American Oral Traditions Research Articles

A pioneer of American folklore: Karl Knortz and his collections

Schamschula has sought to include primarily materials which came from the American oral tradition. She has grouped Knortz's collected data conveniently into listings by genre and provided the first comprehensive bibliography of his scholarly works.

Telling about Bear in N. Scott Momaday's "The Ancient Child"

In oral literary traditions across the Northern Hemisphere, the bear, like no other animal, has worked as an intermediary between humans and animals for many thousands of years. Across geographical, social, and racial boundaries, and across time and space, the bear as a literary device has mediated between humans and animals and the above and below worlds of life and death, as well as between individuals and groups of humans. Using such a literary device, storytellers have told about the bear to help work through the tensions of female and male forces, both natural and social. Throughout Native American and Old European traditional oral literatures, the bear has borne such metas phorical possibilities for human-animal relations and transformations through the storytelling process. N. Scott Momaday, long recognized for his juxtaposition of Native American and European traditional oral literatures throughout o N his work, retells the Kiowa story of Tsoai, the boy who turned into a bear, in The Ancient Child.1 Momaday not only structures his novel . 149 around this Kiowa myth, but to a significant degree he also weaves northern Plains and Athapaskan elements of Bear Boy or Bear Woman motifs into his characterization of the two protagonists: the painter, Set, and the young Kiowa medicine woman, Grey. In addition to using bear elements recognizable from these Native American oral traditions, Momaday also carefully synthesizes references from Old European traditional oral literatures to depict bears throughout the novel.

Answer Jazz's Call: Experiencing Toni Morrison's Jazz

Ideally, [jazz] listener listened intently enough join improviser's trance. That was understood as listener's job, listener's act of creation. This made possible a depth of thought.... indefinite personality of narrator in Toni Morrison's novel, Jazz, invokes two of author's central concerns in creation of African American literature. On one hand, through both indeterminacy and self-questioning of narrative I, she compels her readers, whatever their ethnic background, engage in a thorough self-exploration, or, in her own words, to examine centers of self and ... compare those centers with `raceless' ones with which we are, all of us, most familiar (Morrison qtd. in Hulbert 46). On other hand, narrating voice's indeterminacy enacts in a most forceful way novelist's notion of African American modernity. Morrison once observed ... [that] `a modernity which overturns pre-war definitions ushers in Jazz Age (an age defined by Afro-American art and culture), and requires new kinds of intelligences define oneself.' Efforts shape identity became newly `complex, contradictory, evasive, independent, liquid' (Hulbert 46). Morrison's way of encouraging us on this difficult quest, then, is invite us write novel with her as we are reading it, (re-)create novel, and by same token (re-)shape ourselves. In that sense, she offers reader opportunity become protagonist of his/her version of Jazz. To a large extent, this invitation arises from spaces that both direct reference jazz music and slipperiness of narrator's identity and personality open for readers. very title vividly evokes in our mind fluid, hybrid musical form which evolved primarily in urban African American communities. This polyrhythmic music is characterized by its extensive use of improvisation and call-and-response patterns in connection with audience participation. As for Jazz's storyteller, he/she keeps his/her identity veiled in mystery throughout book, since he/she never names him/herself. In fact, as soon as we touch our copy of novel and turn first two leaves, we find ourselves confronted with question of first person narrator's identity. Indeed, epigraph itself rings out with a self-definition of an unnamed subject: am name of sound and sound of name. am sign of letter and designation of division. reader's only, tenuous clue is that these four lines come from Nag Hammadi, more precisely, from fundamentally paradoxical, anonymous self-proclamation known as The Thunder, Perfect Mind. And as our hands keep turning pages beginning of story, narrative voice softly calls out us: Sth, know that (1). Such an opening sentence instantaneously establishes orality and aurality of novel. Moreover, it activates a sense of immediacy: narrator is addressing someone who is looking at same scene as he/she is, in a tone of gossipy friendliness between speaker and reader who thus turns listener and eyewitness. As we begin wonder about nature of relationship between Jazz's storyteller and epigraph's I, we note that even gender of narrator is open discussion. Several reviewers have claimed or implied that narrative voice is that of a woman given gossipy quality of novel. However, this appears be first a misconception due those critics' forgetting that numerous story-tellers in both African and African American oral traditions have been male. Furthermore, whereas Ann Hulbert assumes without further ado that the novel's garrulous narrative `I' is appropriating I of epigraph (46), many reviewers actually express astonishment or puzzlement at difficulty they have in identifying narrator. …

