Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers: A Bilingual Anthology by Andrew Cowell, Alonzo Moss, Sr.,William J. C’Hair (review)

A masterpiece, this book is a worthy companion to the volume of spoken Arapaho texts (Cowell and Moss 2005) and the reference grammar (Cowell and Moss 2008) that precede it. In recovering a substantial body of texts recorded in writing between 1893 and 1928 and establishing the identity of every word along with their subtle and complex prefixes and endings, it makes these priceless texts available in the standard orthography that the three editors have been pioneering and with scholarly annotations rarely seen in this depth and breadth. It is a work of stupendous erudition and dedication.

It also stands out by complementing the prose texts that account for the vast majority of all text editions in the indigenous languages of North America with a substantial number of song texts. For most languages, published song texts are few in number, no doubt because songs are notoriously difficult to transcribe, edit, interpret, and translate. In Plains Cree, for instance, the published corpus (setting aside Skinner’s fragments from the Qu’Appelle Valley [1914:522, 537], the occasional phrase in liner notes, and the like) consists of three songs recorded by Leonard Bloomfield in 1925 (1934: 22–23), a baker’s dozen also recorded at Sweet-Grass a few years later by David G. Mandelbaum (1940:289–90), and two modern songs with texts in Cree presented by Arden C. Ogg (1988).

The overwhelming majority of the prose texts in this volume were reduced to writing by A. L. Kroeber (almost three-quarters of the texts), mostly in 1899, and by Truman Michelson (about one-fifth) between 1910 and 1928; it seems odd that neither name appears on the title page. Four texts recorded in 1893 represent the manuscripts of Albert Gatschet. The texts tend to be brief, though a few of the “Legends” and one of the “Trickster Tales” come to nine or ten pages apiece, and the “Legends” also include two longer texts, one recorded by Michelson (twenty-one pages) and the other by Kroeber (forty-four pages). The page design is generous; perhaps as a result of the dictation process, many of the sentences, too, are quite short. Taken together, the prose texts amount to roughly half the book.

The 101 song texts present a similar picture: the largest set by far is the full collection of seventy-three Ghost Dance Songs published in 1896 by James Mooney. Another set of twelve Ghost Dance Songs and seven others, including three “Love Songs,” are taken from the unpublished manuscripts of Albert Gatschet, dating from the period between 1880 and 1893. The pioneering ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis (Burlin) is represented by seven songs she published in 1907, and the photographer Edward S. Curtis by two published in 1911. As with the prose texts, the recorders of the song texts might have been included on the title page (perhaps as “Mooney et al.”). While the individual song texts are quite short, their presentation and interpretation take up more than a tenth of the book.

The biographical sketches of the original performers (pp. 6–13) and the scholars who recorded their prose texts and songs (pp. 13–16) are an especially valuable part of this work. The editors’ own contributions to the study of Arapaho language and literature (and, of course, culture in the widest sense), though foundational, are not discussed; in part, they are documented in the bibliography. Brief biographies of the two Arapaho-speaking members of the team, Moss and C’Hair, are given in the introduction (pp. 5–6), while Cowell remains silent about his other life as a student of medieval French language and literature and the author of two books in this field: At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins and Bodies in the Middle Ages (1999) and, more recently, The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred (2007), a literary...