Native American oral traditions : : collaboration and interpretation / / edited by Larry Evers and Barre Toelken ; foreword by John Miles Foley.

• Author: Toelken, Barre
• TeilnehmendeR: Evers, Larry,; Toelken, Barre, 1935-,; Toelken, Barre,
• Place / Publishing House: Logan : : Utah State University Press,, c2001.
• Year of Publication: 2001
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xvi, 242 pages) :; illustrations, maps; digital file(s).
• Notes: "Originally published, without the foreword, in Oral tradition 13, no. 1 (March 1998)"--T.p. verso.

This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert.This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.

Table of Contents

"Like this it stays in your hands" : collaboration and ethnopoetics / Felipe S. Molina and Larry Evers -- Tracking "Yuwaan Gagéets" : a Russian fairy tale in Tlingit oral tradition / Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard L. Dauenhauer -- Reading Martha Lamont's crow story today / Marya Moses and Toby C.S. Langen -- Collaborative sociolinguistic research among the Tohono O'odham / Ofelia Zepeda and Jane Hill -- "Wu-ches-erik (loon woman) and ori-aswe (wildcat)" / Darryl Babe Wilson and Susan Brandenstein Park -- Coyote and the strawberries : cultural drama and intercultural collaboration / George B. Wasson and Barre Toelken -- "There are no more words to the story" / Elsie P. Mather and Phyllis Morrow.