In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991

the Presence of the presents 30 years of selected works by [N. Scott] Momaday, the well-known Southwest Native American novelist. His unadorned poetry, which recounts fables and rituals of the Kiowa nation, conveys the deep sense of place of the Native American oral tradition. Here are dream-songs about animals (bear, bison, terrapin) and life away from urban alienation, an imagined re-creation based on Billy the Kid, prose poems about Plains Shields (and a fascinating discussion of their background), and new poems that utilize primary colors ('forms of the earth') to express instinctive continuities of a pre-Columbian vision.--Library JournalThe strong, spare beauty of In the Presence of the Sun is compelling evidence that Scott Momaday is one of the most versatile and distinguished artists in America today.--Peter Matthiessen. . . the images, the voices, the people are shadowy, elusive, burning with invention, like flames against a dark sky. For behind them is always the artist-author himself . . . a man with a sacred investiture. Strong medicine, strong art indeed.--The New York Times Book Review

Introduction: Religion and Encounter: Mid-Atlantic Regional Contact between Native American and Euroamerican Peoples after the Voyages of Columbus

HE FIVE PAPERS THAT FOLLOW were presentations in a conference entitled Religion and Encounter: Mid-Atlantic Regional Contact Between American and Euro-American Peoples After the Voyages of Columbus. This conference, held on October 18 and 19, 1991, is part of a two-year program at Bucknell, The Columbian Quincentennial (1492-1992): A Critical Investigation. The Religion and conference focused on the role of religious world views in the early mid-Atlantic encounter of native and Euroamerican peoples rather than on Columbus or the events of his landfall. At the time of this early mid-Atlantic encounter the diverse native and European religious beliefs were interwoven with social, economic, political, and ritual practices. The conference papers, which were at once interdisciplinary and provocative, sought to provide new perspectives on these connections. This gathering was also structured to bring multicultural and interdisciplinary issues from out of the specialized academic literature into the curricular discussions for faculty and students at Bucknell. The search for an understanding of the relation of cultural canons and interdisciplinary cooperation is a major issue at a liberal arts institution like Bucknell with substantial commitments to engineering, liberal arts, and the natural sciences. The significance of such a conference, and of the resulting papers, served to emphasize several points for the Bucknell community, particularly the importance of having American speakers involved in discussions of early encounters in America. Thus, the conference was opened by Ron LaFrance, Director of the American Indian Program at Cornell University, who spoke on Native American Oral Traditions Regarding Contact. On Saturday, October 19, the Seneca art historian, George Abrams, focused on Early Encounter and Art Forms in Material Culture. Along with these native speakers, the scholars at this conference brought their diverse disci-

Approaches to Early Intervention on the Navajo Reservation

This article describes a research and early intervention project that involves parents and Head Start teachers who live and work in geographically isolated areas of the Navajo Reservation. Social and environmental characteristics of life in remote areas are considered as "risk factors" that impact upon the child's probable success in school. Two promising lines of intervention are reported comprehensive instruction in child development for Head Start teachers and working with parents as children's "first teachers." The teacher education approach involves innovative methods that build upon the Native American oral tradition. The approach to parents as "first teachers" involves Navajo parents in a structured reading approach with culturally relevant materials, where children are encouraged to reconstruct story content in a variety of representational media. Preliminary results include a dramatic rise in the number of CDA credentialed teachers and major improvements in teaching skills and satisfaction with teaching.

Idaho’s Poetry: A Centennial Anthology ed. by Ronald E. McFarland, William Studebaker

Reviews 183 Idaho’sPoetry: A CentennialAnthology. Edited by Ronald E. McFarland and William Studebaker. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1989. 250 pages, $16.95.) Reading Vern Rutsala’s poem “Words,” I can see why it was that Idaho and her neighbors in the West needed a poetry of their own. Westerners encountered in European and Eastern books and movies words such as “dining room, study, / mantel piece, lobster / thermidor”■ —words that did not “fit / our cold linoleum, / our oil lamps, our / outhouse.” “This,” says Rutsala, “is why we said ‘ain’t’/ and ‘he don’t.’” We knew better but it was wrong to use a language that named ghosts, nothing you could touch. (114-15) To use a language that names what we can touch has been a primary goal of Idaho’s poets; and their achievement is well represented in McFarland and Studebaker’s fine centennial anthology, which gathers 243 poems. Including work from the Native American oral tradition and by 129 individual poets, it is the most comprehensive collection of Idaho poetry ever assembled. A distinguished Oregonian, William Stafford, introduces the compilation and also presents two of his own poems inspired by visits to Idaho. Then the first section, “Native Poems,” includes twenty-two selections from the oral tradition, as well as eight poems by three contemporary Native poets. Section two, “The Pioneer Poets (1860-1900),” offers a look at the folksy verses of eighteen writers who were kindred spirits of James Whitcomb Riley. But the “Poets of a New State (1900-1940) ”—Vardis Fisher, Yvor Winters, and their contemporaries—gave us not just verse but poetry. In the last two sections— titled “The Third Generation (1940-1980)” and “The Contemporaries”— readers of this journal will recognize the names of Ed Dorn, Vern Rutsala, Richard Shelton, Penelope Reedy, Ford Swetnam, Tom Trusky, and Harold Wyndham. They and the other eighty post-1940 poets hail from every corner of the state; and although many of the anthology’s poems are published for the first time, some of them appeared earlier, either in one of Idaho’s dozen literary journals or in national periodicals. What of the quality of Idaho’sPoetry? It compares well with similar col­ lections from other states, and it certainly illustrates the struggle to use a language that names something besides the world east of the Mississippi. Indeed, through the efforts of writers like those represented in Idaho’s Poetry, we may eventually be able to say of the West and its poets what the narrator of Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala says of Rome and Virgil: “the land that has inspired ssntiment in the poet ultimately receives its sentiment from him.” JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University ...

