The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale

7. The Power of the Tale

135 CHAPTER SEVEN The Power of the Tale A story can bring the past to the present, open people up for the experience of being healed, and prepare them to do the work of healing themselves. —EDITH TURNER, AMONG THE HEALERS The Quest As mentioned in chapter 1, “The Blind Man and the Loon” has traveled for thousands of miles and has been performed for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years for thousands of people over a very large part of northern and western Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and the western United States. Most exciting of all is the fact that it is still very much a living tradition. My exercise on the morphology of the tale in chapter 1 demonstrates the tale’s great popularity and its ability to bend and transcend many cultural and linguistic boundaries, but it offers little or no insights into why it has traveled so widely and why it has persisted so strongly in oral traditions right up to the present day. Why has it become part of virtually every Native storyteller’s repertoire throughout the North American Arctic and Subarctic? To answer these questions I have turned my eye toward the tale’s underlying semiotic. The significance of the story is arguably somewhat opaque, at least to a non-Native audience, but it becomes increasingly transparent as we study its performers and its cultural milieus. Diving down under the formal surface of the story, its shape and texture, I am interested in its significance to myself as a reader and listener and to the people who continue to perform the story and listen to it. In the words of my friend Kenneth Frank, we have to “go under the ice.” I am also attempting to gain a better understanding of the cultural and performance contexts of the tale, even though such contexts are sadly absent from nearly all published oral texts. I really have only my THE POWER OF THE TALE 136 own unpublished collection of texts and field notes to draw upon, an extremely small fraction of the total listed in appendix B. But they offer at least a small keyhole to peer through. As Terry Thompson and Steven Egesdal declare in the introduction to their book Salish Myths and Legends: One of the problems with a Western audience understanding, let alone appreciating Salishan narratives is that often they are decontextualized to the point of being incomprehensible. The narratives seem terse, laconic, and spare, because much if not most presupposed cultural knowledge is missing. That leaves outsiders with a problem grasping the actual themes of the narratives. (2008, xxxiv) I would argue that this problem extends today to almost any Native American oral tradition, including those which have maintained the Blind Man and the Loon in their repertoires. In Tanacross, Alaska, it is crucially important to know that Kenny Thomas Sr. (2005: 203–6) performs “The Blind Man and the Loon” as the opening episode in a much larger story cycle about the man Yamaagh Telcheegh. The full Yamaagh Telcheegh story, which reportedly takes seven nights to tell, can only be performed in the fall during the month of October, suggesting that it is closely associated with the seasonal round, particularly with moose hunting. And indeed in Tanacross tradition (Group G) the game animal the blind man shoots with his arrow is always a moose. The name Yamaagh Telcheegh glosses as “He went all around the world in anger,” a name given for his response to the way his wife treated him when he was blind.1 Another feature of the tale that deserves more attention is the repertoire of hand gestures that travels with it. In Kenny’s performance, one notable gesture is the arching and flick of his wrist each time the loon dives under water with the blind man (fig. 19). The repeated gesture may be seen in the video companion to this volume at http://www.uaf .edu/loon/video. This simple gesture would seem to be an integral part of the performance, but we will need to have visual documentation of other narrators and other performances in order to confirm this. Yamaagh Telcheegh starts out as the blind man we are familiar with in other variants, but in subsequent episodes he quickly takes on the THE POWER OF THE TALE 137 identity of the Traveler. The Traveler is a familiar figure in Northern Dene folklore who...