The Truth About Stories (11 page)

This experiment in economic opportunity didn't last long. Three
weeks. Given the rate at which the workers were going broke, it probably wouldn't
have lasted much longer anyway, but halfway through the third week, a White mob from the
nearby town of Merced attacked the camp with the intention of burning it down. The
police held the mob off, and it contented itself with turning cars over and setting them
on fire. Louis and the rest of the men stayed inside the fence, armed with metal cot
legs and makeshift knives, waiting for the big fight.

But it never happened.

The mob eventually dispersed, and, in the morning, the workers came into
the yard to find the front gate wide
open, the supervisors and the
guard gone. No trucks came to pick them up that day, and, by afternoon, everyone began
the long walk home. For many, that walk was over three hundred miles, with little chance
of catching a ride with a passing motorist.

In
I Hear the Train
, Louis recalls that moment and wonders,
“[W]here are those fellows today, the ones I picked tomatoes and played basketball
and watched a mob with? Do they sit in midlife and wonder, as I do, whether it really
happened at all? Whether their memories, like mine, are warped and shadowed far beyond
reliability. Whether even trying to put such a thing into words is an absurd endeavor,
as if such things are best left to turn and drift in inarticulate memory like those
river pebbles that get worn more and more smooth over time until there are no
edges.”
³

Maybe this was the story Louis told himself as he sat in that airport
garage. A story about poor young men walking home alone. Maybe it was another. Whichever
one it was, for that instant Louis must have believed it.

Did you ever wonder how it is we imagine the world in the way we do, how
it is we imagine ourselves, if not through our stories. And in the English-speaking
world, nothing could be easier, for we are surrounded by stories, and we can trace these
stories back to other stories and from there back to the beginnings of language. For
these are our stories, the cornerstones of our culture.

You all know the names. Masculine names that grace the tables of contents
of the best anthologies, all neatly
arranged chronologically so we
can watch the march of literary progress. A cumulative exercise in the early years, it
has broadened its empire in the last few decades, sending scouting parties into new
territory to find new voices. These days, English literature anthologies contain the
works of women writers, Black writers, Hispanic writers, Asian writers, gay and lesbian
writers, and, believe it or not, a few Native writers.

All in the cause of culture, all in the service of literacy, which we
believe to be an essential skill. Indeed, the ability to read and write and keep records
is understood as one of the primary markers of an advanced civilization. One of my
professors at university argued that you could not have a “dependable”
literature without literacy, that the two went hand in hand.

I'm sure he would have been buoyed by Statistics Canada's
figures of Canadians' reading habits. According to the 1998 survey, which, so far
as I can tell, was compiled through information that Canadians volunteered,
approximately 80 percent of all Canadians from age fifteen on read newspapers, 71
percent read magazines, and 61 percent read books.

Not bad.

Out of the 80 percent who read newspapers, 49 percent read a daily, which
means that 39 percent of all Canadians read a daily newspaper.

I'm impressed.

Out of the 71 percent who read a magazine, 57 percent read at least one
magazine weekly, which means that 40 percent of all Canadians read at least one magazine
a week.

That's great.

And out of the 61 percent of all Canadians who read books, 31 percent read
at least a book a week, which means about 19 percent of all Canadians read at least a
book a week.

Fifty-two books a year.

Unless, of course, I've done the math wrong. Which is possible.

No doubt this includes students at high schools, colleges, and
universities, who are “encouraged” to read. Still, if you look at just the
self-confessed readers in the category of twenty-five-year-olds and older, you'll
find that the percentage stays exactly the same. Nineteen percent.

So how do they do that? Over four million Canadians reading a book a week,
each and every week of the year. Well, some are parents reading to their children. Some
are professionals who read for a living. Some are up at the cottage or on a beach
somewhere, away from television and the phone.

And the rest?

Well, maybe it's true. Or maybe we Canadians just like to think of
ourselves as more literate than we really are.

Not that it matters. What's curious is that there are no statistics
for oral literature.

When I raised this question at a scholarly conference once, I was told
that the reason we pay attention to written literature is that books are quantifiable,
whereas oral literature is not. How can you quantify something that has sound but no
physical form, a colleague wanted to
know, something that exists
only in the imagination of the storyteller, cultural ephemera that is always at the whim
of memory, something that needs to be written down to be … whole?

I understand the assumptions: first, that stories, in order to be
complete, must be written down, an easy error to make, an ethnocentric stumble that
imagines all literature in the Americas to have been oral, when in fact, pictographic
systems (petroglyphs, pictographs, and hieroglyphics) were used by a great many tribes
to commemorate events and to record stories, while in the valley of Mexico, the Aztecs
maintained a large library of written works that may well have been the rival of the
Royal Library at Alexandria. Written and oral. Side by side.

In the end, though, neither fared any better than the other. While
European diseases and conflicts with explorers and settlers led to the death and
displacement of a great many Native storytellers, superstitious Spanish priests, keen on
saving the Aztecs from themselves, burned the library at Tenochtitlán to the
ground, an event as devastating as Julius Caesar's destruction of the library at
Alexandria.

In each case, at Tenochtitlán and at Alexandria, stories were lost.
And, in the end, it didn't matter whether these stories were oral or written.

So much for dependability. So much for permanence.

Though it doesn't take a disaster to destroy a literature. If we
stopped telling the stories and reading the books, we would discover that neglect is as
powerful an agent as war and fire.

