Native Folklore for Canadian Children

Native Folklore for Canadian Children In his comments accompanying a collection of Eskimo folktales, George Swinton has written: In our age it no longer suffices to merely know one's own mythology and heritage transmitted through prehistory and history. We are in constant contact with "other" people and the best way to get to know them and their cultures is through their art and their myths. No doubt Swinton, a scholar of Eskimo art, is correct to an extent, but one wonders just how accessible "others" are through their art and myths, particularly as these are most often presented. The myths of "other people" are generally the subject of either scholarly works or children's books — scarcely a situation destined to produce general acceptance and understanding of these important traditions and their bearers. In the last century, a large number of books dealing with the myths and other oral traditions of foreign cultures have been produced for our children. Yet, there is, at best, limited knowledge and appreciation of these cultures. Are the books, then, the wrong sort to produce cross-cultural understanding, or is this material simply not suitable for children's literature? I intend to address these questions by looking at Canadian works dealing with native folklore-folklife . The largest single genre and a high proportion of the corpus of Canadian children's literature concerns the folklore and folklife of Canada's indigenous people — the Indians and the Inuit. Some of the finest Canadian children 's books are of this nature, and each year more retold stories, legends, myths, and various portraits of native life are produced. I do not intend to survey this literature here, since such surveys are readily available, most notably the chapter on "Indian and Eskimo Legends" in Sheila Egoff's The Republic of Childhood and various pertinent bibliographies and commentaries in In Review. Rather, I would like to raise several problems which exist in using native folklore-folklife as literature and then to discuss some examples of different ways of treating this material for children, commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of each. There are three major problems in creating children's literature from native folklore; namely, the "forelgnness" of the native traditions, their oral nature, and the attitudes towards both children and native people which underlie the presentations, as well as being reflected in and maintained through them. The native folklore originates in cultures other than those in which it is consumed in literary form. It most commonly must be translated into English (or, sometimes, French) before it is used for Canadian children's literature. Seldom does the author of a children's book do this translation; rather, he or she works from the material already once removed from the culture. But the "forelgnness" of the raw material is not merely a matter of language; rather it is an entirely different world view which shaped and is portrayed in the traditions. Most authors for children are relatively unaware of the true nature of the native cultures and their world views, and so they are capable of presenting only an "etic" or outsider's view of them, rather than the desirable "emic" or insider's perspective. The authors work mostly from secondary sources and consequently sometimes make serious errors of interpretation . One of the most obvious is the confusion of Indian oratorical speech, used on ceremonial occasions, for typical speech patterns; it too frequently is either presented as such or removed from the tales for which it legitimately should be used. This is but one example of the falsification of the traditions which occurs when they are removed from their cultural milieux. One wonders whether the generally recognized high calibre of the native tales is sufficient to instill cross-cultural appreciation. Is there not a need to present this material, especially the sacred tales, that is, the myths, with an awareness of their cultural context in order to avoid the creation of false images of the cultures? The oral nature of the native folklore presents particular problems. In order to become children's literature, the material must be transposed from an oral to a literary style — not as simple a task as one...