Folklore and earthquakes: Native American oral traditions from Cascadia compared with written traditions from Japan

2007 ◽  
Vol 273 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth S. Ludwin ◽  
Gregory J. Smits ◽  
D. Carver ◽  
K. James ◽  
C. Jonientz-Trisler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Written Traditions

scholarly journals FEMALE IDENTITY AND MAGICAL REALISM IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND AFRO AMERICAN WOMEN WRITING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LOUISE ERDRICH’S TRACKS AND TONY MORRISON’S BELOVED

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Mumtaz Ahmad ◽  
Kaneez Fatima
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Native American ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Fourth World ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
American Women ◽  
Sweeping Generalization ◽  
Discursive Field

<p>This research article is an attempt to evaluate the Native and Afro American women writers ‘sustained efforts to articulate a continuous and internal cultural female identity by constructing re evaluative narratives that deconstruct institutionally supported universal female images inflicted upon the third and fourth world women by the first world feminist intelligentsia. To do so these women writers radically depart from the conventions of Euro American stylistic, formal and structural modalities of the narrative and use instead a stylistic mosaic allowing the native and black oral traditions to imbricate with the white normative models. Since literature and arts have always been an effective medium, an expansive domain, and a discursive field where writers have been voicing the aureate human feelings, conflicting passions and the continuous struggles of the different societal segments, especially of deprived strata against those who maintain and perpetuate their cultural and political hegemony by suppressing the subalterns, the  women writers from the fourth world ethnic communities have expressed whole range of the intensely personal and communal human emotions that radiate from the springboard  of social, cultural, historic and political practices One of the significant features that the Native American and Afro American women writers often demonstrate include the use of magical realist strategies that express, on one hand, their efforts to indigenize narrative and, on the other hand, help them construct female identity from their own perspective since, within main concerns of contemporary fourth world feminist criticism, the (re) construction of female identity merits special attention and analysis. The stereotypical discursive construction of the Native and Afro American women by the dominant Euro American discourses bracketed them into essentialist categories glossing over the medley of vital differences that these women reveal in their social, cultural, anthropological and sexual strictures. Tackling the issue of the discursive construction of female identity that involves conceptual and perspectival problems, both Native American and Afro American women writers deconstruct the sweeping generalization of the fourth world women by challenging and subverting the clichéd images replacing them with empowered and agentive subjects who are no more subjected to, what Gyatri Spivk conceptualizes,   subalternity and “epistemic violence”.</p>

Tecumseh’s Legacy: The Enduring Enigma of the New Madrid Earthquakes

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Elizabeth Hough ◽  
Roger G. Bilham
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Central United States ◽  
New Madrid Earthquakes ◽  
To Come ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
The One ◽  
Indian Lands ◽  
New Madrid

Like any proper mystery, the tale of the New Madrid earthquakes begins on a note of intrigue. According to legend, the earthquakes were predicted—even prophesied—by the great Shawnee leader and statesman Tecumseh. Concerned over continued encroachment of white settlers onto Indian lands in the mid continent, Tecumseh traveled widely throughout the central United States in the early 1800s, striving to unite diverse tribes to stand against further land cessions. According to legend, Tecumseh told his mostly Creek followers at Tuckabatchee, Alabama, that he had proof of the Great Spirit’s wrath. The sign blazed across the heavens for all to see—the great comet of 1811, a dazzling and mysterious sight. As if to emphasize Tecumseh’s words, the comet grew in brilliance through October, dimming in the night time sky in November just as Tecumseh left Tuckabatchee for points northward. Also according to legend, Tecumseh’s speech at Tuckabatchee told of an even more dramatic sign yet to come. In an oration delivered to hundreds of listeners, the leader reportedly told the crowd, “You do not believe the Great Spirit has sent me. You shall know. I leave Tuckabatchee directly, and shall go straight to Detroit. When I arrive there, I will stamp on the ground with my foot and shake down every house in Tuckabatchee.” The Creeks counted the days until the one calculated to mark Tecumseh’s return, and on that day— December 16, 1811—the first of the great New Madrid earthquakes struck, destroying all of the houses in Tuckabatchee. Tecumseh’s Prophecy, as it has come to be known, strikes a chord with those inclined to see Spirit and earth as intertwined. But it can also capture the imagination of those who see phenomena such as earthquakes as the exclusive purview of science. What if Tecumseh’s Prophecy was born not of communication with the Great Spirit, but instead of an ability to recognize signs from the earth itself? According to the renowned English geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Native American oral traditions told of devastating earthquakes in the New Madrid region prior to 1811.

