In the Spirit of Crazy Horse/Smoothing the Ground
Weidman, Bette S.
IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE Peter Matthiessen Viking, $20.95, 628 pp. SMOOTHING THE GROUND Essays on Native American Oral Literature Edited by Brian Swann California, $24.95, 364 pp. Bette S....
...Recorders have failed to pay sufficient attention to genre...
...Here is a brief summary of some high points...
...Until we understand and share a range of verbal forms with those of another culture, we don't fully grasp its meanings...
...This beautifully handsome typeface allows us to see and pronounce the original language and to compare Hymes's numbered-line translation, which is preceded by an analysis of structure...
...Kroeber shows how the Indian poem, in a Nez Perce example, does not grow out of a tension between the singer and his society, but becomes a poem by virtue of its entrance into public performance...
...The language of their encounter is English - but Peltier and Matthiessen understand one another not just because they speak the same language, but because they have a mutual understanding of the forms of speech...
...Will Matthiessen and Leonard Peltier be able to talk to each other when they meet...
...His own work, Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (Dial, 1972) is evidence that Zuni tales are narrative poetry, not prose...
...Collected by those looking for factual material, the tales suffer from anaesthetic retelling in which the imagination of the ethnologist displaces the traditional responsive audience...
...As full of promise as these two enterprises are, they rest on incompletely known texts...
...Dennis Tedlock offers a review of Zuni literature collected by ethnologists since the late nineteenth century, noting their intrusions of moralistic passages and their elimination of stylistic devices such as parallelism in joining of sentences...
...He is writing in one of the great American traditions, the European-American counterpart to the American Indian tradition of powerful oratory...
...Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse reconstructs the events of one day, June 26, 1975, when a shoot-out ending in the deaths of one Indian and two FBI agents took place on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota...
...Equally rich is Paul Zolbrod's essay on the Navaho chants recorded by a nineteenth-century army surgeon, Washington Matthews...
...This gives Native Americans their own substantial voice in the book and a clear relation, sometimes an actual blood relation, between these contemporary speakers and the remarkable Sioux of the nineteenth century - Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Black Elk...
...Its presence at the opening, is tremendously useful, for it is the voice of an artist, whose reportage is graced by imaginative understanding...
...They understand legal, prophetic, historical, conscience forms...
...The introduction also establishes the first-person relationship of Matthiessen to his material...
...He recommends attention to voice quality, volume and pausing, paralinguistic features the tape recorder can assist us to observe...
...This returning voice of the author is the most remarkable element of the book...
...Is there a language that the white writer and the Native American political activist share...
...Now Dell Hymes, reexamining these volumes with the eye of a scholar and the ear of a poet, has made the tremendous discovery that, although Jacobs translated the stories into literal prose, he overlooked the linguistic markers Mrs...
...They are precious few, but there has been a writer like this in almost every generation and their truth is cumulative...
...Howard was practicing the craft of poetry...
...Howard, one of two remaining speakers of Clackamas Chinook, had absorbed myths and tales from her mother and grandmother...
...This anthology of essays by eighteen scholars and critics, describing the oral literature of at least four centuries, is the first book to draw together recent work in a very exciting field...
...She died in 1930, and her words remained in phonetic transcription in Jacobs's notebooks for twenty-eight years, until Indiana University published two volumes of texts in 1958 and 1959...
...Hymes gives us his analysis of one of Mrs...
...Karl Kroeber finds a radical difference between European and Native American poetry...
...Only such knowledge can save us from the destructive mindlessness of racism and greed, the forces that would rape the Black Hills, and, if Peter Matthiessen is right, consign objectors to the penitentiary.ors to the penitentiary...
...Howard used to structure her story...
...I am thinking particularly of D'Arcy McNickle's Native American Tribalism (Oxford, 1973...
...Poetic images in non-European poetry serve "efficacies of another kind...
...Though Books I, II, and much of III are unfolded as reportage without the active "I," that "I" returns to us in the last four chapters, assuming full authority for the point of view that asserts the innocence of Leonard Peltier...
...Tedlock calls for new collections of tales with attention to speaking style: phonological distortions, length of phrases, choice of words that are archaic or onomatopoeic...
