The Historical and Literary Role of Folklore, Storytelling, and the Oral Tradition in Native American Literatures

Abstract

To understand any written literature, attention needs to be paid to its craft, its distinctive language and rhetoric, its style and form, its literariness. This is especially true for Native American literatures which are deeply informed by their respective tribal traditions of storytelling and oratory. And to begin to understand Native American literature, attention must be paid to the language, form, rhetoric, and literariness which are (1) in many cases reflective of present and past oral traditions and (2) integrally tied to tribal literary and linguistic heritage and influence. While the primacy of oral traditions as historically significant is a fact for all literatures, Native American literature stands out due to its ancestrally and culturally genetic positioning between its traditional, tribal oral cultures, languages, and rituals and its place as part of the larger American and Canadian literary canons. The precedence of orality in relation to literacy and textuality is a global fact: in terms of chronology, all written literatures have oral literary traditions as precedent and formative. However, for all of the tribes of North America, the shift to a predominantly written culture has been relatively recent within the global history of writing – for many tribes, largely occurring just within the past two centuries.