Oral tradition is essentially inclusive.
◊ It is 'the actions, behavior, relationships, practices throughout the whole social, economic, and spiritual life process of people' (Ortiz). If a Native author draws upon oral tradition, they are invoking inevitably a tradition to which individualized notions of authorship are foreign.
◊ Oral traditions involve more than just what is spoken, they are a living dynamic practice that includes an interactive and spiritual relationship to specific places that is expressed and perpetuated through forms of ritual and ceremony with the power both to heal and cause harm.
◊ Integral to this is a reverence for the fundamental creative and transformative power of language, symbol, and thought. Correspondingly significant is reverence for the power of silence: silence, in a sense, as the climate for the performative act of expressing language.
◊ Performance is at the core of the oral tradition; therefore the meaning of a linguistic expression is not created just by the linguistic expression on its own. Contemporary writers whose works are informed by their respective oral traditions produce work that is at heart a conversation. Often there is a close relationship between the work, the writer, and a traditional community and the reader must conversively interact with the world of the story told (Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez).
◊ Storytelling in the oral tradition establishes a dialectical relationship between 'text and interpretation,' something that unites Native American literature with postmodernism (Alan Velie, Gerald Vizenor). This dialectical relationship stimulates epistemological reconsideration and powerful imaginative engagement with the processes of textual creation.



Oral Literature of the Alaskan Arctic

In many respects, the oral literatures of Alaskan Yupik and Inupiaq peoples are thematically and structurally varied, yet the range of variatio is consistent. Alaskan traditions are clearly related to the verbal art of Inuit peoples in Canada, Greenland, and Siberia, and many elements are also shared with other Native North American groups. The following concentrates on features of genre, performance, transmission, function, and content specific to Alaskan Inuit oral tradition.

Native (narration) genre distinctions: (these distinctions relative, stories often classified ambiguously)
1) Unipkaaq/quliraq, "legends" - consists of narratives considered to be of great antiquity and importance. Traditional tales which are not ultimately attributable to any known storyteller, and which include stock characters, rather than named persons who are known to have existed.
§ Etiological stories - detailing origins of celestial and geographic features, human customs and ceremonies, and animal characteristics
§ Accounts of the legendary exploits of culture heroes
§ Ancieent tales of animals in their human forms and of human/animal transformations
2) Quliaqtuaq (Inupiaq)/quanemciq (Central Yupik), "stories of people with names"/"accounts" - narratives which are considerede to be more recent. These may describe events in the lives of known (extant or deceased) individuals, and are thought to be attributable to a particular person, a source who may or may not be known to the storyteller.
§ Ranging from memorates - e.g. Encounters with ghosts and other supernatural beings
§ To ethnohistories of such events as interregional warfare or early contacts with Europeans.
-msuk - "something newer" or "less important"

More specialized forms: defined primarily by form and mode of performance
1) Short stories - in which characters compete through ritualized insults songs
2) Illustrated tales
3) String figure stories - variously restricted
4) Formulaic rhymes
5) Finger plays for children
e.g. Storyknife tales - told only by women and consist of simultaneous narration and illustration with stylized symbols etched in mud or snow. Illustrations of house plans.

Narration:
w Ownership and performance rights: anything lcuky enough to cath a story may tell it. Customarily storytellers, however, defer formally and politely to each other's expertise, and actively request additions or corrections to their tellings. Lack of specific story ownreship.
w The setting and focus of narrative performances might vary depending upon the age and gender of the narrators and audience, the season, and the narrative genre. In winter much time spent in the ceremonial house. Here elders told stories, both for entertainment and to teach their juniors the rules of proper behavior when traveling, hunting, courting, and pursuing other activities. These rules were codified in aphorisms, prescriptions, and injunctions, which were repeated frequently so that youth would absorb and be able to recall them when the appropriate situation arrives.
w Form and content distinctions associated with different oral genres. Narratives do not include lengthy geneologies of either characters or narrators, although the storyteller often briefly credits their source and that person's relationship to them. In some narratives (quliaqtuaq) story's location is immediately specified, by placename and in relation to identifiable geographical features (they also quickly identify named characters); others (unipkaaq) begin with generalized locations. In stories accounting for animal characteristics or natural features, it is common for the narrator to corroborate the story with their own observations.
w Because of the structure of Eskimo languages, which incorporate tense, case, and person in postbases and endings such that words commonly end in the same sequence of syllables, rhyme is not important to song or story structure, although rhythm is.
w War and revenge stories (the story is construccted around a variable number of incidents following the warrior's trail) - describe the agony of a tortured family member and the justice wrought by their relatives, the destruction of cillages that leaves only one survivor, or the shrewd and/or magical menas by which people manage to escape death. The effect is of a series of intimate and personal vignettes - violence and revenge as experiences by members of a scattered band society. There is no epic glorification of conquest.


