WAIT WAIT! SAY THAT AGAIN!

Scientists tell us that we moved beyond Neanderthals in the sense of evolving skills because of new developments in the ability to make art and tell stories.  Most creatures can make war or reproduce, etc., but it is art, music, dance, and stories that make us humans.  

We know that there are differences among groups of humans and try to treat them as differences between species, or nations, or religious bodies.  In fact, the culture-making capacities are often what separate us, creating differences and even conflict.  But culture making can also reconcile us.

In the past there have been two cultural thinking mistakes when it comes to the "surf" between the American indigenous people and the European indigenous people, who try to represent themselves as somehow Platonically (a line of thought that started with Plato) and abstractly definitive. Writing is supposed to be better and "higher" than talking.

This has been encouraged by some because writing has been a feature of the Eurasia culture, but the American culture has emphasized oral literature.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition

"Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality."

— John Foley, "Signs of Orality"

These thinkers about "orality" distinguish between the oral traditions of a whole culture and the individual who tells stories, testifies to his or her experience, and so on.  The latter has been emphasized by anthropologists who come to settlements of oral people and write down what they say out loud, either to the recorder or to a group.  The oral people themselves may come to think that only the written record is what counts. Thoughts about the larger culture were neglected.

Thus, if we consider oral "literature," the first "Nat lit" was first person stories told in the people's languages, perserved by machinery like tape or video.  One of the early problems in "reviving" the indigenous languages is that there's not much to read.  The technical work of inventing an alphabet of the sounds used by the people in question creates a representative code that has to be learned, and not easily.  Even then, one must learn a new way of holding the oral/pharyngeal cavity to make the right vowels and new ways of using tongue, teeth, lips, and even epiglottis to make the stops and hisses of the consonants.

Contemporary tribal people can "read" oral languages on video.  Once they are "translated" even into written accounts, the story changes according to word choices.  Sometimes there is no such concept in the written language as there is in the oral version or vice versa.  Translation of the oral language is complicated by the spoken words always having a "subtext" of gesture, facial expression, pauses, volume, and so on.  In the written versions we try to add footnotes, print differences, illustrations, spaces.  Oral and written are parallel but different art forms, as though one were sculpture and the other was painting.

Early "Nat Lit" literature might be Chief Pokagon speaking in his own language at the World Fair in Chicago just before the 20th century. The written version we have was translated by a woman of the Edwardian era who understood it all a slightly different way. This kind of collaboration happened often and accounts for the uplifting tone of NA oratory.  Much of what was written down to be read in an indigenous language was in homage to the power of certain Books that were thought to contain religious truth.  One whole religious denomination, Bahai, is based on all the various Books together.  The premise is that if it were written down and "true" all religious writing would agree.  

The modern concern about "Nat Lit" writing deals with none of that.  Instead it is at first drawn from anthropology notes, so that tribal people are reading "who they are" as filtered through someone visiting.  Then gradually those writing about tribes began to be tribal people themselves, but almost always educated by whites, which inevitably means assimilated at least enough to manage and be understood by white people.  

This had nothing to do with blood quantum, but more to do with managing and reconciling two systems of thought.  Ruth Beebe Hill claimed that she did this by translating "Hanta Yo!" out of English into Sioux with the help of a Sioux man, and then back to English again so she could sell the product. Since in the Sixties she was in the habit of coming to visit us in Browning instead of the Sioux, I had to think about this early on.  

Books are objects in a way that oral stories can only be on recordings, preferably video.  As far as I know, no one is selling CD's with spoken literature in an indigenous language.  Perhaps they ought to.  People could buy them for the prestige of it, even if they can't follow the talk -- they do that with books.  The tribes themselves haven't had access to early recordings until recent years because they were archived in academic or scientific institutions.  Now one can get some things on the Internet, including the free spoken language through radio like Canadian Windspeaker.  https://windspeaker.com/radio  (Thunder Radio is owned by Montana Blackfeet: KBWG-FM 107.5 MHz - Browning, MT.  Spoken mostly in English.)

But there is another element, which is the ecosystem and the ecopolitical system of the place that gave rise to the language.  If I say "sweetgrass" and you've never smelled it, you won't be able to think of it.  If I say Auntie in Blackfeet, it will mean something different than it means in English.  This sort of thing makes stories thin or even misleading when they are taken to a different culture.  Many traditional oral stories, as the Bible was drawn from by scribes, are moral, much more crucial to human life than the experiencing plants, though maybe as crucial as having proper aunts.  The difference in meaning is something like a rural person trying to explain life to an urban person.

Contemporary writers are identified as part of the Nat Lit selling commodity, either self-identified or having the role thrust upon them by publishers.  They justify their label by constructs claiming provenance, descendence unproven by DNA which shuffles the genes in each generation, or by the way people "look," creating the weird premise that all Native Americans look like the buffalo nickel.  The actual facts of the content or the genetics of the author get pushed aside by this stereotype, this genre.  Consequences can be major.

More to say later.