In 1980, through a series of mishaps and
happenstance, my nine-year-old son and I moved from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Lethbridge,
Alberta. The details of the move — divorce, unemployment, depression — are
too boring to explicate. The reason for the move, however, was simple. The University of
Lethbridge had offered me a job. I had been to Lethbridge before. A good friend of mine,
Leroy Little Bear, had brought me up as a speaker for Indian Days at the university. So
I had seen the lay of the land. As it were.

And it was flat.

Flat, dry, windy, dusty. Nothing like the Northern California coast that I
loved. And the last place on earth I wanted to work. But when you don't have a
job, something always looks better than nothing.

So we moved. I bought an old step-side pickup from a government auction,
packed everything I owned in the back, strapped my son into the passenger's seat,
and headed north.

Just before we got to Sweetgrass and the border between Alberta and
Montana, heavy rain turned into heavy hail, and we had to make a run for a freeway
overpass. There, under the concrete canopy along with several other cars and trucks, we
waited out the storm.

Which wasn't about to give up easily. The hail picked up pace,
turning the road in front of us into a skating rink, and my son, who even at nine was
not one to put sugar on sorrow, turned to me and said, “Just so we keep it
straight, Dad, this was your idea.”

The second assumption about written literature is
that it has an inherent sophistication that oral literature lacks, that oral literature
is a primitive form of written literature, a precursor to written literature, and as we
move from the cave to the condo, we slough off the oral and leave it behind.

Like an old skin.

The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, in his novel
House Made of
Dawn
, touches on the written and the oral, on the cultural understandings of
language and literature. The White man, Momaday argues, takes “such things as
words and literatures for granted … for nothing in his world is so commonplace. .
. . He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language … as an instrument of
creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish
by the Word.”

But of his Kiowa grandmother, who could neither read nor write and whose
use of language was confined to speech, Momaday says that “her regard for words
was always keen in proportion as she depended upon them … for her words were
medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning.
They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold. And she never threw words
away.”
⁴

Perhaps it was this quality of medicine and magic that sent nineteenth-
and twentieth-century anthropologists and ethnographers west to collect and translate
Native stories, thereby “preserving” Native oral literature before it was
lost. As a result of these efforts, an impressive body of oral stories is now stored in
periodicals and books that
one can find at any good research
library.

Not that anyone reads them. But they are safe and sound. As it were.

At the same time that social scientists were busy preserving Native oral
culture, Native people were beginning to write. Depending on how far you want to stretch
the definition of literature, you can begin in the late eighteenth century with Samson
Occum, who collected hymns and spirituals, or you can wait until the nineteenth century
and begin with George Copway's autobiography or Alice Callahan's novel or E.
Pauline Johnson's poetry.

I'm tempted to say the names of all of the early Native writers
aloud, though such a long and comprehensive list would probably put everybody to sleep.
Still, such a name-dropping exercise might impress you and make me look scholarly and
learned.

And truth be told, I can live with that.

Perhaps I could frame such a bibliography as a eulogy to remind myself of
where stories come from, a chance to remember that I stand in a circle of storytellers,
most of whom will never be published, who have only their imaginations and their
voices.

That sounds rather romantic, doesn't it. Circles of storytellers.
Oral voices in the night. You can almost hear the violins.

I mean the drums.

The point I wanted to make was that the advent of Native written
literature did not, in any way, mark the passing of Native oral literature. In fact,
they occupy
the same space, the same time. And, if you know where
to stand, you can hear the two of them talking to each other.

Robert Alexie's
Porcupines
and
China
Dolls
, for instance, and Harry Robinson's
Write It On Your
Heart
, along with Ruby Slipperjack's
Honour the Sun
and Eden
Robinson's
Monkey Beach
. A novel, a collection of stories, and two more
novels. Canadians all. Though the border doesn't mean that much to the majority of
Native people in either country. It is, after all, a figment of someone else's
imagination.

But I'll start this discussion of literature with an American
example. Partly because I have to, and partly because I have a perverse streak and, at
times, would rather annoy than placate.

So, the first thing to say about the advent of the modern period in Native
written literature is that it begins with the publication of N. Scott Momaday's
1968 novel
House Made of Dawn
, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. But what
makes the novel special and what allows us to use it as a starting point are the
questions that it raises and its concern with narrative strategies. As well as what it
avoids.

With the long and problematic history that Native people have had with
Europeans in North America, it would be reasonable to expect that, when Native writers
took to the novel, they would go to the past for setting in order to argue against the
rather lopsided and ethnocentric view of Indians that novelists and historians had
created.

James Fenimore Cooper, for instance.

Cooper, whose sympathies lay with the wealthy,
landowner class of nineteenth-century America, had a somewhat romantic view of Indians
that saw them either as noble or savage. Noble Indians helped Whites and died for their
trouble. Savage Indians hindered Whites and died for their trouble. A rather simplistic
division. But Cooper took the matter further. What is it, Cooper asked himself, that
makes Indians different from Whites? Why is it that Indians and Whites can never come
together?

His answer was gifts. Indian gifts. And White gifts.

In
The Deerslayer
, the first (chronologically, that is) of the
five Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper's protagonist, Natty Bumppo, a.k.a. Deerslayer,
later to be known as Hawkeye, gets into a running philosophical discussion with Henry
March, a boorish frontiersman, on the matter of race.

“Now skin makes the man,” March tells Deerslayer. “This
is reason — else how are people to judge each other? The skin is put on, over all,
in order that when a creature or a mortal is fairly seen, you may know at once what to
make of him.”
⁵