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

Foreword

ix Foreword From a distance of miles and centuries, stories in the oral tradition seem to have an independent existence, drifting from place to place like species of animals over time and territory and gradually evolving from one form to another. Indeed, early folklorists and anthropologists sought to dissect and classify them in the same way that anatomists and taxonomists dissect and classify groups of animals. Later, Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow (also known as the father of actor Max von Sydow) coined the term oicotype to describe local forms of a widely distributed folktale. His idea was that stories evolve and adapt to local conditions over time. The Blind Man and the Loon is a remarkable work that traces a single story through Inuit and Athabaskan variations. It is clearly a labor of love. Craig Mishler has collected and told the story himself. At the same time, he also traces the contexts in which the story has been told, collected, adapted, and sometimes appropriated. While he uses the terminology of academic folklore, he does not rely exclusively on this rather hermetic language. He takes the reader on a shared journey of discovery and places himself within the narrative to do justice to the people he cites, both historical figures and ones he knows or has known personally. His comments on field technique reflect his own experience as storyteller and collector as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant literature. Knud Rasmussen comes out as exemplary. Franz Boas doesn’t do as well. Mishler is also forthright on the issue of cultural appropriation and doesn’t hesitate to point out the failings of the popular and often praised film The Loon’s Necklace. He tells a cautionary tale for outsiders contemplating the use of Native American oral narratives as “children’s literature.” Mishler is a self-confessed collector who early on made the switch from coins to folktales. From there it was just another step to start collecting stories about storytellers and stories about the collectors of stories. He is also a gifted storyteller in his own right. He is schooled in the traditions of distributional and typological folklore, but he is also and perhaps primarily sensitive to the poetic values of storytelling. FOREWORD x Not every collector has been so sensitive. Some even failed to give the names of the people from whom they heard a story. This is unfortunate and indeed disrespectful, for as the author says, “The storytellers who have performed and recorded the story of the Blind Man and the Loon are the unsung poet laureates and Nobel prize winners for literature of their times. . . . They are diverse and fascinating people who need to be honored and remembered, and what follows here is a nod to an illustrious pantheon of voices, names, and faces.” Oral stories live only in the moment of their telling. At least before the advent of electronic communication, stories have been sustained by face-to-face personal contact. They are creatures of breath and ears and voices, and take place in settings like the ones Knud Rasmussen described for his encounters with Inuit storytellers in the 1920s. These settings have recently been vividly recreated by the Igloolik Isuma film cooperative in their feature film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Actor Pakak Inukshuk delivers a masterful rendition in Inuktitut of a story the shaman Avva told Rasmussen about acquiring his spirit helpers. His performance honors Rasmussen, his friend Avva, and the Inuit people who told him a wealth of stories, including that of the Blind Man and the Loon. Stories span generations of living people before they jump into the realm of tradition. A story lives and is reborn each time a storyteller makes it his or her own and passes it on to an attentive audience. As Dane-zaa elder Tommy Attachie told anthropologists Robin and Jillian Ridington, “When you sing it now, just like new.” Storytellers make stories new with each telling. They assemble traits and motifs wafted to them from distant times and places and construct coherent narratives from them. Stories are cultural (what Alfred Kroeber called “superorganic”), but they are enacted as individual creations in the way that Edward Sapir, in his critique of Kroeber, said all culture is individually enacted. As a story gradually moves from one cultural and geographic area to another through countless tellings, it evolves into distinctively adapted oicotypes. In his collecting adventures, Mishler has recorded versions of the Blind Man and the Loon...