The Oneida Creation Story, and: Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller, and: American Indians: Folk Tales and Legends, and: Native American Legends of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley (review)

These four works include two extremely important contributions to Native American tales as folk literature. The late Floyd Lounsbury and an able student, Bryan Gick, rescued and now have put into print, in Oneida and English, a version of the "Oneida Creation Story" as told by two of the last fluent speakers of that language. While working in Ontario in 1971, Lounsbury tape-recorded a recitation of this tale by the 96-year-old Demus Elm. Since that tape was made, "a large segment of the beginning of the tape was lost" (p. 2). Fortunately Gick was able to recover the lost segments from Harvey Antone, "one of the last few fluent speakers of Oneida" (p. 3) who also knew this story. This major study of a specific and essential Oneida text, including numerous aspects of linguistic analysis, includes references to the forty earlier translated versions of various Iroquoian creation stories (see Thomas S. Alber, "Dendrogram and Celestial Tree: Numerical Taxonomy and Variants of the Iroquoian Creation Myth," Canadian Journal of Native Studies 7:195-221, 1987). Lounsbury and Gick contribute to this published corpus with this narration and also include an appendix that includes two previously unpublished versions of the story. Both of these shorter versions had been written in English. Also, note that Katharine Judson was the transcriber of the earlier of these two accounts (see below). Judson's middle initial is incorrectly listed, but that is the only error that I noted in this splendid and important volume.

The monograph also includes an important discussion by Anthony Wonderly. His review of the cultural and historical contexts of the many versions of this story provides essential background material as well as information regarding centuries of social change among the Oneida. Wonderly's essential observation regarding the "fundamental shift in plot [that] becomes apparent during the very early 1800s" (p. 8) is of particular value in understanding the transformation of Oneida society at that time. Wonderly's chapter provides information critical to the text as well as important in understanding the process of evolution, or change, which is normal in all folk narratives. Moreover, this change parallels changes in other aspects of Oneida society taking place at the same time (see Marshall Joseph Becker, "A Wampum Belt Chronology: Origins to Modern Times," Northeast Anthropology 63:49-70, 2002). Considering the rapid pace of cultural change in recent years, the editors might have been more clear in pointing out whether the intact portion of the Elm tale and the overlapping portion of the Antone version of the story—recorded over twenty years later—differ other than in the minor ways suggested by a few of the translators' notes.

Chapter 3 consists of the relatively short text of the combined Elm-Antone version of the Oneida creation story together with its English translation. The presentation is carefully designed to facilitate study. The final three chapters are lexicons reflecting the careful linguistic analysis. Together these data provide a tour de force covering all aspects of a single, important Native American narrative. This volume sets the standard for research of this type, and the University of Nebraska Press is to be commended for their work with this book and the...