WHO TELLS THE TALE

“Who Tells the Tale?” was supposed to be the focus of the panel at the Montana Festival of the Book, but the panel seemed curiously reluctant to take on the question, so I’ll address it here.

The heart of the matter is the Sixties and Seventies empowerment movement that changed everything in many circles. (I was surprised to hear Adolf Hungry Wolf talk about this culture revolution as containing the revitalization of the Blackfeet. I mean, I thought so, but hadn’t heard others speak of it.) Suddenly, the old pattern of Grinnell, Linderman, Wissler, and other patriarchal educated fellows coming to the reservation in summer and gathering up charming tales and legends to publish -- carefully bowlderized and diluted to suit women and children -- just wasn’t enough anymore. Why couldn’t the Indian people themselves tell their stories their own way?

The Indian people quickly discovered that their stories, songs and ceremonies were worth money and began to ask for payment when they related them, abandoning the gift economy that had always been traditional. Some white people grasped the idea of the symbolic payment and were happy to hand over only a cigarette or two in exchange for some privileged information they could sell. Privilege was very important to these white people: they wanted to be singled out as worthy recipients of the magic of the Noble Savage.

However, they were usually in a hurry, so -- as Adolf Hungry-Wolf vividly related in his presentation -- they rushed into the cabin of someone like Mike Swims Under out at Heart Butte, asked their vital question or two, and when their authoritative Oldman gave a kind of preliminary thought or two in the process of getting a grip on the subject, they wrote it in their notebook and charged back out the door. By simply hanging around the rest of the day, Adolf discovered that hours later the Oldman would reflect on the topic at length, maybe sing some songs. Then Adolf would write it down or maybe tape it for translation later. The answer might even last until after supper, though the question had been asked in the morning. In fact, by the time the translation had been made and a few things had been clarified, days might have passed. By then the anxious whiteman was back on the East Coast at his famous university, writing up his paper. Telling these people that the stories were secret was doing them a big favor, since they never got them right or whole anyway.

A few years ago a famous anthropologist died, leaving tape recordings of forbidden stories. They had been told to him on tape with the understanding that they were secret because they were only to be told at certain times and places. This was what kept them valuable, because if people heard them all the time they would think they already knew everything and they wouldn’t listen. The anthropologist’s wife destroyed the tapes, scandalizing her husband’s colleagues and gratifying the people whose stories they were. In part, it was a matter of keeping her husband’s word. In part, it was a matter of not unmasking what might have been mocked or discounted -- keeping things secret preserves their magic.

In some tribes there are stories that are only to be told in winter when the children and old people stay rolled up in bed to keep warm. If the stories are told in summer when they should be doing things, the stories will already be worn out and stale in winter when there is nothing to do but listen. Then what will the old people tell the children to keep them settled?

In part, stories, songs and ceremonies are kept secret to preserve their ownership by the people who created them or feel they “own” them. They are a sign of privilege for the Indians themselves and a source of empowerment. A few will take advantage of the situation to sell stories or charge admission to ceremonies -- sometimes thousands of dollars. On the one hand, they need the money. On the other hand, they may be selling themselves cheap -- a form of prostitution, an intimacy usually granted only in a real relationship.

There is another consideration never mentioned by Indians because they are embarrassed by it and some of them don’t realize it anyway. It is caused by different cultural boundaries. Some ceremonies were related in Latin by the early researchers because they involved things like ritual intercourse. Not an imitation, but the real thing in hopes of modeling for the buffalo what they ought to do. Lately the Latin has been translated into plain English to get rid of the privilege the Latin speakers imposed on them, thinking that a person who could speak Latin would be educated enough to understand ritual intercourse. Authorities (assumed NOT to know Latin) might impose penalties if they knew.

In the Sixties and Seventies, some rebellious professors began to publish Napi stories that were really authentic. Napi had not been influenced by Victorian white missionaries. In one version of what Napi did, the Latinate translators agreed among themselves to call Napi’s penis his lariat. It was an amazing lariat that was constantly reaching between the legs of young women, even if they were swimming in the middle of a lake while Napi stood on shore.

If a modern assimilated Indian heard such a story, he or she might be deeply upset because of constant conditioning to always to conform to propriety, once Blackfeet propriety but now white propriety fairly old-fashioned. This allows the sharing of the real (“dirty”) meaning to be privileged knowledge among men, reducing them to dirty jokes. If a young Indian of the 21st century told the stories bluntly, he or she might feel privileged because of having a modern frank sensibility that doesn’t shrink from saying “penis.” A penis is simply a penis. No need to feel ashamed.

In this time period of the Sixties and Seventies, the effort to get beyond stereotypes of Indians and any other ethnic groups was often addressed by forbidding anyone to tell ethnic jokes that depended on making the person look silly or stupid or habitually drunken. Yet much of prairie humor from the Euro-homesteaders was about dumb mistakes and bad behavior -- it was a way of blowing off tension and relieving shame. John Tatsey, an Indian who wrote a column about the people of Heart Butte, mocked them all the time and told preposterous half-true tales about them. In his time these were very popular, published in the local paper, read into the Congressional Record by John Tatsey’s good friend Mike Mansfield, and published again in a book. One can hear older Indians today talk about how proud they are that Tatsey was such a big success without ever realizing that he made them all seem to be the ridiculous inhabitants of Dogpatch.

On the other hand, there are tribal people who will only allow good things to be said about their tribe and will invent all sorts of rationalizations to excuse the actions they now consider shameful. Heart Butte school searched the continent to find a drug program for high schools that was created by Indian people. Then the Blackfeet drug counselor had the kits destroyed because she said they portrayed drug-addicted Indian students as stupid, dizzy and disgraced. She thought that was wrong -- the portrayal of Indians must always be positive.

