Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories

The Story Is a Living Being: Companionship with Stories in Anishinaabeg Studies

61 the story is a Living being Companionship with Stories in Anishinaabeg Studies eVA mArie gArrOutte And KAthLeen deLOres WestCOtt Mythic thought is the way traditional people think today and the way others thought in the past. It is a reasonable way of ordering the world that presupposes that any activity can happen again. Thus, the telling of a cosmogonic myth continues creation. . . . The retelling of the myth animates the story and makes it all happen again—on another sphere of existence, but not so far away that such power could not break through into our own plane of being. . . . Myths are true in that sense. They pulse in the telling of them. The language is vibrant in a sacred way. —mAureen KOrP, THE SACRED GEOGRAPHY OF THE AMERICAN MOUND BUILDERS the current volume invites readers to consider whether the emerging field of Anishinaabeg studies can center itself on stories, and what kinds of questions a field so positioned might undertake. An invigorating invitation, it raises complex issues. scholars have contributed a considerable body of research on native American stories. Yet such research has often yielded results that those stories’ caretakers find unsatisfying. the excellent collection edited by Phyllis morrow and William schneider, When Our Words Return: Writing, Hearing, and Remembering Oral Traditions of Alaska and the Yukon (1995), offers a compendium of common critiques. some contributors offer concern about scholarly approaches that overanalyze and 62| Garroutte and Westcott “tear apart” stories, become preoccupied with hidden meanings, and exclude native voices—or include them in ways that strip their authority. Others express frustration with researchers who demand disclosure, misconstrue themes, appropriate and objectify, or impose ill-fitting analytic categories. this is a partial list. such criticisms suggest that past encounters between scholarship and native American stories have gone badly wrong. Can scholars of Anishinaabeg studies hope for different outcomes as they attempt to place stories at the center of this emerging field? that depends, we suggest, on the intellectual tools they use to engage stories. For many decades, researchers have applied the perspective of “narratology ” to interpret and theorize stories. directing particular attention to issues of story structure, narratology has influenced scholarship not only within literary criticism, but in anthropology, psychology, and sociology. still, the approach has critics. some, like leading narratologist Arthur Frank, observe in his discipline the same analytic heavy-handedness that troubles storytellers . Frank’s response directs the analytic gaze away from excessive attention to structural elements and toward the capacities of stories: “the study of stories that i propose,” he writes, “is less about finding themes and more about asking what stories do, which is inform human life.”1 even more importantly, Frank argues for “dialogical” approaches. in place of analysis that “asserts rather than engages,” Frank urges practices that avoid “finalizing” stories, tidying them away via imposed intellectual frameworks that appear to speak the last interpretive word. “dialogue,” Frank writes, “implies an ethical demand for openness to the difference of the other, both recognizing what is different and also respecting the need to sustain the difference, not assimilate or finalize it.” by inviting many voices, dialogical approaches honor “humans’ necessary, inescapable, sometimes beneficial but too often imperfect companionship with stories.” such approaches, Frank proposes, may even “improve the terms of that companionship.”2 dialogical narratology promises new possibilities for the intersection between scholarship and stories that scholars in Anishinaabeg studies invite. Yet they will wish to proceed advisedly. issues surrounding stories understood as myths—the sacred stories described in some Anishinaabe traditions as living entities—invite particular consideration. this chapter ponders the consequences of looking to narratological approaches for the tools Anishinaabeg studies will use to construe stories. how might these perspectives, even the dialogical varieties, affect stories? how do the possible outcomes differ from the consequences accruing within the perspectives that storytellers Companionship with Stories| 63 themselves bring? how, in short, do frameworks for working with sacred stories assist or challenge those who wish to be their good companions? We proceed via an analytic approach that places an Anishinaabe myth at the center. We begin by presenting a sacred story retold by Anishinaabe/ Cree elder Kathleen Westcott. We then examine two exemplary narratives, by which we mean sets of resources from which speakers build up and grapple with individual stories. Our selected narratives represent two important perspectives that define ideas about stories and what they do; one is carried by narratologist Arthur...