Reading the Fire

The Traditional Indian Literatures of America

Jarold Ramsey, Jarold Ramsey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295803500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Reading the Fire engages America's "first literatures, " traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays. Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.

PART ONE

1 / Creations Origins

There was no land, only a great lake. Kamukamts came from the north in a canoe. It floated along. It stopped. He shook it, but could not move it. He looked down, and in the water he saw the roof of a house. It was the house of Pocket Gopher. Gopher looked up. Then Kamukamts went down into the house, and they talked.

Kamukamts said, “You had better be thinking of what is the best thing to do.”

“Yes, I am thinking of that now,” replied Gopher.

“If you can plan anything better than I can do, you shall be the elder brother,” promised Kamukamts. “What kind of food are we going to have?”

Gopher opened his mouth to yawn, and fish, roots, and berries came forth.

“It seems that you will be the elder brother,” said Kamukamts.¹

THE GREAT MAJORITY OF READERS TODAY, IF THEY have had any contact with traditional American Indian narratives, have gotten it first through reading—probably in childhood—versions of Native creation and origin myths. These are not bad entrees into the traditional literature, and I would propose to take them up first here even if they weren’t the most familiar category of Indian stories to begin with, but that very familiarity has its problems, and I want to scout two in particular.

First, if our general knowledge of the traditional literatures of the American Indian is compromised by a longstanding reliance on corrupted and unauthentic texts, this unhappy state of affairs is especially true for creation and origin myths. Every form of textual debasement known can be illustrated, I think, in the fate of these stories at the hands of Anglo writers and editors over the years, many of them well intended but working in the presumptions of ignorance, others merely careless or exploitive, or both. There has always been a pronounced tendency, for example, to render Native cosmogonies as versions of the Judeo-Christian Genesis, leaving out much that is distinctively “Indian,” so as to call attention, a la comparative mythology, to the fact that the Indians also had Eden myths, flood myths, Babel myths, and so on. In particular, editors and redactors have been guilty of cultural bias in silently eliminating the erotic, bawdy, and playful elements of Indian creation stories, giving the wrong impression that, like our Genesis text (itself, it now appears, a severely edited palimpsest), the Native creations are all remote, grand, teleologically rigorous affairs, full of what has been called “the perfection of origins.”²

A less obvious difficulty with the relative familiarity of Native creation stories is that such familiarity usually comes with ignorance of two facts: (1) such stories constitute only a small portion of the surviving traditional literatures; (2) such stories, engaging and accessible as they often are, are not especially representative of these literatures. Readers who grew up, as I did, encountering Plains and Far West creation and origin narratives in schoolbooks, Boy Scout materials, and so forth, have understandably concluded that “How the Earth Was Formed” and “How the Chipmunk Got Its Stripes” and “The Fight Between the Mountains” illustrate the thematic and emotional range and artistry of Indian narrative.

Nothing could be farther from the truth, as I hope to show in these essays. The etiological motive, as T. T. Waterman demonstrated seventy years ago in his monumental and neglected study, “The Explanatory Element in the Folktales of the North American Indians,”³ is only one generic motive among many at work in the Native literature and rarely appears as an exclusive motive; yet the general conception of myth that Waterman, Franz Boas, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, and other pioneers undertook to refute—that it fundamentally expresses a human impulse to explain natural phenomena, especially solar and lunar—is still very much alive today, in the popular view of what Indian stories are and what they mean. Native narratives given to “explaining” conspicuous natural features and above all capable of being understood with a minimum of knowledge about the cultures they reflect are still what the general reading public in America knows, and favors. A regrettable state of affairs: as if we were to deny artistic value and significance to the traditional literature of India except for its Just So stories.

The fact is that the traditional repertory of any well-transcribed American Indian group contains a rich diversity of imaginative motives and literary forms, some corresponding to the motives and forms of our literature, and some not. Besides cosmogonies and origin myths, we will find—if we look—cycles of trickster stories exploring the world in a spirit of “anything possible,” rather like picaresque novels; didactic and pedagogical narratives, not so much “explaining” as chartering customs and rituals; stories of realistic bent; “problem” stories that engage and clarify pressing conflicts between social norms and personal impulses; hero stories, like epic episodes; songs (often integral to narratives, like dramatic lyrics); prophecies; ceremonial texts; and mythopoetic syntheses of Native and Anglo materials, with many of the characteristics of romance.

Nonetheless, having identified these misunderstandings, we can profitably begin with a consideration of a few representative Western Indian myths of creation and origins. But—what is a myth? As Percy Cohen has pointed out, none of the standard ways of formulating the subject—etiological, cultural, psychoanalytical, structural, and so on—seems to be wholly adequate to the task of accounting for the mythic impulse and its manifestations, and none of them is probably without some merit in carrying out that formidable task.⁴

I want to propose, therefore, an eclectic working definition, one that favors inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, and that allows for recognition of multiple, simultaneous, and complementary lines of meaning in a given myth. In the history of any culture, it appears that certain central institutions come to accept a variety of purposes; people expect more and more of them as vital agencies. So—to mention a not inappropriate analogue for myth—in our culture the school has evolved into a bewilderment of social, political, economic, and psychological, as well as pedagogical purposes; and so, by the same process of centralizing of functions, the mythologies of tribal societies seem to have evolved toward functional complexity. Bronislaw Malinowski’s perception about what a myth-narrative means to a Melanesian tribesman is valid, I think, for our Western American context as well: a myth is “not an idle tale, but a hard-working active force.”⁵ In our attempts to engage myth-texts on literary grounds, then, as imaginative verbal constructs, we must be prepared to deal with this “hardworking” aspect by recognizing that they may in fact be structured to “perform” a number of functions all at once.