...His own example of exploring a portion of the myth of Quetzalcoatl, recorded by Saha-giin in the sixteenth century, makes use of ethnography, internal evidence, and native criticism in the form of variants...
...A reader can only rejoice that more Grizzly Woman stories will soon be published in a book called Bears That Save and Destroy...
...The riches of Indian culture are represented here in three especially noteworthy essays...
...the song works to keep a balance of energy not just in literature, not just in culture, but throughout the world: life-power moves through dream to song to ceremony to the hunt sustaining life through death...
...Once Tedlock's method has established a text, then John Bierhorst tells us that literary criticism, based on explication, can be of great assistance...
...and Book III, a seven-chapter account of the prison life of Leonard Peltier (convicted of the murder of the agents), the invasion of the Black Hills by coal and uranium interests, the discrediting of FBI testimony and treatment of witnesses, and Matth-iessen's own reconstruction of the events of June 26, ending with a memorial service for murdered Indians held in the Black Hills on June 26, 1976...
...Hymes's working analysis is less devoted to interpretation than to observation of the way the text moves...
...Howard's Grizzly Woman myths, presenting four scenes in a specially designed typeface called "Syntax Phonetic...
...His discussion is unique for its unwillingness to rush into translation before examing the text itself and its ceremonial context...
...Re-analyzing her texts and others, Hymes has demonstrated that lines, verses,and stanzas are the appropriate divisions of oral narrative, in short that Mrs...
...The most exciting essay in the book is the triumphant recovery of an original-language story, a Clackamas Chinook myth told by Victoria Howard to Melville Jacobs, anthropologist and linguist, in 1929...
...In the twentieth century, they have been joined by Native American writers with roots in the oral tradition of their own peoples...
...it shows the way...
...Full communication between cultures in social and political life may rest, then, on the kind of effort represented by Smoothing the Ground...
...both can reach back into the verbal traditions of their peoples for a way of speaking...
...He justly remarks "Perhaps only a woman would have performed a story in which a woman so perfectly unites feminine decorum and sexuality, male strength and spiritual authority...
...Matthiessen sees what is before him in the physical world and in the world of the human spirit as well...
...While Matthiessen himself acknowledges Helen Hunt Jackson, whose A Century of Dishonor is a landmark of the 1880s, the tradition in which he is writing goes back to the sixteenth-century Spanish priest, Bartolome de las Casas, who presented formal argument before the Spanish Crown on behalf of the humanity of enslaved Indians...
...For instance, in an Ojibwa deer-dancing poem...
...In his introduction the writer invests the landscape of the Great Plains with historical meaning and locates spokesmen within it - Lame Deer, Frank Fools Crow, Joe Flying By, Sidney Keith, Leonard Crow Dog, Pete Catches...
...All three of the people - the teller, Victoria Howard, the recorder, Melville Jacobs, the restorer and translator, Dell Hymes - should be declared national treasures...
...But in order to make sense of the event, to penetrate its unresolved mystery, Matthiessen centers his six-chapter account of June 26 (and the investigation and trials that followed) between two other bodies of material: Book I, a six-chapter summary of the history of controversy over the Black Hills, the development of the American Indian Movement, its early demonstrations at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and the conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation in the mid-1970s...
...Jarold Ramsey's discussion of the Wasco Chinook tale, "The Hunter Who Had an Elk for a Guardian Spirit," is a model of discussion for stories without native language texts for which we have translations...
...His discussion brings out the several views of women figures in the story, from the bear-like ogress to the ideal wife...
...His ability to comprehend these reports, to make them an understated leitmotif of the book, shows an "I" which is neither naive nor sophisticated, but whole...
...Bette S. Weidman BOTH of these books offer contemporary approaches to the understanding of Native American cultures, and though they are very different, both indicate that despite moral and intellectual difficulties, such understanding is more than merely valuable: it is central to the definition of American culture as we hope someday to know it...
...Now Matthiessen adds his voice to these ranks with a book that is modest (no detail too small for his scrutiny), yet ambitious (not just the story of one man, but a story of the survival of the Plains people and their landscape...
...The artist is able to take in sightings of an ominous mythic figure - the Big Man, or Brown Earth Man, or rugaru - whose appearances at the edge of the Indian communities are said to foretell disaster...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 10
