Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

7. Translation and Censorship of Native American Oral Literature

Translation and Censorship of Native American Oral Literature William M. Clements One decision confronting translators of orally performed American Indian verbal art concerns what to do with material that is regarded as questionable by one of the several persons who may figure into the process that begins with oral performance and ends with the publication of a written representation of that performance. The performer, the ethnographer who documents the performance, the translator, an editor, or a publisher may decide that a feature of a story or song should be withheld or transformed , usually to protect someone or something from moral or spiritual contamination. Under ideal conditions, the performer should not feel compelled to place any restraints on what he or she verbalizes, nor should anyone who contributes to the translation of the verbalization from oral performance and from an indigenous language into textualized English. But translation in the real world often involves censorship. While the very word censorship undoubtedly raises a red flag for most people, translators must face the reality that what their readers experience in print is often not what they would have experienced had they encountered the material in its usual performance situations because of decisions by someone to delete, expurgate, or simply ignore aspects of that material that he or she believes should not be available in their original form or content to a reading audience. The purpose here is not to condemn or support censorship per se but simply to acknowledge that it occurs and to describe some of the ways that those involved in the translation process have handled it and some of the factors that have occasioned it in the particular case of Native American oral literature. 168 The folklorist Richard M. Dorson, for example, used to tell a story about censorship to his beginning graduate students in folklore study. It seems that as a young folklore collector, recently returned from fieldwork in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Dorson had submitted several stories he had recorded from Ojibwe raconteurs to one of the folklore journals specializing in regional materials. At least one of these was a trickster narrative in which the impish Winabijou’s “balls” figured. The journal’s editor refused to publish the story unless Dorson would agree to change the referenced body part to “ears.” Some twenty-five years after he had withdrawn the material from the journal’s consideration, he chuckled over the benighted editor’s attempting to “castrate” the story. When we think of censoring Native American literature, what probably first occurs to many of us is the sort of situation related by Dorson: a prudish Euro-American—collector, editor, or publisher—who cannot deal with the forthright expressions of “Noble Savages” whose perceptions of body parts and functions have not been corrupted by exposure to the repressive institutions of Western civilization. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who notoriously suppressed material he considered indecent from the translated texts that he and his in-laws produced from Ojibwe oral traditions, may epitomize this practice. Schoolcraft became the federal government’s agent to the Ojibwes at Sault Ste. Marie in 1822. Influenced by his mentor Lewis Cass’s belief that such information had the practical value of helping to implement government Indian policy, Schoolcraft used his position as a basis for learning as much as possible about his charges’ way of life. This included recording and translating their stories and songs. An entry in his journal from early in his tenure (July 28, 1822) reveals his methodology : “My method is to interrogate all persons visiting the office, white and red, who promise to be useful subjects of information during the day, and to test my inquiries in the evening by reference to the Johnstons, who, being educated, and speaking at once both the English and the Ojibwa correctly, offer a higher and more reliable standard than usual” (1851:107). The Johnstons to whom Schoolcraft refers were a family who were to become his mixed-blood in-laws. In 1823 he married Jane Johnston, daughter of Irish fur trader John Johnston and granddaughter of Waubojeeg, a famous Ojibwe leader. Some of the censorship that eventually characterized Schoolcraft’s representations of Ojibwe verbal art may have come from the Johnstons, who undoubtedly recognized their future kinsman’s religiosity, which produced what his biographer has called his “somewhat Translation and Censorship of Oral Literature 169 170 Clements priggish village-bourgeois outlook” (Bremer 1982:46). Nevertheless...