Storytelling Traditions and Written Collections used by Contemporary Native American Writers

Storytelling Traditions - Native American Writers

Contemporary Native American writers and theorists such as Gerald Vizenor are reviving and enhancing storytelling traditions through the use of written collections, including ethnographic, historical, and anthropological studies, originally compiled as part of a colonial enterprise. While, as he concedes, Native American often return to the printed page for access to the oral traditions of their own nations, storytelling traditions preserved in print cannot replace tribal oral traditions as a part of lived experience, but are useful as templates which model the ways of thought that have shaped and continue to shape Native knowledge systems. Gloria Anzaldua, and Leslie Marmon Silko can be best comprehended within this context of, as they participate in the postmodern project of writing metanarrative autobiographical fictions, calling our attention to the construction of meaning and the way oral and written histories have been, and continue to be, learned and transmitted through storytelling. With their mixed genre narratives, they present readers with more comprehensive versions of their cultural legacies, challenging genre and discourse conventions that have previously excluded minority voices. Specifically, they use multiple narrators, multiple genres, and shifts in time to present alternative versions of historical events, such as the role of Malintzin in the Spanish Conquest, and the post-colonization experience of the Laguna Pueblo Indian tribe. In doing so, they accomplish at once the autobiographical task of recording and presenting their life stories and the socio-cultural task of unpacking their bicultural national identities and patriarchal oppression of women. Indeed, both Anzaldua and Silko intentionally juxtaposes history, myth, and fiction to challenge a monolithic viewpoint-whether of family history or Native American history. Their doing so does not merely influence their narrative form through the its ultimate presentation as a mixed genre narrative but, significantly, seeks to preserve their traditional method of storytelling and, in so doing, impose their traditional narrative on postmodern literature - on the white man's literary genre.

Anzaldua introduces "the Mestiza Consciousness, " an inclusive concept at the core of her text (99), as the culmination of her revisionary mythmaking. Being born and raised in two contradictory cultures and attending value systems, la mestiza is "in a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word, meaning torn between ways" (100). In other words, "la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another, " resulting in "un choque. a cultural collision" (l00). Rather than continually clash against the dominant culture, Anzaldua suggests we drop the counterstance and instead embrace both perspectives at once as "a step towards liberation from cultural domination" (100). When she recommends that we "see through serpent and eagle eyes" and stand "on both shores at once, " she encourages Americans to embrace native and post-native cultures-on either side of the border. "The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions. a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures" (101). More importantly, Anzaldua's concept of mestiza consciousness is not merely a "happy pluralism, " or a convenient balancing of opposite (cultural) qualities, but rather includes a "third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts ... and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm" (101-2).

Anzaldua urges us to dissolve postcolonial dichotomies that results in sexist cultural practice. She demands the dissolution of this myth from the dominant culture that inherited it from the military state of the Aztecs upon Conquest, and from the men in her culture who learned it when post-Cortesian Catholicism locked it in place with the supposed fall of la Malinche. Not surprisingly, Anzaldua concludes her final chapter with a call to arms but storytelling, theorizing, and consciousness-raising are her only weapons-spiritual ones. Eventually, Gloria Anzaldua forgive with the selfless suggestion that Chicano/as forge alliances with whites (107).

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981) is another work that challenges Euro-American autobiography in form and content. Like Anzaldua, Silko is a bicultural American who purposely crosses genres in her text to recreate what Mary Louise Pratt has called a "contact zone"- a space "where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths" (Krumholz 89). A member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of several Keres tribes from the Laguna, New Mexico region, Silko's innovative collection of photographs, poems, family stories, and short fiction examines not only her own life, but restores her tribal history.

Linda Krumholz calls Sitko's autobiographical fiction "oral tradition in the written form, " noting the different genres are "woven together to create a self-reflexive text that examines the cyclical role of stories in recounting and generating meaning for individuals, communities, and nations" (88). While Silko writes about many themes common to other Native American literatures, such as land loss, reservation life, and tribal rituals-she privileges the role of storytelling. Like Anzaldua's, Silko's metanarrative focuses on the telling of stories as much as on the stories themselves. As many critics have noted, Silko occasionally comments in her text on the storytellers' style or way of speaking, revealing her preference for oral versus written storytelling. Long before Native Americans had access to publishing, they relied on oral narration, not only to teach the "old ways" within their tribe, but also to relate their post-colonization experiences from generation to generation. Bernard Hirsch hails Storyteller as a celebration of the oral tradition and the relationship between land, teller, and listener (4). Indeed, Silko relates both personal and fictional stories where storytelling triumphs over discrimination and oppression; it functions as a source of strength and survival for her family and her characters. Indeed, Krumholz suggests that her style simulates the way stories are told, responded to and revised, in the context of the Laguna community (89). Thus, Storyteller is very much about the blending of old and new forms in the ongoing creation of meaning.

Like Anzaldua, Silko defies the Western norm by opening her autobiography not with an account of her own birth or childhood, but with the voices of her female ancestors. The tribe defines her identity in the pages of Storyteller. Krupat esteems Storyteller as a significant contribution from "a new generation of Indians, educated in Western literate forms yet by no means acculturated to the point of abandoning the 'old ways'" (56). Silko claims national attention, Krupat says, "not from their relation to American religion, history or anthropology, but from their relation to American literature" (56).

In the final analysis, it needs to be emphasised that while Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is more theoretical than fictional, it is a good example of a postmodern autobiographical fictional storytelling since it comprises history, autobiography, fiction, myth, and poetry. Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller is similar in form, but notably different in (political) function. Like Anzaldua, her multi generic work expands the autobiographical genre from a non-Western standpoint. Silko privileges the oral tradition of Native American storytelling and thus includes many tribal storytellers to present her identity. Like Anzaldua, who affiliates herself consistently with the collective, Silko shares no concept of identity that is not integrated with tribal welfare.

Indeed, the politics of storytelling indicates a larger (positive) trend of authors challenging and revising American (literary) history. Postmodem fiction writers use cultural memory to redefine their identities from a communal perspective, where individual liberties are strongly tied to the progress and welfare of the "tribe." In the process of revising cultural myths, they also critique their communities' gender politics. While Silko holds the dominant culture responsible, Anzaldua also challenges her own postcolonial patriarchal cultures for perpetuating damaging gender roles that detract from the positive progress of the community. Indeed, they have created a new, autobiographical paradigm for upcoming writers to emulate, redefining their own identities, as well as our national identity, by promoting a communitarian, transnational model of citizenship for future generations of Americans to learn and respect.

References

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, 1999.

Hirsch, Bernard A. "The Telling Which Continues': Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller." American Indian Quarterly 12.1 (I 988): 1-26.

Krumholz, Linda J. "To understand this world differently': Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's `Storyteller.'" ARIEL (Jan 1994), 104-10.

Krupat, Arnold. "The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller." In Narrative Challenge: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico p, 1989. 55-68.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.