Discursive Discriminations in the Representation of Western Mono and Yokuts Stories: Confronting Narrative Inequality and Listening to Indigenous Voices in Central California

This article focuses on academic representations of Western Mono and Yokuts traditional narratives by exploring examples of what Dell Hymes described as "narrative inequality." Further developing a notion of "discursive discrimination," I demonstrate that the erasure and marginalization of indigenous narrative traditions was, in part, caused by the hegemonic blending of aesthetic and political economic criteria. But recent theoretical developments in ethnopoetics, critical literacy, language ideologies, and new ethnographic research provide key resources for projects of decolonization and cultural reclamation that were unavailable to salvage-era researchers. Examples of narrative texts in Yokuts and storytelling performances in Western Mono are explored to display indigenous aesthetic criteria that were misrecognized by generations of translators and interpreters—including linguists and anthropologists of the salvage era who explicitly analyzed their structure. By providing more accurate and complete representations we can both decolonize past representations and forge new ones, not only for the benefit of scholars but also for the heritage language communities that struggle for resources in their language renewal efforts. In so doing, we can use the ethnopoetic legacy of Hymes to create what he called "mediative" resources that enable us to better hear the voices of traditional narrators telling their stories in their heritage languages and in accord with the intertextuality of indigenous genres and storytelling ideologies. A commentary to this essay by Richard Bauman appears later in this special issue.