Representing Native American oral narrative

Abstract

The burgeoning philological researches of the nineteenth century established the foundations not only for the scholarly production of languages, but also for the production of a significant class of texts, specifically, texts gathered from oral tradition under the aegis of the developing field of folklore.In Europe, the twin linguistic and folkloristic labors of the Brothers Grimm exerted a formative influence on conceptions of both language and folktales, but while the revolutionary significance of Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik is well known to linguists, the Grimms' textual practices figure not at all in standard histories of linguistics.Nevertheless, the increasing centrality of narrative textuality to a number of contemporary lines of linguistic inquiry, including discourse analysis, conversational analysis, pragmatics, ethnopoetics, and performance-centered study of verbal art, suggests that conceptions of narrative textuality and the metadiscursive practices that have been employed in identifying, recording, extracting, and interpreting oral narrative texts are worthy of linguists' attention as well.Charles Briggs has recently offered an illuminating analysis of the Grimms' textual practices and the rhetorics they employed in support of those practices (1993).Briggs's investigation is part of a loint project in which he and I are engaged, centering on poetics and performance in linguistics, linguistic anthropology, folklore, and adjacent disciplines (see Bauman and Briggs 1990;Briggs and Bauman 1992;Briggs 1993).The present paper is intended as a complement to Briggs's investigation of the Brothers Grimm, examining a similarly formative moment in the Americanist tradition, namely, the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (17%-f864), whose career was roughly contemporaneous with that of the Grimms.2Schoolcraft is accorded by intellectual historians a status similar to that of the Grimms as founding ancestor of folklore and anthropology.A.I. Hallowell has observed that "Historically viewed, Schoolcraft was a pioneer in the collection of the ' An initial draft of this essay was writtcn