The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West

After a career of working and living with Native Americans and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values

The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West

After a career of working and living with Native Americans and studying their traditions, Barre Toelken has written this sweeping study of Native American folklore in the West. Within a framework of performance theory, cultural worldview, and collaborative research, he examines Native American visual arts, dance, oral tradition (story and song), humor, and patterns of thinking and discovery to demonstrate what can be gleaned from Indian traditions by Natives and non-Natives alike. In the process he considers popular distortions of Indian beliefs, demystifies many traditions by showing how they can be comprehended within their cultural contexts, considers why some aspects of Native American life are not meant to be understood by or shared with outsiders, and emphasizes how much can be learned through sensitivity to and awareness of cultural values.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1013/thumbnail.jp

Collaboration in the translation and interpretation of Native American oral traditions

Even so, it is true--as Gottlieb writes--that "collaborative projects often contain hidden sources of discomfort, accommodation, and compromise that may keep them at least distantly allied to . . . problematic political terrain" (1995:23). And as Lawless points out, in any case we need to acknowledge the effect our "cultural baggage" has on what we see, hear, and understand on both sides of the cultural interface (1992). Collaboration will always be an interactive standoff in one sense, with practitioners on each side obligated to take their own cultural constructions as well as those of their partners into consideration--with the realization that in many cases there will be no middle ground for sweet agreement. In this spirit, we feel that what we have accomplished with this collection is not in the realm of the impossible; rather, we have tried to do the possible, the plausible, the necessary, and we have tried to do it in the appropriate and responsible ways available to us. It remains for us, and for our many colleagues engaged in the study of Native American oral traditions, to continue opening up the mutually responsive, mutually responsible, dialogues that will bring forth the hundreds of other tribal literatures and languages of America. And it remains for all of us to learn how to hold them properly in our hands.Issue title; "Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation.

Coyote and the strawberries : cultural drama and cultural collaboration

Our job in this essay, then, is not to cope with the difficulties of translating Coquelle into English, for this step has already been achieved by earlier Coquelle intellectuals, living tribal repositories and articulators whose expertise far outreaches ours. Here, it is a network, a constellation of cultural beliefs and assumptions, which is to be approached and understood. The primary basis for this understanding must come, of course, from the narrator's own culture and experience. But since we know it is especially difficult to examine consciously and rationally the assumptions in one's own culture, assumptions that seldom come up for critical review, we also need to recognize that there are a number of questions--perhaps even impertinent ones--that can come only from the questing outsider who, presumably alert and respectful of the possibilities of meaning, has not internalized or rationalized the cultural norms and "obvious" assumptions, and thus may pose questions that the insider might never need to consider.Issue title; "Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation.

Ghost and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends

The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan

Native American Oral Traditions

This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert. This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1052/thumbnail.jp

Ghost and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends

The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1065/thumbnail.jp

Coyote and the Strawberries: Cultural Drama and Intercultural Collaboration

Our job in this essay, then, is not to cope with the difficulties of translating Coquelle into English, for this step has already been achieved by earlier Coquelle intellectuals, living tribal repositories and articulators whose expertise far outreaches ours. Here, it is a network, a constellation of cultural beliefs and assumptions, which is to be approached and understood. The primary basis for this understanding must come, of course, from the narrator's own culture and experience. But since we know it is especially difficult to examine consciously and rationally the assumptions in one's own culture, assumptions that seldom come up for critical review, we also need to recognize that there are a number of questions--perhaps even impertinent ones--that can come only from the questing outsider who, presumably alert and respectful of the possibilities of meaning, has not internalized or rationalized the cultural norms and "obvious" assumptions, and thus may pose questions that the insider might never need to consider.Issue title; "Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation.