- Glimpses of Oneida Life by Karin Michelson, Norma Kennedy, and Mercy Doxtator
This volume is a fascinating and masterful presentation of narratives compiled and analyzed by linguist Karin Michelson with Norma Kennedy and Mercy Doxtator, who have both taught the Oneida language at the Oneida Language and Cultural Center at the Oneida Nation of the Thames, located in southwestern Ontario, about thirty kilometers south of London. The stories were recorded by fourteen speakers, including Kennedy and Doxtator, some as early as 1980 and others as recently as 2008.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is Michelson’s brief introduction to the Oneida sound system and the orthography used in the transcriptions of the narratives. Part 2, the major section of the volume, is a collection of fifty-two stories presented in Oneida and English translation. Part 3 is a discussion of Oneida grammar, including the structure of words and clauses, of nearly one hundred pages—although, as Michelson explains, rather than being an exhaustive treatment of the language, it focuses on exemplifying the specific types of constructions that appear in the text collection, so that the reader can appreciate the complexity of the Oneida grammatical system as it appears in everyday speech. The volume ends with two appendices, the first listing all of the 160 particles occurring in the stories, some of which occur alone and others in various combinations. The second appendix contains three texts with full morphological analyses.
The stories in part 2 are topically arranged. Some recount features of everyday life and customs (“Pranks and Mishaps,” “Lessons,” “Customs”), others are personal experiences and remembrances (“More Favourite Memories,” “Growing Up and Working,” “Reflections”), and still others document folkloric traditions (“Lessons,” “Customs”). In addition, six stories in a section on “Language” tell of sometimes humorous misunderstandings arising from linguistic confusions between English and Oneida. For example, “Why Berries are Bellies in Oneida” (pp. 17–19) tells of two elderly ladies who went picking berries and were confronted by the hiring boss, who said to them, “I want to see your berries.” After hearing this, one of the ladies, who spoke a little bit of English, said to her friend “Geez, that white man is crazy, he wants to see our bellies.” The storyteller, Mercy Doxtator, explains that this misunderstanding occurred because the Oneida language does not contain the sound [r]; instead, any [r] is heard as [l].
Each section is instructively introduced by pointing out thematic elements and problems in translating specific Oneida words, verbal or nominal roots, or clausal constructions that appear in the stories in the section.
The stories in part 2 are presented in a two-line format in which the first line is a transcription in the established Oneida orthography, employing nine consonant symbols and six vowels (four oral vowels and two nasal ones); in addition, the orthography marks primary stress and vowel length. The second line presents a word-by-word gloss of the Oneida. Finally, at the bottom of each page, a connected English translation is presented, with sentences numbered to match the Oneida text.
The connected translations are deliberately not presented in polished English; rather, they retain the rhythm and structure of the Oneida clauses and sentences. Thus, as one reads the translations, one can almost hear the storytellers talk. It makes the narratives sound, as they surely did in the original, casual, relaxed, and very much alive and vibrant. For instance, the third sentence of the story “Why the Bat Travels at Night” [End Page 209] (in the section “Lessons”) appears in English as “So then it seems that the ones that fly were winning; then the bat, he went way around over [to their side], that’s where he joined in, he joined them [on the side] where they were winning” (p. 35).
A distinctive narrative style is evident in the stories in part 2. Most storytellers employ similar framing devices, beginning either with a greeting or some brief summary such as “This is...