Fieldwork, Orality, Text: Ethnographic and Historical Fields of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Gabon

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 47-77
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Equatorial Africa ◽  
Written Traditions ◽  
Over Time

I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.

Engineering Eden in Walt Whitman’s “Passage to India”

Telegraphies ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 129-157
Author(s):  
Kay Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
New Type

Walt Whitman wrote odes to Morse’s telegraph that present it as a cultural “monument” speaking its nation’s mythic history in the making. His telegraph poems imagine the electromagnetic telegraph to perform a spiritual purpose: for Whitman, the disembodied nature of telegraphy’s virtual realm allows settlers’ voices, and the nation’s mythic origin stories that those voices carry, to spread across, and eventually to soak into, newly colonized American lands. In so doing, telegraphy births a new and specifically American sort of electric oral tradition, which Whitman poetically links to the power of this land’s previous Native American oral traditions to construct spiritual connections to American earth and environments. His poems imagine for American settlers a new type of indigeneity through telegraphy.

Ancient History in the New World: Integrating Oral Traditions and the Archaeological Record in Deep Time

2000 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger C. Echo-Hawk
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New World ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Source Of Information

AbstractOral traditions provide a viable source of information about historical settings dating back far in time—a fact that has gained increasing recognition in North America, although archaeologists and other scholars typically give minimal attention to this data. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) lists oral traditions as a source of evidence that must be considered by museum and federal agency officials in making findings of cultural affiliation between ancient and modern Native American communities. This paper sets forth the NAGPRA standards and presents an analytical framework under which scholars can proceed with evaluation of historicity in verbal records of the ancient past. The author focuses on an Arikara narrative and argues that it presents a summary of human history in the New World from initial settlement up to the founding of the Arikara homeland in North Dakota. Oral records and the archaeological record describe a shared past and should be viewed as natural partners in post-NAGPRA America. In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.

scholarly journals Landscape and Rhetoric: The Marriage of Native American Traditions and Zen Buddhism in Selected Poems by Gary Snyder

MANUSYA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Surapeepan Chatraporn
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Gary Snyder ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Zen Buddhist

This paper examines certain similarities between Native American beliefs and Zen Buddhist teachings and demonstrates how Gary Snyder fuses these two traditions in his poetry. Through the analysis it has been found that the Native American wisdom of the interrelatedness of humans and nature has an affinity with the fundamental Buddhist principle of the interpenetration and interdependence of all existence or as Thich Nhat Han calls it “the inter being nature of things.” Gary Snyder has developed his love of nature concurrently with his respect for Native American traditions and his interest in Zen Buddhism. Snyder draws on the primitive oral traditions of chants, incantations and songs to communicate his experiences. Like the shaman-poet of primitive cultures and in imitation of Buddhist teachings, Snyder seeks to restore reverence for nature and reestablish a harmonious relationship with the universe. Apart from emulating certain Native American beliefs and Zen Buddhist principles, Gary Snyder makes use of Zen Buddhist poetic techniques which bear some resemblance to the oral poetic tradition of the Native Americans that precedes the influence of the white man. The precision of tersely worded images reminiscent of imagistic poetry, conciseness, concreteness, simple and ordinary language, as well as an abundant use of nature and animal imagery, which are common characteristics of both poetic traditions, find their way into the poetry of Gary Snyder.

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