Oral literature of the Subarctic Athapaskans

About 23 Northern Athapaskan languages are spoken by different tribal groups in the western subarctic (Alaska, the Yukon territories, northern British Columbia, the Northwest territories, and northern Alberta). Related to other of the Athapaskan family which are spoken on the American Pacific Coast and in the American Southwest.

Typical genres, performances, and functions:
w Three principal genres of traditional Northern Athapaskan oral literature:
1) Mythic accounts of "Distant Time".
• Stories about the first three of five eras distinguished more or less explicitly by subartic Athapaskans. The chronology is distant time; an era dominated by a great flood; an ambiguous period of recreation and great transformation by culture heroes; a period of distant history or legend; an era of recent history and personal narrative. During the first of these, the mythical universe was dominated by anthropomorphic animals existing much like humans of the modern world - humans possessed of all the psychological trais of human agents, as well as language, culture, and a kin-based social ortganization. The boundary between animals and humans is often blurred, and spiritual power, transformation, and transfiguration were common events.
• Raven is generally creator, transformed, and trickster. The floot marked the end of the first world and the beginnign of a second one. Human linguistic and cultural diversity began to develop. A great traveler, hunter, and transformer emerged as a culture hero, who transformed many Distant Time places and animals into their modern forms.
• Share with other genres certain types of themes and events. Some of these features are almost as likely to be associated with historical or personal narratives as with accounts of the mythological world. Principoles of kinship and marriage are fundamentally important to the organization of social life in all of the world.
• Four other elements common to various subartic Athapaskan genres: the existence of multiple worlds; journeys to and from these world; the ever-present threat of starvation; the imperatives of both self-reliance and mutual support for survival.
• Accounted for the origins of everything in the subarctic universe. They explained the significant characteristics of plants, animals, and the natural landscape and they specified and justified appropriate human behaviour - establishing a code of ethical conduct.
2) Historical narratives focusing on such remarkable events as feuding or raiding between groups, the arrival of whitemen, and the discovery of gold or oil
3) Personal narratives.
Other traditional genres include riddles, songs, prayers, and stories of bushmen or bogeymen, powerful human-like creatures occupying the forests and behaving in asocial ways.
w All genres of oral literature were performed in both informal and formal situations. Distant Time stories, riddles, songs, and prayers were intrinsic parts of "shamanistic" practices, feasts, dances, and gambling.
w Oral literature was used to entertain and educate. (Distant Time stories). Historical and personal narratives as well as bushman stories, frequently displayed the appropriate behavior or misguided acations of characters, along with the advantages of the former and the negative consequences of the latter.


Northwest Coast and the Plateau

Genres:
w Native languages of the area rarely distinguish more than two varieties, lumbing everything else together.
1) Myth - specific name refers to those legends that explain, and hence validate, the history (often legendary) of a family along with its crests and rights.
2) Traditional story
w All other types besides stories of the myth age are called by a word based on forms meaning "tell, narrate". Several distinct types of narrative. Tales of traditional nature, often with anthropomorphic animal acotrs, that take palce somewhere between the myth age and historic times. Biblical stories and European folktales and fables are easily adapted to this type of story. Also contemporary stories which may be based on actual incidents. These may or may not be rendered using the formal apparatus of myths and tales.
w Literature in a broad sense. Songs of various types, some occurred as parts of myths, and spirit power songs, love songs, and gamblings songs were popular. Speeches and prayers can also be seen as distinct categories. Aphorisms and adages. Sasquatch story - concerned with whether or not such creatures really exist, and actual stories or anecdotes about them appear only sporadically.

Cosmogony and myth roles:
w Mythologies don't always include creation stories, and the preexistence of a world is often assumed. It is an imperfect world, full of animals and physical objects with human characteristics and ogres of many varieties. Where humans are present, they are ill-formed and deficient in essential knowledge. That has to be fixed, the people have to be taught to b ehave correctly, ogres have to be killed, various foods provided, the sun and moon established, day and season lengths set, and numerous other matters arranged before it is time for the transition to the present world. This because everything has to be gotten ready for modern man.
w On the north coast it is often Raven who does much of the changing and is combined trickster-transformer, on the Plateau and Willamette Valley it is Coyote. In the latter to regions it is difficult to assigns roles like "transformer" and "trickster" since characters may be both. A sort of culture hero is present who is a kind of a man, certainly not an animal nor a deity.
w Other characters in myths come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. All act like people, albeit people with special characteristics. Animal characters who may have special myth names.

