Storied Voices in Native American Texts: Harry Robinson, Thomas King, James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko (review)

As Arnold Krupat points out, the term "oral tradition" has become a "catchall phrase," often expressing a "vague [. . .] nostalgia for some aboriginal authenticity" without reference to "historically and culturally specific instances" (38). In defining his term "anti-imperialist translation" to conceptualize parallels between Native American and more fully "post" colonial literatures, Krupat argues that to read a native text as "an instance of cultural translation," one must demonstrate "how that text incorporates alternate strategies, indigenous perspectives, or language usages that [. . .] make its 'English' on the page a translation in which traces of [. . .] the 'Indian' can be discerned" (38). Blanca Schorcht's study Storied Voices in Native American Texts makes just this case for the traditional stories of Harry Robinson (recorded by anthropologist Wendy Wickwire) and three contemporary novels—Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water (1993), James Welch's Fools Crow (1986), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991); using specific historical and cultural examples, Schorcht demonstrates with careful precision the perspectives and strategies that make these texts powerful examples of cultural translation. However, Schorcht chooses not to frame her study within postcolonial theory, agreeing with Thomas King that to do so "assumes that the starting point for the discussion [of Native literature] is the advent of Europeans in North America" (qtd. in Schorcht 4). Schorcht argues that these three novels resist postcolonial readings; rather, they are rooted in oral storytelling traditions, and as oral story-telling cycles such as Harry Robinson's have done since contact, translate European/American English into a "Native English" that redefines and recontextualizes non-native influences in terms of native worldviews.

Storied Voices originated as Schorcht's 1999 doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia under the direction of Robin Ridington. Schorcht relies heavily on Ridington's work and a wide range of other ethnographers and literary critics—including Julie Cruikshank, Dennis Tedlock, Jeannette Armstrong, Margery Fee, Gerald Vizenor, Hayden White, and the ubiquitous Bakhtin—to develop an interdisciplinary and border-crossing exploration of relationships between oral storytelling and written native literature. Her introduction, "Listening to Stories," uses an analysis of Harry Robinson's stories and conversations with Wendy Wickwire to build a theory of reading contemporary native literature cross-culturally as a continuation of an oral storytelling mode. Schorcht lays out the following questions, which systematically structure the book's four chapters:

What happens to our reading when Native literatures are read from within the context of ongoing indigenous oral narrative traditions? What happens if we read those traditions as already inherently novelistic? How do orally told stories connect with the process of writing? How do traditional stories found in novels explicitly connect past and present as aspects of contemporary Native reality? And, Wnally, how do Native authors maintain the dialogic Xuidity of oral storytelling performance in written forms like the novel?

(4-5)

Challenging a tendency to equate language and culture, Schorcht demonstrates that Robinson, King, Welch, and Silko use a "Native English" that must be contextualized within native cultural narratives and conceptual categories to be read cross-culturally.

One of the significant contributions of this book is its introduction to the stories and commentaries of bilingual Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson (1900-1990). Chapter 1, "Recreating the World Through Story," examines Robinson's ten-year collaboration with Wendy Wickwire, beginning in 1977, to record his stories, some of which were published in Write It on Your Heart (1989) and Nature Power (1992). According to Schorcht, these collections comprise the "Wrst comprehensive body of traditional Native stories where the storyteller has provided his own translations," as well as instructions on "how he wants us to think about Okanagan linguistic categories and cultural experience" (5, 3). Schorcht focuses on stories' "continuity as social process" to demonstrate how Robinson theorizes his world and experience through narrative (34). She makes the case that Robinson's story...