American Indian Texts Research Articles

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts by David Murray

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts by David Murray

"No One Ever Did This to Me before": Contemporary American Indian Texts in the Classroom

AT TIMES, IT SEEMS OUR GOAL as teachers of introductory courses in Native American literatures is to promote contradiction: to circumscribe a distinct area of American literature while we praise its great diversity of voices, to categorize it while we resist it being categorized simply as ethnic literature. Paradox is, of course, inherent in our task. For today's Native American author, the dilemma remains: how to assert tribal identity in modern times and demonstrate its continuity with a rich heritage, when one's non-tribal audience believes a history that dramatizes only loss, dispossession, extinction. This dilemma has been resolved in various ways by various authors, so the classroom challenge is to spark an admiration of the variety while providing a relatively simple framework that can encompass such a polyphony of voices. The admiration of diversity is easily handled; one need only have students read widely. Helping them fit sometimes very dissimilar texts and styles into a comprehensive understanding is more problematic. And if one encounters students with particularly strong misconceptions about Native Americans and their cultures, this comprehension may become a vexing point of contention. In all instances, and particularly the latter, a formalistic, perhaps almost ritualistic approach can help smooth the way, if for no other reason than by implying regularity in what, for the student, may become a disconcerting body of literature, and by providing a system within which he or she may seek significant patterns. Thus, it is necessary to develop a method by which students can quickly recognize elements of cultures presented in works of literature under discussion, and then use the resulting awareness to assess other works about the same or similar cultures. Recently, as a Fulbright professor in a German university, I developed an approach to fulfill this need, but I must emphasize that it is simply a useful tool for initiation; it helps initiate discussion and then direct future reading, and may not necessarily resolve difficult analyses in all areas and genres of American Indian literatures.

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts

Storytelling in the Classroom: Crossing Vexed Chasms

I begin my American Indian literature course by telling a story told to me by my Pomo elders. I then ask students, usually at the next class meeting, to repeat the story as they heard it. Invariably their stories tell them more about themselves than about the story or about the speaker and culture from which the story comes. Here students can see how they are approaching the story and begin to explore unexamined assumptions by which they operate and which they use to frame the texts and experiences of members of another culture. This storytelling (about a story) engenders a reflexivity that pervades, or establishes the groundwork for, further study of American Indian texts. Below I present the story I tell so that I can discuss student responses to the story and assumptions inherent in the responses.