Setting and function:
w Non-myth lit could be performed at any time or as occasion demanded, although myth performance was traditionally restricted to the winter. Widely believed that it would be unlucky to tell only part of a story.
w On the northern part of the coast, where myths validates family crests and histories, they wre told primarily as part of winter ceremonials and at potlatcher. Farther south and on the Plateau,an elder might tlel myths to a group of children at night. Audiences were expected to respond with a traditional word from time to time to indicate continued attention.
w Stories were told for several reasons. Portrayal of family histories, other myths were related for their educational value, since lessons on social norms and expectations were interjected into stories, and good or bad behavior by myth characters served as a model for children. Various bits of explanation, true or fanciful, occur frequently in stories, educating audiences on the origin of some animal characteristic, geographical formation, or the like. Entertainment - filled with suspense and rollicking, often ribald humor.

Form and style:
w Charcteristic of the area (Jacobs):
1) The telling of myths and tales has been likened to a dramatic performance, "play structure.
2) Myth and tale introduction
3) Closings
4) Pattern numbers
5) Terse indications of distance, location, and time
6) Cirtual lack of reference to environment, feelings or personal traits
7) Audience behavior and response words
8) Humor
9) Laconic style
10) The use of titles of myths and tales.
w Myth performance has systematic structure at many levels. Number of stanzas, verses, scenes, or acts within a larger unit is not random or arbitrary, but usually accords with whatever pattern number is dominant in a society (for example 4 and 5).



California and the Intermountain Region

Genres of narrative:
w Myth - action occurs before tha human species existed. The characters of a prehuman race which may be called the "First People". Most of them have at least some human characteristics, but are thought of as the prototypes of the corresponding present-day animal species. Prehuman era - "when the animals were people". Among certain tribes, the plots of many myths move toward the point when First People ordian some great change: for example, salmon are released into the river, or death is instituted. Thereupon, the First People are transformed into animals, and human beings come sponteneously into existence.
w Tale - the main actors are human beings who lived long ago. May involve magical or supernatural beings and happenings.
w Also public speeches and prayers by chiefs. Aphorisms.

Cosmogony and religion:
w Northwestern California notable for lackin gmyths of the origin of the world, and in ascribing the human species to spontaneous generation. Elsewhre, the world and the First People are said to have come into existence through the will of a creator.
w Myths describe how the necessary elements of human life, such as fire and acorns, were provided by the First People.

Typical roles and plots:
▪ Coyote not as a deity who created the world, or as a culture hero, but as the bricoleur responsible for The Way Things Are; prototypical trickster, magically powerful, but gluttonous, lecherous, dishonest, and clownish.
▪ A noble or heroic character who kills monsters and makes the world fit to live in.


Southwest

Traditionally centered on what are now the states of Arizona and New Mexico, with fringes extending into the surrounding US as well as into the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico.

Genres and styles:
▪ Speech: ordinary talk, prayer, narrative.
▪ Narrative, story: myth, historical tale, saga, gossip.
▪ Myth - the origin story everywhere is the myth of emergence, which describes how the ancestors of the present population emerged onto the earth's surface from within the earth. Usually coupled with a migration seuel, in which the mergent population travels over the earth surface until they discover the most suitable locale for their habitaion. Two components: 1) during the course of the migraiton, events happen which account for the origins of many elements of social organization or economy or religions. 2) the adventures of culture heroes are often narrated as part of this migration or, if narrated separately, are said nevertheless to have occurred during this time period.

Folktales:
▪ These stories are told as "hearsay", a status communicated by the recurrent use of a reportative particle, "it seems", "they say".
▪ Man-animal marriages, transformations, and cohabitations. These stories account for hunting rituals still practiced today by describing the close relations thta formerly existed between human persons and animal persons, who understood each other's thoughts and language and who altered their physical forms by putting skins on and off as easily as changing shirt.
▪ Stories that involve human beings with ogres and other creatures. These appear to be stories which have been spun out of reflection upon the social order and the institutions within society. By putting individuals in unusual situations - abandoned children, girls as hunters, and the like - these stories offer the opportunity to reflect upon the efficacy of the present social structure.
▪ Animal tales, including those featuring the Trickster figure. The Trickster is a creature dominated by appetites which frequently bring about hiw downfall.


