At the Font of the Marvelous: Exploring Oral Narrative and Mythic Imagery of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors (review)

This engaging and eclectic study, penned by one of the most readable and productive scholars of the Iroquois people, offers a series of case studies that illustrate how creative analyses of traditional narratives may enrich our understanding of the historical experience of American Indian nations. Noting the "enormous body" of Iroquois folktales, legends, and myths that has been hitherto "largely neglected" by academic researchers (xiii), Wonderley outlines essential patterns of content and structure that will guide generations of future inquiry into Iroquois oral narrative. Wonderley's confidence in the capacity of myths to tell us something significant about the past of the people who told particular stories is conveyed in reasonable and persuasive terms, and his frequent meditations on the methodology underlying his analysis open the book to students of peoples and regions beyond northeastern North America.

The book's introduction provides a splendid entrée into the mechanics of analyzing oral narrative: its genres (myths are given pride of place over folktales and legends insofar as the former represent "a people's most important stories" [xiv]), its representation in the documentary record (as largely transliterations of orally told stories), and what counts as authentic and trustworthy. While Wonderley denies having "an ideological ax to grind" (xxvi), he is not unwilling to speak his mind on particular issues (7-8, 51, 64, 112). He dismisses the subgenre of "Victorian parlor literature purporting to convey Native American stories, often to a young reading audience" on the grounds that such works "typically combine authorial embroidery and fabrication to such an extent that, if there was any authentically native basis to the plot, the story has been rendered worthless for any comparative purpose" (xxv). Significantly, these criteria of authenticity lead Wonderley to exclude two well-known collections of stories published by the Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker during the late 1920s from his canon of Iroquois oral narrative—such works, in Wonderley's view, are merely "fiction" (xxv), ineligible for the sort of inquiry he considers legitimate and worthwhile.

Wonderley's two-stage comparative approach aims to uncover and document coherent story lines across places and times ("chronometric fonts") and then, in certain cases, to seek "archaeological correlates" (xxv) to determine the antiquity of stories. Wonderley enjoys a rich base of primary data. The Northeast, and especially Iroquoia, is home to some of the oldest documented indigenous oral narrative of greatest longevity. Wonderley's informed readings of an array of Iroquois narratives are augmented by his comprehensive awareness of related versions of stories for comparative purposes, including those told by the Iroquois or by neighboring nations in the Northeast as well as those recorded in global ethnographic literature.

Scholars of the Iroquois will find many compelling insights in this volume. Three stood out to this reviewer as especially noteworthy. First, Wonderley's discussion of the changing mythic representations of Sky Holder (the "Good Twin" in the Iroquois Creation narrative) over time leads him to conclude that the early nineteenth-century Handsome Lake religious revitalization movement represented "a far more comprehensive overhaul" of Iroquois "cosmogonic ideas" (64) than historians and anthropologists have recognized to date. This finding has important consequences for the future viability of much of the current Iroquois ethnographic literature, which tends to utilize Handsome Lake as a baseline for authentic Iroquois cultural norms that is often "upstreamed" into more remote times in an effort to understand past behavior (116). Second, in his analysis of Iroquois "Friendly Visitor" stories, Wonderley points out the rarity of female-centered perspectives in Iroquois oral narrative. Although the author's effort to square this point with the well-documented social power of Iroquois women is ultimately unsatisfying (113-14), scholars of the Iroquois will now have to confront the meaning of the evident "misogyny" (104) in Iroquois oral narrative that Wonderley has established in this study. Finally...