American Indian Culture and Research Journal

One of the best-studied, least-discussed texts of Native American oral literature is a long Mojave “epic” taken down from a man named Inyo-kutavere by Alfred Kroeber in 1902 and published in 1951. The Mojaves live along the Colorado River at the border of today’s states of Arizona and California. For his publication Kroeber condensed the text from an estimated one hundred thousand Mojave words to about thirty-five thousand words in English. The Mojave language was not recorded. Kroeber entered the story’s details as an interpreter translated them for him over the course of six days. (The old man talked, the interpreter translated, the visitor wrote, and the old man talked again.) The text was published in twenty-nine pages along with forty-eight pages of commentary and twenty-five pages of notes. In 1999, Arthur Hatto, an Englishman and devotee of epics, produced a second book on the text. It is rare for an oral work by a Native American to be accorded one, let alone two, book-length commentaries; it is also rare for any scholar to call a Native American text an epic. The Quiche Maya’s Popul Vuh has that status, but north of Mexico the only such work that I know of is The Trickster, a Winnebago text given and commented on in a book by Paul Radin in 1955. The trickster may be the best-known type of character in Native American literature, thanks partly to Radin. I do not wish to diminish the importance of tricksters but to complement them by taking up this other and hitherto neglected kind of text. We will consider the following: what did epic mean to Kroeber and Hatto; what should we mean by epic, as work and as hero; and how widely spread were works of this kind in traditional Native America? For this article I follow the definition of epic given by Hugh Holman in Handbook to Literature: a long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in a series of adventures that form an organic whole through their relation to a central character of heroic proportions and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race.