American Folklore Scholarship, Tales of the North American Indians, and Relational Communities

This article acknowledges that folklore studies has sometimes overlooked the imperatives of relational communities with the publication of tale collections. By privileging stories as texts and objectifying literacy as a stage of human development, some authors of tale collections have followed long-standing societal norms and ignored the primary imperative of maintaining relations to remain a community. Analyzing the introductions to Tales of the North American Indians (Thompson 1929) and four other collections of American Indian stories published between 1892 and 1929, I show how authors associated literacy, lands, stories, and people to confirm or disrupt assumptions of American Indians as pre-literate, primitive, vanishing, or ongoing peoples. With greater awareness of evolutionary assumptions and relational perspectives at play in a crucial disciplinary genre, folklorists may produce and receive tale collections in ways that better evaluate how stories relate storytellers with lands and communities.