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In his pivotal work on the poetics of Native American oral traditions, Dell Hymes reinterprets a Chinook story that he first analyzed in 1968. In this story, a girl is trying to tell her mother unsettling but crucial news that will affect them both, but, intent on maintaining the status quo, the mother stubbornly refuses to listen. In the event, her daughter can only argue, “In vain I tried to tell you.”1 As he reflects on his methodology, on his successes and failures in using anthropological philology and structural linguistics in the attempt to restore voice to oral texts that have been little more than museum specimens, Hymes writes: “If we refuse to consider and interpret the surprising facts of device, design, and performance inherent in the words of the texts, the Indians who made the texts, and those who preserved what they made, will have worked in vain. We will be telling the texts not to speak. We will mistake, perhaps, to our costs, the nature of the power of which they speak” (“In Vain I Tried to Tell You” 5–6). While coming from the specific field of ethnopoetics, Hymes’s observations “speak” perfectly well to the subject of this chapter: crossreading and crosscultural communication as ways of opening up rather than closing down ideas in language. As critics involved in reading texts originating in differing epistemologies, in the narratives of Native American oral traditions, we might, Hymes suggests, listen carefully to what these narratives have to say even when they are heavily hybridized , affected by contact with Western discursive paradigms; we might consider both our and their different viewpoints and ultimately learn to see things in new ways. As readers and critics of Native American literature, our 3 Crossreading Texts, Bridging Cultures The Dialogic Approach of Greg Sarris and Louis Owens . . . an appreciation for the boundless capacity of language that, through storytelling, brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time. Leslie Silko primary responsibility is to make sure that these texts will “tell” us something and that they will not speak “in vain.” In Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993) and Mixedblood Messages (1998), respectively ,GregSarris(Pomo-Jewish)andLouisOwens(Choctaw-Cherokee and Irish) explore the ways in which people read across cultures and what the aims and consequences of these readings can and should be. Crucial to both critics’ work is the idea of dialogue within and between people in order to expose boundaries that shape and constitute different cultural and personal worlds. Elaborating on Bakhtin’s formulations, Sarris and Owens apply concepts such as dialogism and heteroglossia to the idea of reading across lines of cultural identity, overcoming rigid binary oppositions between Western and Native perspectives and constructing a criticism that challenges old ways of theorizing. Unlike Allen, Warrior, and Womack, who argue for a “tribalcentric” approach to a Native theoretical discourse, Sarris and Owens argue for a hybridized, multidirectional, and multigeneric discursive mode, one that encompasses their mixedblood identity and, ultimately and subversively , redefines the boundaries of Euramerican discourse.2 Unlike Allen, Warrior, and Womack, who take a Nativist stance, Sarris and Owens do not aim to recover authentic Indian traditions or to speak exclusively from or within a Native or tribal perspective. While acknowledging that, in the light of their strategic location within the mainstream academy, for them to be taking a “Native perspective” is problematic, if not downright impossible, they conceive of writing within and out of the metropolitan center as a powerful subversive tool, a tricksterish subversion of the authoritative discourse of Euramerica, through which Native Americans can survive as indigenous people and living human beings. In ways similar to those elaborated in the oral traditions of tribal cultures, in which words and narratives have the power to create and to heal, Sarris and Owens turn to language as the most powerful tool with which to ensure the life and vitality of Native writing and identity in opposition to the stasis and entrapments created by the stereotypes and clichés of the Euramerican imagination. As critics deeply committed to a discourse on hybridity and dialogism, Sarris and Owens explore new creative avenues in a language that will allow Native people to reimagine themselves. In Keeping Slug Woman Alive, storytelling and theorizing overlap, thus creating a discourse that resembles a “kind of story” (131). Similarly, in Mixedblood Messages, autobiography, critical theory, film commentary, and environmental reflections are blended in order to come to terms...

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