Plains Indians

Most consistently classified as Plains rather than Prairie or Platea: the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux.


Northeastern Algonquians and the Northern Iroquoians

Northeastern Algonquian refers to Algonquian-speaking peoples in the Atlantic province of Canada and the New England states. Literature in this area differs somewhat from those of other Algonquian groups to the north and west such as the Cree and Ojibwa.

Some of the elements in the mythologies have a wider distribution in North America or even beyond: the themes of the earth diver, the rival twins, the overworld thunderer vs. the underworld serpent, and the magic flight.

The Northeastern Alonguians:
▪ Myths - seen as true accounts of events occuring in the earliest times when the earth and the anials received their forms. Distinguished from shorter tales - recited for amusement or to teach a moral lesson. Generally conceived as fiction. Both are distinguished from traditional histories which recount relatively recent events.
▪ Mythologies are dominated by Transformers, who converted the primal earth and its creatures into their historical forms, and Trickters, who were involved in numerous escapades, either with or without a moral purpose. Some (e.g. Cree, Ojibwa) combine these antithetical personalities in one figure. Wabanaki groups - resolve the psychological contradiction of an all-owerful culture hero and a blunderin buffoon by separating them into a culture hero Transformer and a host of animal Tricksters.
▪ 'wigwam tales' - Wabanaki, shorter narratives which revolve around the exploits of Tricksters and the adventures of animals. Frequently humorous, usually regarded as fiction, may have an immediate moral purpose or serve to explain how an animal came by its appearance or characteristic habits. The style and setting of these tales was informal, and there was considerable performance variation among narrators.
▪ Ceremonial performance: Algonquian groups (Ojibwa, Sac, For, Menominee) - medicinee societies; Northern Iroquoians - complex calendrical ceremonialism and well-developed traditions of political oratory. Wabanaki ceremonies - largerly a matter of song and dance

The Northeastern Iroquoians:
▪ The category of narrative can be distinguished from ceremonial speaking of grounds of setting, participation, occasion, and style. The tradition of story narration survives on all Iroquois reservations, although content of the tale shas shifted to some extent away from traditional to more contemprary themes over the 100-year period they have been instensively collected.
▪ The traditional setting for story and myth narration was the longhouse during winter nights. The narrator began by smokng a pipe or burning tobacco at the hearth fire, ritual acts of cleansing the self, and preparing a communicative path to the overworld.
▪ Myths were regarded as being true explanations of the origins of natural phenomena and social institutions. Shorter myths account for the origina of the extraterrestial 'man-beings' the Pleiades, Orion's elt, Thunderer, Sun, Moon, Wind, Morning Star; or detail of the supernaturals Flying Head, Horned Serpent, Dew Eagle, and Blue Panther. A good part of Huron mythology is concerned with powerful oki, either benevolent spirits contained in some animals, plants, and people, or malevolent spirits contianed in witches and monsters.
▪ Second set of narratives which they regard as pure fiction. These usually involve human foibles and being with an opening forumal such as 'It is as if a man walked'. Also the category of narrative history (not as well developed). Ceremonial speaking.

The Southeast

Genres: Determining genres difficult.
▪ Speck: Sacred one and 'commonplace' class. In the latter included Trickster stories and animal stories, although not a clear distinction.
▪ Myths - deal with events of the primal time or have overtones of culture heroes, power people, etc. The historical legend of great events in recent times.

Beliefs and plots:
▪ As myths, the narrative normally enshrine beliefs about the structure of the cosmos, the nature of its inhabitans, and the customs and traditions of the particular people whose story they are.
▪ The ancient earth diver motif is the creation theme, with the resulting image of the earth as an island floating on the sea and covered over with a solid dome supporting the sky world, a world which can e reached by leaping to the other sid eof the dome at its edge, then climbing into the celestial plane. Birds, as representatives of religious powers (sun, thunderstorms, wind, planets) and as inhabitans of the upper world are important acots in the basic myths.
▪ Agricultural rooting is well manifested. Most of the importatn food and medicine plants are mentioned in the myths, with many of them given a firm origin in etiological or culture-hero legends.
▪ Accompanying the subsistence lore is the usual body of cultural information, from the details of rites to the architecture of the towns - lodges, square grounds, ball play grounds, and pole. The details of dialy life are part of the very weave of the stories.
▪ The identity of the culture hero changed from text to text, even among the same people. No single character stands out, but it seems impossible to know whether that is a loss from the lore or stems from the original belief system.