Tribal Poetics of Native America
Abstract
An Eskimo poet told Knud Rasmussen, "Songs (poems) are thoughts sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices .... And then it will happen that we, who always think we are smalL will feel still smaller. And we will fear to use words. But it will happen that the words we need will come of themselves. When the words we want to use shoot up of themselves-we get a new song." -Paul Radin, in Diogenes (1955)
A Papago woman told Ruth Underhill, "The song is very short because we understand so much." - Margot Astrov. The Winged Serpent
Once, over a time of 70,000 years, there were some 400 Native American tribes in North America. For the most part they lived as independent cultures. They spoke at least 200 languages representing the world's major Ianguage families. Except for the Mayan and the Aztec, these peoples evolved without written languages. They lived as oral cultures, tribal life passing mouth to mouth, generation to generation, alive only as the people lived. This oral tradition bound the people tribally, as it poeticized the "common" speech. The art of language was a daily, shared activity, and the word was tribal bond. The names of 27 different tribes mean, in various forms, "the people." Winnebago means "people of the real speech."