Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language by Nimachia Howe (review)

The young Blackfoot scholar Nimachia Howe, curator and archivist in Montana, has published a remarkable study about the stories of the Blackfoot trickster Naapi. The language referred to in her title is, of course, Blackfoot, or Siksika as it is called by its speakers. (The nickname Blackfoot or Blackfeet supposedly comes from the fact that their moccasins were often black because they would walk in places where fires had burned the prairie grass.) “Language” here can probably also be interpreted metaphorically.

According to the biographical blurb on the back cover, the author is “an Indigenous philosopher and educator who specializes in environmental philosophy and landscape literature.” With the word “language” in the title, a linguist would hope to get a linguistic analysis as well.

The book is an intellectual tour de force. The author has studied all the available printed sources of trickster stories of the Blackfoot, and also manuscripts, as well as the analyses of them by indigenous and nonindigenous observers—scholars, missionaries, tribal leaders, and short-term visitors. The book is written in a decorative style, intellectual yet intelligible, accessible yet flowery. Her writing style is amazing, and her choice of vocabulary wide-ranging. I read her book with interest, pleasure, and awe for her broad knowledge and intelligent observations. As a linguist, however, I was somewhat disappointed.

The four chapters of the book are rather abstract. The author states that the text was intended to be an introduction to an anthology of Blackfoot trickster stories. If one does not know the genre of trickster stories, I would recommend that readers start with the six-page appendix, which contains five brief trickster stories: Naapi flees his enemies, and changes himself into a rock that can still be seen; Naapi meets a woman, he ties a bell to her dress, and she helps him shoot bison, but later she discovers that he has no eyes; Naapi, when rejected by women, turns into a lone pine tree. Many of the stories are connected to certain locations, such as a place near Red Deer River where Naapi slid down a hill with his toboggan.

One of the storytellers said, “Napioa [Naapi] is the Secondary Creator of the Indians. There are two kinds of stories told concerning him. One class reveals him in the character of a good man, and the other class as a bad man. He is not, however, a man, but a supernatural being, able to perform deeds which no human could perform” (p. 135).

The first chapter deals with the language background as well as the semiotic background; the author connects the Blackfoot language with Plains Indian Sign Language and the meanings of animal tracks as signs. The second chapter deals with the name of the trickster, including the loss of a final syllable through time (as above: Napioa to Naapi). Chapter 3 deals with traditional and untraditional interpretations of Naapi stories, and chapter 4 provides a new view of the stories.

Reading the book, one gets the impression that the author is privileged as an indigenous person, in that she better understands the deeper background of the trickster stories than an outsider would. She criticizes several approaches, and proposes her own complex analysis of the wider meaning of the stories. She has one foot in indigenous philosophy, but she also has a good grasp of modern Western, perhaps also postmodern, science. On the one hand, she links the Naapi stories to similar narrations in other North American Indian traditions, most often of the Algonquian groups.

A reader who does not know anything about the Blackfoot language, or Algonquian languages, or the diversity of languages of the world, will find that the remarks about Blackfoot in this book provide a very exotic image of the language. For a typologist, however, the exotic traits constitute just another solution among the range of structural and grammatical choices: special, yes, but far from unique. Blackfoot is...