The Risk of Misunderstanding in Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive

Abstract

Greg Sarris's book Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts is a groundbreaking text in that it is, in part, an attempt to incorporate aspects of oral tradition within the written word and to make the tradition and lessons of storytelling understandable for a Euroamerican audience. However, because Sarris does not clearly explain what he is trying to say, there is a risk, perhaps a certainty, that many readers will misunderstand or misinterpret the meaning of the stories that he tells and the points that he attempts to make. Instead of explaining what he means, Sarris follows Mabel MacKay's example of enigmatically answer ing a story with another story or ignoring the question until a later related event recalls the original story, and even then he allows the second event to stand as an explanation for the first story or event.1 It would seem that his point is to invite readers to participate in his narration and storytelling by allowing them to interpret the mate rial through the readers' own reality filter of experience, knowledge, and emotion. This approach might be appropriate and work well for an audience steeped in oral tradition, particularly the oral tradition of the Porno people, of whom Sarris is a member, but for the more usual Euroamerican reader, Sarris's approach does not explicate but only serves to confuse and complicate. Still, most other writers who have attempted to translate oral tradition into literary form have not done much better in accurately recording, translating, and explain ing stories from oral tradition. Is such accuracy important? Why? Stories?spoken or written?are important for two reasons: they