If white people say things about Indians, they can be attacked on the harshest terms as racists. Yet Indians have many racist notions about white people that go unexamined because everyone thinks they are TRUE, not stereotypes! (White people have hidden resources, white people have no families, white people will not stay...) And white people say the same thing in their defense: “but Indians really ARE like that: drunken, quarreling, feckless, illiterate, etc.” These are not magic stories but they are power stories and sometimes historically focussed. If a person wanted to keep things peaceful, it might be a good idea to suppress them.

The American holocaust atrocity stories are the hardest to handle. In the 19th century they were likely to be about the torture and mutilation of whites by Indians. Now they are more likely to be about the torture and mutilation of Indians by whites. In a time when we hear about such things daily on the media, these stories are no less incendiary and are often political fodder involved in a demand for reparation, maybe money or maybe apologies. And yet, stories about such things as the abuse of students in mission schools were kept secret for a long time. It’s good to get them out in the open -- isn’t it? How else can change happen?

Who tells the tale? The Indian? WHICH Indian? What IS an Indian? Can a Cree tell a story about Blackfeet or vice versa? Can a city-raised or college-educated Indian tell reservation stories kept in the traditional way among family members? There is a federal law that only an Indian can sell art work certified to be Indian art work. Ward Churchill was friendly with a tribe who agreed to give him an honorary membership in the tribe so that he would technically be an Indian and the government could not prosecute him for selling his “Indian art work.” He looked like an Indian (long dark straight hair) and pretty soon even he thought he was an Indian. He has been able to write intensely fiery post-colonial attacks on the white world from his “Indian” point of view. Revealing his genetic identity has destroyed his writing career besides losing him his academic job. He was attacked by Indians for not being a genetic Indian, and yet the upshot is beneficial to whites.

Every story ought to be heard while “considering the source.” Whether or not they ought to be silenced is a different issue. If one thinks that telling the story or performing the ceremony is efficacious, that is, really “works” on reality to change it in a supernaturally powerful way, then its use ought to be controlled. But we are of several minds about whether such acts impact reality.

A related issue is photographing sacred objects or opening Bundles normally kept closed. Photographing sacred objects is a taboo sometimes observed and other times neglected. Since the uses and protections of Bundles grew up around them as they were assembled, which was for the most part before cameras were invented, the matter is simply unaddressed in the oldest settings. It makes sense to open Bundles as little as possible to protect them from contamination by bugs or from theft of the contents. When Bob Scriver and I became Keepers, we discovered that we had been buying small objects from inside Bundles for years without knowing what they were. These objects were not missed until the ceremonial opening once a year. In general, the Bundles were kept by the most traditional people who felt they should resist modern “different” ways, so that many of the taboos we were given as Keepers were things like never using a fork. A metal fork is a modern innovation.

But by now many, if not most, Bundles have been opened, photographed, and otherwise recorded. It would be harder to steal from the contents, but a little of the magic has been rubbed off. It’s already happened. There’s no way to go back.

I would argue that the more serious damage was caused by not knowing what the contents of the Bundle were trying to evoke. Far more damage to ceremonial life has been done by the replacement of real nature with television nature -- Walt Disney stuff. To pick up a kit fox hide and dance its song is impossible without really knowing a kit fox, having sat on the prairie and watched one for hours. The Amskapi Pikuni know this and are interested in nature programs on the land.

As the old buffalo people have died, the ceremonies have had to transform in order to remain relevant. For instance, women now dance, when traditionally Blackfeet women did not. The ceremonial foods no longer include buffalo tongues as they once did. Substitutions are necessary. The “feast” might include oranges, hard-boiled eggs, frybread, and Sailor Boy hardtack. It may not be convenient to meet in a tipi. Nevertheless, the heart of the ceremony, the Bundle itself and the songs, are as intact as effort can make them. And new songs or practices may be added if the ceremony is part of a living stream. Even the Catholic mass has changed over the centuries.

When I told people about my book “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” they said, “Who gave the stories to you?” When I said, “Nobody. I just made them up!” they thought at first that I’d invented Napi stories. But I write stories in the way that Sherman Alexie or Tony Hillerman or Louise Erdrich do -- ordinary modern short stories about Indian people. Should I do this since I’m white? Particularly since I wrote about non-mainstream characters like a two-spirited man, a warrior woman, a cut-nose woman, a black Blackfeet, and so on? But people write stories about other people all the time. If they don’t know the people they write about well enough to be convincing, that’s a different kind of problem than recounting once more a traditional story properly told in a ceremonial setting. It’s an artistic issue, not a religious issue.

In my opinion, the white insistence that “Indian stories” are only myths, legends and traditional tales, has held back the development of dynamic writing by Indians. For a while the Native American Renaissance was bursting with new ideas and voices -- then they went silent. Publishers didn’t believe in them and didn’t know how to present them. They printed too many copies, didn’t hold them long enough for the public to understand, and then remaindered them in cities where Indians couldn’t find them. Some of these problems have been solved by technology. Now the whole Internet is a bookstore. Every library includes a computer.

Now anyone can go to a Publish-On-Demand website and make available a book they wrote, even in their own indigenous language. This will create a new set of problems, since any self-important fool can pretend to be a great shaman with true ideas (which he copies out of an anthropology textbook the night before). The public will have to scramble a bit to understand what is reliable and what is moonbeams. Who Tells the Tales meets Who Reads the Tales and there are illusions on both sides.

I think the solution is Adolf’s -- taking time. Really listening. Spending the day. Becoming part of the scene. Learning how a kit fox really moves. Learning what stories mean to the tellers of them.

I think that whether one is IN or OUT of the group, one can witness. One has an active obligation to witness accurately and possibly to record that somehow. It is the way to wisdom.