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The Wife Who Goes Out Like a Man, Cotnes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives Jarold W. Ramsey The oralliterature ofanotherculture is often difficult to penetrate. The reader (since this literature is invariably encountered in printed translation) may be overwhelmed, on the one hand, by what seems to bean abundance ofneedless repetition,yet stymied on the other by brevity and conciseness that borders on the cryptic or nonsensical. What we often lack is access to the complex matrix of assumptions, associations, conventions, and understandings that inform that lite,.atu,.e and are immediately available to almost every memberofthe culture. Despite the difficulties, such literature can be made accessible through careful and informed reading. Of course, this accessibility may be more a hypothesis than a definitive accomplishment,ยท nevertheless, something may be gained from the attempt. ]a,.old W. Ramseyleads us through severalvariants ofaNorthwest Indian narrative. Starting with the informed commentaries of Jacobs (1959,1960) and Hymes (1981), Ramsey presents these stories as a literature that can be analyzed and discussed in literary terms. Tedlock (1972) has done much ofthe originalwo,.k on the representation oforalliterature, particularly native American literature, in print. Furtherdiscussion of native American literature can be found in Kroeber (1981), Ramsey (1977, 1983), Swann (1983), and Toelken (1969). One of the few stories in a North American Indian repertory to receive genuine analysis from more than one writer is a brief, starkly horrifying text in the late Melville Jacobs's collection of Clackamas Chinook literature from Oregon-titled "Seal and Her Younger Brother Dwelt There"I-with full and penetrating commentaries on it by Jacobs himself and by Dell Hymes, and illustrative references to it in an important essay on the nature of fiction by Frank Kermode. "Seal and Her Younger Brother" might be said to have "arrived," critically.2 My intention here is not so much to add to its understanding and fame (it is still a long way, I imagine, from inclusion in a freshman literature anthology) as to draw on the attention given it by Jacobs and Hymes in order to introduce another, closely related, Northwest myth-narrative, and, in discussing it, to raise some issues about our long overdue reclamation of native American literature. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America, from PMLA 92(1977):9-18. Copyright 0 1977 by the Modern Language Association of America. Not for further reproduction. 209 Jarold W. Ramsey About that literature, the reader is reminded here at the outset that in general terms it is an oral, formulaic, traditional, and anonymous art form; that ultimately its engagement with reality is mythic and sacred; that what survives of it comes to us at two removes, translated from an oral-traditional mode into print and from ~ native language into English; that it flourished through public performance (generally during winter religious festivals) by skilled recitalists whose audiences already knew the individual stories and prized not plot invention but rather the recitalists' ability to exploit their material dramatically and to weave stories into sequences and cycles. Indian myth-narrative, being dramatic in conception and performance, inevitably strikes us as a highly tacit expression; motivation and emotional states are generally implied rather than directly specified. And Indian literature is likely to seem all the more terse, even cryptic, to us for being the verbal art of highly ethnocentric, tribal people, whose infinitely diverse cultures we still don't know much about. An elderly Papago singer said to Ruth Underhill by way of commenting on this difficulty: "The song is so short because we understand so much."3 Our two Oregon narratives are indeed short and concentrated, and yet, with some ethnographic help, we can hope to understand and appreciate them as instances of native American literature. First the text of "Seal and Her Younger Brother," as narrated by Mrs. Victoria Howard in Oregon City, Oregon, in 1929 and transcribed and translated by Jacobs, with corrections by Hymes:4 They lived there. Seal, her daughter, her younger brother. I do not know when it was, but now a woman got to Sears younger brother. They lived there. They would go outside [to urinate] in the evening. The girl would say, she would tell her mother: "Mother! There is something different about my unclets wife. It sounds like a man when she 'goes out':'-ttDon't say that! [She is] your uncle's wife!" They lived there like that for a long time. They would 'go out...

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