Native American Literature 1

Native Americans presented peculiar difficulties to Europeans since the white people's first arrival about the turn of the sixteenth century. They proved to be an obstacle to colonization. Their religious beliefs created a lot of tension and friction for Christians. There were clear frictions in ideas about proper behavior. Europeans ended up partly by chance and partly by intention perpetrating a great holocaust that amounted to genocide that lasted for 500 years and has only abated - not entirely ended - in the past 50 years or so.
I think it would be possible, with more comprehensive reading and study than I have done, to show that the history of Euro-Americans' attitude toward and treatment of Native American literature provides a sort of allegory of the history of post-Euro Indians. The reason I say this is that you can see the difficulties we have with Indian culture in the difficulties we have with their literature. Indian literature poses special, interesting and aggravating problems for Euro-trained readers.
In her book American Indian Literatures, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff divides Native American literature into three categories: Oral Literature; Life History and Autobiography; and Written Literature, which she says essentially began in the eighteenth century. Since Native North Americans for all intents and purposes had no writing system (with the exception of the Cherokee, who devised a writing system in the nineteenth century, and the Mayans), you could modify Ruoff's categories a little bit and say there's an oral literature and a written literature. The written literature consists at first mainly of nonfiction prose, and then as the twentieth century unfolds, becomes really just a genre of conventional Western fiction, poetry and autobiography. (Native American writings of course have qualities, concerns, themes and approaches unique to them, but that's a topic for a different talk.) This written literature is the literature of the Westernized Native Americans. It speaks partly with a Native American voice, but it's mainly in English, after all, which is a major reason it takes form in genres conventional to English-speaking literatures.
For the purists interested in the "real" Native American literature, then, the texts of most interest are from the oral literature. In the slightly modified categories, you can say there are four kinds of Native American oral literature: Narratives; Songs; Ritual Dramas that include chants, ceremonies and rituals; and Oratory. Native Americans were great speechmakers, as many accounts including Ben Franklin's wry piece, mention, because their political systems by and large depended on the persuasive powers of their members in groups, and their moral and ethical systems vital to their survival were handed down through storytelling by elders. These remarks vastly oversimplify the complexities within very diverse cultures, but they're probably generally accurate.

The fact of the literature being oral presents major problems for Western readers. The most obvious and important is pointed out by Dennis Tedlock: In an oral presentation, there is no text. Or, let me rephrase this because the problem is already with us when I say it like this. In an oral presentation, there is no text as we conventionally expect it to exist.
In other words, we Western readers understand a text to be a fixed, written work that we can study in its details like an unchanging object of nature. "What does the author really mean?" we might ask, and then carefully pore over each word and piece of punctuation, teasing out meanings like careful scientists. Even when we deal with oral literatures, we like to get a transcription of a presentation and go from there, because the transcription provides us with that fixed text we can dissect like a cadaver.
But Tedlock observes that in Native American oral traditions (as, probably, in all oral traditions), the oral telling of a story is the text. I.e., the text is not a written, fixed work. The text is, as it were, on the air, and melts into the cosmos out of our sensory range as soon as it is spoken. How can we study this? Tedlock says that the problem with a transcription is that it cannot represent the gestures and vocal inflections that are inseparable from the recitation in an oral presentation. Gesture, facial expression, tone, rhythm, breaks from the story, even audience participation are all part of the story being told. Tedlock coheres all this by saying that the oral presentation is both the text and the interpretation of the text rolled into one. No two interpretations will be exactly the same, even by the same storyteller. And so the text, while having a general form - as in a story having the same general plot, characters and setting - is subject every time to interpretation offered by the storyteller.
So this would be true in narratives especially, and also in songs and oratory (which in most Native American contexts would not be likely to be repeated anyway because the context of the oration would always be different), and even in ritual dramas, which in many cases call for very precise observance of formulas and repetitions of movement, precise kinds of order that are expected in the spirit world, but whose oral "texts" may vary according to the needs of the situation or reason for the ritual. Conventional Western literary ideas of "text" cannot accommodate this unfixed presentation.
This is a way of saying that as far as conventional literary criticism is concerned, in the oral Native American tradition, there is no text.
Tedlock, of course, alerts us to the fact that there is indeed a text, but it's just not what we expect or want it to be.
Over the last five centuries, Native Americans s have of necessity warped their cultures and lifeways into Euro-American lifeways. I think there is little doubt they could have survived at all without doing so. Their literatures are emblematic of the warping, and by the end of the twentieth century, some very good Native American writers have emerged working in conventional Euro-American forms. Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch have written excellent novels of Native American life. Editors like Joseph Bruchac have retold Native American tales as well-wrought children's stories, Joy Harjo and Scott Momaday