American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"TRANS-" "TO THE OTHER SIDE OF, OVER, ACROSS" Crossings: every " word " translates the world we live into the world we know. When the proc ess of language works, our known world comes alive in word s, animate and experiential. Among other plastic forms of human expression (music, dance, costume, drama, sculpture, painting), words embody reality: -through metaphor to re concile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent ! -"A Sort of a Song," Williams, Selected Poems. When more than one language and culture and space/time lies at either end of this metamorphic and multiple process, the trans lator must look two ways at once: to carryover, as much as po ssible, the experiential integrity of the original, and to regenerate the spirit of the source in a new verbal performance. Two languages and artists orbit at the beginning and end, neither simultaneous nor identical, but reciprocal - and recipient to differing audiences. When the tribal ear listens ceremonially at one end of this continuum, and the existential eye scans the printed page at the other end, questions of form and function, how and why one uses language, the designs of literature, naturally come into play. "Firmly planted. Not fallen from on high: sprung up from below," Octavia Paz, the Mexican poet, says In Praise of Hands. The voiced Word, like the handmade object, the right-told tale, the well-shaped poem, speaks of "a mutually shared physical life," not as icon, commodity, or art for its own precious sake. "A glass jug, a wicker basket, a coarse muslin huipil, a wooden serving dish: beautiful objects, not despite their usefulness but because of it."

INTRODUCTION Like many native groups of western North American, the Karok of Northwestern California believed that the earth had once been inhabited by a pre-human race - the ikxareeyavs, translatable as "First People." Their myths describe the adventures, the loves, and the misfortunes of these people during a period of time which ends with the spontaneous emergence of the human species. At that point, the First People are transformed into animals, plants, inanimate objects, or intangible spirits-often after an announcement that, "When human beings come, they will live in such-and-such a way." The most famous of the First People is Coyote, who appears in many myths and plays the same paradoxical (but all-too-human) combination of roles as he does in the literature of other tribes: lawgiver and hero, but also trickster, buffoon, and dupe. Karok myths are told in different ways by different individuals -and, indeed, in slightly different ways even by single individuals. A narration which is told as a complete myth by one person may be only an episode in a longer myth told by another person. Nevertheless, some of the best-known Karok stories deal with a famous journey, in which Coyote travels from the "Center of the Earth" far to the north, upriver to Klamath Falls, to seek shell-money-but fails, floats (or is chased) downstream, all the way to the river-mouth at Requa, but finally "hitch-hikes" back to his home at Panamniik (modern Orleans). It is tempting, from our European viewpoint, to hypothesize an "original" or "complete" or "correct" version of Coyote's Journey; but such a concept is probably meaningless in a preliterate (and, furthermore, highly individualistic) society like that of the Karok. It is more likely that episodes have been combined, detached, or modified by individual story-tellers over a period of many centuries. I should emphasize, then, that the arrangement of incidents into the single narrative which appears below is my doing; I do not know that any Karok narrator ever put elements together in exactly this way. My motive is to offer a sample of Coyote's adventures, translated in a style which aims to preserve as much as possible of Karok literary structure, while still being accessible to English-speaking readers.

The Boruca Indians, one of eight small remaining tribes in Costa Rica, inhabit a reserve in the southwestern part of that country. Despite the reserve's legal measurements of 31,938 hectares, it is estimated that at present the Borucas have only about 5000 hectares because of incursions from outsiders. (La Nacion, 14 Feb. 1979). The eight hundred Borucas live on the edge of the mainstream of Costa Rican life as do the indigenous tribes of the United States. Many do not have citizens' documentation or property deeds (La Nacion, 14 Feb. 1979). Visitors to their villages of Buenos Aires and Curré come away impressed with the "survivals" of a passing culture in a country that until recently could only heave sighs of national shame for these less assimilated people. Indianness in Costa Rica seems unprestigious where high value is placed on light skin and blue eyes: proof of the Spanish hidalgos' presence. Foreign archaeologists, anthropologists, and artists have been the primary appreciators of the Talamanca mountain region tribes. Dr. Doris Stone of Harvard was among the first to conduct ethnographic and archaeological studies there in the 1940s. Government interest in these people appears to be mainly for touristic value. Karen de Figueres, wife of ex-president Jose (Pepe) Figueres has been instrumental in promoting artisan centers and sponsoring exhibits of indigenous peoples' crafts: simple white women fabric, string bags, wooden drums, and carved ceremonial masks. The University of Costa Rica, primarily through the efforts of anthropologist Dr. Maria Eugenia Bozzolli de Wille, conducts research in the area, and the linguistics department currently publishes a small monthly newsletter written in the Chibcha-root language of the Boruca and Bribri tribes. The publication from which the present translations were made, Leyendas y Tradiciones Borucas by Adollo Constenla Umana, was a linguistics project first and foremost. Desirable ethnographic and biographic data are lacking on the informants. Efforts to obtain this information from the University of Costa Rica have proven futile alter many months of waiting lor a response from the author and other involved university officials. Nevertheless, my own experiences alter six years of living in Costa Rica, (although in a different region) offer some impressions lor the immediate purposes of this paper. They may serve to spark interest in further investigation by American Indian scholars.