Lady Lil and Pisspot Pete

ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR FOLK POEMS in the United States Lady Lil. Its central motif in Frank Hoffmann's Analytical Survey ofAnglo-American Traditional Erotica (1973) X735.9.2.2, Lie: Celebrated whore who claims to be able to take on any man meets her match. In The Horn Book, G. Legman says that this erotic narrative poem is now being collected as hardly more than a four-line toast or epitaph (1964:417), but Lady Lil still can be collected in fairly full texts in the American oral tradition from Maine to Washington. In spite of the popularity of this poem in American folklore over the last 50 years, though, Lady Lil, like most traditional erotica, has received scant attention from folklorists.

Sacred Reversals: Trickster in Gerald Vizenor's "Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent"

'' ' ARTHDIVERS, says Gerald Vizenor at beginning of Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (1981), is imaginative metaphor. The vehicle for this metaphor is a culture hero (sometimes trickster, like Wenebojo Ojibwe story Vizenor cites his preface) found extensively native American myth. This figure directs animals to dive into great flood until one finally returns with grains of dirt from which hero magically creates present earth mass. The tenor of metaphor is Vizenor's protagonists, mixedbloods, or M6tis, tribal tricksters recast culture heroes, mournful heirs survivors from that premier union between daughters of woodland shamans white fur traders. The M6tis or mixedblood earthdivers these stories dive into unknown urban places now, into racial darkriess cities, to create a new consciousness of coexistence (ix). Traditionally standing between two cultures, M6tis earthdiver will integrate America's divided anima. Furthermore, in metaphor of M6tis earthdiver, white settlers are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into unknown ... to swim deep down ... search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island (ix). To lead us to such creative realization, M6tis earthdiver must also be a trickster, for the world must be realized through inversions opposites, sacred secular of sort associated with tricksters (123). Because Vizenor refers frequently to his characters as tricksters to their reversals contradances, trickster element is apparent throughout twenty-one mainly satirical narratives of Earthdivers. Because association of blood with earthdiver-trickster is Vizenor's own, rather than one found oral traditions, what might be less apparent is that Vizenor's tricksters are very much those of native American oral traditions, even if their trickery is contemporary world. Whether Vizenor's rendering or that of oral tradition, trickster is an elusive figure. Like a subatomic particle, he defies final definition of time, place character. (Perhaps Dakotas were suggesting as much when they ended stories about trickster Ikto with and from then on, who knows where Ikto went next.) Vizenor acknowledges

Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom

When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts-work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book and the scholarship that followed in its wake. A landmark work that was part of the cultural turn in American history, Black Culture and Black Consciousness profoundly influenced an entire generation of historians and continues to be read and taught. For this anniversary reissue, Levine wrote a new preface reflecting on the writing of the book and its place within intellectual trends in African American and American history.

I Ain't Lying: Folktales from Mississippi

16mm color documentary based on fieldwork William Ferris conducted with African American storytellers and bluesmen in the communities of Leland and Rose Hill, Mississippi. The stories include include folk and religious tales, jokes, toast telling sessions, and characters from African American oral tradition.

Some Minor Genres of Obscene Folklore

FOLKLORISTS have finally recognized that the study of oral tradition must include serious consideration of obscene material.' Attention has been drawn to off-color variants of the major folklore genres, such as folktales and folksongs. However, there are a number of folkloristic forms circulating widely in American oral tradition in which obscenity is more often the rule than the exception.2 These minor genres are generally characterized by set opening formulas, such as Confucius say, She was only the 's daughter, and What's the difference between. The salacious nature of these genres is frequently so well-known-at least among male audiencesthat the mere utterance of the opening formula prepares the listener for what is to come. Because these forms are so often concerned with obscene material, they have received little attention from folklorists. Yet since so much of traditional American obscenity is carried in these genres, no consideration of the obscene should exclude them.