Myths are sacred traditional stories whose shaping function is to tell the people who know them who they are; how, through what origins and transformations, they have come to possess their particular world; and how they should live in that world, and with each other.

Notice that this definition replaces the simplistic why of a purely etiological formulation of myth with questions of who and how; that is, it focuses attention upon the relationships between a group’s myth-repertory and its sense of collective identity in relation to origins, welfare, and destiny. Therefore, it stresses the importance of ethnography to interpretation. And this emphasis on mythic fabulation of collective experience does not preclude speculation, at least, on the ways in which myth can be both medium and mediator of deeply personal, individual meanings. From the evidence of the Native American literatures, I would venture to guess on this score that if the individuals forming the first Indian communities had somehow found a way to achieve social solidarity and order without affronting individuality, they wouldn’t have created for themselves the richly imaginative accommodations to tribal living that we now attempt to understand as “Indian mythology.” They wouldn’t have needed what myth as we have it provides.

One extreme of myth interpretation, notably encouraged by Claude Lévi-Strauss and followed by some of his disciples, conceives of mythology as being so remote from the individual minds that have known it, transmitted it, perhaps re-created it, that it is best seen as a sort of grand natural process, just going its own glacial way, according to its own laws: in Dell Hymes’s witty phrase, an “imperturbable self-transmogrification.”⁶ That mythic stories do “story” themselves systematically over time is, I think, undeniable; but unless we can also learn as readers to attend to evidence of historical and individual human “perturbation” and deliberate artistic “transmogrification” in them, we cannot really hope to claim them as imaginative literature. I think the claim can and should be made, because the evidence of artistic control and of personalized content, expressing such personal factors as gender (see essays 6 and 8) is certainly there. If for most traditional narratives the identity of the “individual talent” working on the “tradition” is irrecoverable, that shouldn’t preclude our engaging as best we can the artistic achievements of that talent, whosoever it belonged to.

Now let’s turn back to some representative Western Indian creation and origin stories in which such difficult questions of personal content are, conveniently for our purposes, unimportant—these are, it would appear, very old stories, well worn, “imperturbable,” and impersonal. Return to the Klamath story with which we began—Kamukamts and Pocket Gopher, remember, have begun a sort of creative competition, to see who can earn the title “Elder Brother.”

That night Gopher caused his companion to sleep, and he burrowed under the bottom of the lake and made it bulge up into hills and mountains, which raised their tops above the surface. In the morning he said, “You had better go up and look around!” When Kamukamts went out he was astonished. Gopher asked what should become of his house, and Kamukamts replied, “It will always remain as the oldest mountain [Modoc Point].”

“What will our children have for amusement?” asked Kamukamts. They played the game of throwing spears at a mark. They threw them, and their targets were hills. Kamukamts’s spear knocked off the top of Bare Island, and so it is today. Then they invented all the other games.

Gopher asked, “What will live on the mountains?”

“Mountain lions, bears, elk, deer.” Kamukamts named all the animals, both beasts and birds.

“What will grow in the mountains?” asked Gopher.

“I will walk over the earth and see what I can do,” replied Kamukamts. So he went about and selected homes for the different tribes, and in each territory he placed something which was to characterize that particular tribe, such as obsidian in the Paiute country, marble in the Shasta country, and tules in the Klamath country. Then he looked about and saw smoke. Kamukamts said, “What is the matter, I wonder? I see smoke here and there.”

And Gopher replied, “You have beaten me. You are the elder brother.” For he knew that the smoke was from the fires of people brought into being by Kamukamts. They listened, and heard the sound of people talking and of children laughing and playing. The people increased very rapidly, and the animals and plants on the mountains multiplied.⁷

Obviously such a narrative of beginnings does not conform to modern Judeo-Christian conventions of the genre! What we witness here is far short of a real cosmogony, comparable to the first chapters of Genesis. However it happened, the world has already gotten itself primally created, though not properly organized, and the adventures of Kamukamts and Pocket Gopher are considerably ex post facto what our modern “Big Bang” cosmologists call “the first three minutes.” Furthermore, it is clear that what is at stake here etiologically speaking is not the globe at large anyway, but only the Klamath world in southwest Oregon and northern California—its distinctive features and boundaries, centering on Klamath Lake. And whereas our Judeo-Christian narrative is resonant with a sense of what Mircea Eliade has called the power, prestige, and perfection of origins, literally God’s Story, the tone of the Klamath story as we have it is remarkably casual and lighthearted . . . an amiable tale, then, rather than an overwhelmingly majestic one.⁸

On all three counts, “The Klamath Creation” is representative of Western Indian creation narratives, at least in the form in which they now exist. With some notable exceptions—the Cheyenne, Maidu, Navajo, and several of the Pueblo cosmogonies are as philosophically systematic and grand as any cosmologist could wish⁹—such stories are, like this one, indifferent to global beginnings, concentrating instead on the creation and ordering of the immediate environs of the people who know the story, and investing the action of the story with a sense of casual improvisation, or so it seems to us, expecting something different.

But, like Genesis, such stories do establish priorities and ultimate values; creation myths are ipso facto teleological formulations as well. Thus, as with our tradition, the Klamath narrative leads up to the appearance in the world of the human race; man appears to be the final cause in Aristotelian terms. But of course it is a teleology alien to us in which the world takes its shape according to a friendly competition between two demi-urges as to who will be called “Elder Brother”; and as for specific priorities, it is noteworthy that Kamukamts (the Klamath progenitor per se) and Pocket Gopher decide to invent sports and amusements immediately after they have created gathering-food...