When Coronado turned his back from Cibola, he left behind not only the pueblos of Zuni but his dreams of fame and wealth. There was no gold. No one ever saw the wealth within, in the dark, subterranean circular rooms known as kivas, where the splendidly-costumed kachinas in elaborate, week-long ceremonials maintained a complex ritual calendar and danced life and prosperity into Zuni. Probably these rituals, or rumors of them, communicated to subsistence cultures further south, formed the basis of reports to Coronado of great wealth further north. But it was a wealth perhaps only a Zuni could appreciate, for to be a "poor man" there means to lack any ritual knowledge or position. Though the multi-storied pueblo of Coronado's time has been almost entirely supplanted by single story dwellings, Zuni still is the "other," alien culture. Not only Anglos, but most neighboring Indians as well, are forbidden access to kiva rituals. The Zuni language remains classified as a linguistic isolate, genetically unallied to any other in North America. And more than at any other pueblo, the old way, the kachina way, is kept in spite of the "civilizing" forces working for its destruction. That we have a text of "Sayatasha's Night Chant" is itself unusual, for it was given to the transcriber, Ruth Bunzel, "by a man who had never impersonated Sayataca and never expected to. They were verified after the informant's death by the Sayataca wo' Ie [preserver of the true text) who wondered how and why the informant learned them. I myself heard the actual chant twice after recording the text and know it to be accurate.'" This essay proposes to examine the literary form and merit of this single Zuni ritual poem. Recognizing the limits imposed upon us by using a "received text" -that much of its literary significance undoubtedly derives from dimensions of performance unavailable to us-it is nevertheless valuable to study the work for what it can communicate to us as literature. This is especially true since, as "received text," it is so typical of what is being studied as oral-traditional literature in college and university courses in Native American literature. For this reason it seems legitimate to explore a single work as thoroughly as possible with all the literary and folkloristic tools available to us, though ever mindful of how far short of full understanding and appreciation we shall surely fall.

The land was hard and spare, lean and dry, the struggle for survival harsh. The Yaqui infant, Refugio Savala, was just one more fugitive from the genocidal war against his people. His birth was unrecorded and his life tenuous in the chaotic flight toward asylum across the Sonoran desert to the Arizona border. Yet he was one of the fortunate ones, protected by a family still whole despite dangers, still rich in the tradition and belief of the Yaqui way. That tradition was not lost to the man who grew from the refugee infant. In the seventy years following flight to safety, Refugio Savala observed and recorded the renewal of his native culture in Arizona. He quietly and determinedly wrote about what he experienced. He transformed his experience into a body of Yaqui traditional lore and personal literature which speaks to his own people arid reveals the Yaqui way to the non-Yaqui world. Refugio Savala is a person of poetic sensibilities, a man of words. In his youth, he felt a strong urge to preserve in written form the Yaqui stories he had heard, and as he matured and came to broader and more complete knowledge of his culture, his desire to become a man of letters increased. His driving interest in language, and in Yaqui perception and way of life, inspired him to attempt non-Yaqui literary forms in order to communicate his personal and cultural vision to those who might otherwise never know -its existence. In the course of his lifetime, he has translated oral tales, written his versions of Yaqui legends, described Yaqui personalities and occupations in character sketches, recorded and analyzed ceremonial songs and sermons, composed original ballads, created a body of personal poems, and recorded his own and his family's history in a comprehensive autobiography.

Although recently some material has been published on the relationship between Western theories of literary criticism and Native American literature in general (oral traditions more specifically), little has been written about that same relationship specific to contemporary written Native American literature. Vine Deloria's chapter "Indians in America," in God is Red, is useful in reiterating all the basic assumptions that have formed a basis for defining contemporary written American Indian literature: that it be both by and about American Indians, that it be sensitive to the traditional aspects of native populations, and that it include as part of its definition a relationship with an ongoing oral tradition as well. This position has been expanded through well-written articles by Sayre, Lewis, and Evers. None of these deals at any length, however, with a methodological approach to the criticism of this literature. This past fall, I again taught a course in contemporary written American Indian literature in which I spent a substantial amount of time dealing with the literature written by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko. In thinking about what both Momaday and Silko have to say about the art of storytelling, I discovered that the working definition, as presented by Deloria and others, is valid as far as it goes and helpful particularly to the critic or teacher interested in comparative literature, but it does not adequately represent the underlying attitudes that make this literature as American Indian literature unique. Because of the diverse nature of the American Indian population, it is difficult to generalize about the nature of this literature; still, in looking at this material with the perspectives presented by Silko, Momaday, and others, certain patterns do seem to emerge, suggesting a uniqueness to most, if not all, of the written American Indian literatures.