Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore in the West / Edition 1

by Barre Toelken

Overview

After a career working and living with American Indians 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.

Winner of the 2004 Chicago Folklore Prize, The Anguish of Snails is an essential work for the collection of any serious reader in folklore or Native American studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874215564
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	06/28/2003
Series:	Folklife of the West Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

The Anguish of Snails

Native American Folklore in the West

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By Barre Toelken

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2003 Utah State University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-556-4

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CHAPTER 1

Cultural Patterns in Native American Folklore

An Introduction

The only problem I've ever had with white people has been unrequited love.

—Vic Charlo, grandson of Flathead Chief Charlo

So the snail shell is our governing metaphor in the following chapters. We can see that the ongoing responses of the living snail have been recorded in the structure of the shell over time, forming patterns with which we want to become more fully acquainted. We believe that the markings before our eyes have meaning, and we want to explore the clues. We start here, not with the snail's sensitive innards. As outsiders, we may not initially understand what the many-patterned expressions of Indians "mean," either, but we can be certain that they mean something, and whatever it is must be important because it constitutes a substantive, outward-facing record of feelings and values Native people have shared with each other and with us over time.

Even if "all that is recorded" is only the anguish of snails, isn't that more than enough to suggest the way a physical object can excite a mixture of ideas in the human mind? Like T. S. Eliot's objective correlative, an external object or metaphor provides the touchstone for complex systems of abstract meaning within us and our cultures. In our model, it represents a whole class of abstracts having to do with snailness, let's say, just as the Native expressions we will examine represent not simply the unique ideas of one talented artist but the ongoing concerns of many sharing artists within whole cultures.

The premise of this book is that we may use the "clues" provided by Native American tales, songs, dances, architecture, and other arts—provisionally, of course—as if they were snail shells, as objects that have meanings beyond their physical existence but nonetheless are readable through their details of style and substance.

These objects will not be treated as mere cultural items but as fossil records of real responses to living contexts; as physically crafted, culturally situated, and shared human articulations of irritation, injury, pain, growth, healing, nurturance, and even (sure, go ahead, reach for it) love, phrased in concrete metaphors that at once establish emotional and physical kinship with us and trigger our recognition of other systems of belief, custom, and worldview.

Like the articulations of all cultures, Native American expressions exist for a number of reasons, and few of them are secret or mysterious: They provide entertainment and dramatize ritual and social order; they record and maintain cultural values, providing moral examples, giving instruction, and imparting culturally important information; they express and embody artistic values; they preserve historical records with an eye for culturally significant detail. In our scrutiny of any culture, we easily run the risk of seeing mainly the shell and believing that it is only a shell; thus, we may hastily assume that a narrative is "just a story." But if a snail's shell is not just a shell, if it is an accumulated record of the "agonies" experienced by snails, then its full meaning cannot be captured merely by analyzing its calcium content but will be implied by the style and context of the record, and will lurk quietly in the field of implication, waiting to be brought into focus by an eye willing to read and "unpack" the suggestions of the patterns.

This does not imply that such a pattern is intentionally difficult to understand, or that we need to read meaning into the shell, however. Quite the opposite: it requires us to read out of the shell as text, and to accomplish this task, we need to be open to what the clues mean in the cultural contexts which shaped that shell. While our insights will be conditioned by what we bring with us into the effort, we must try as much as possible to include as much knowledge as we can of the Native contexts. In other words, we should not apply our own fantasies to this job of perception; neither should we take the lazy way out and say it's just anybody's guess. Nor will we start with the "hidden-meaning premise" usually expressed in the question, "What do you think this really means?" Instead, we will ask, "What's being acted out, or dramatized, or made concrete here?"

Attend a Native powwow and you will see that no one is trying to hide anything; rather, something is being performed and projected to you and everyone else, even though it is not explicit. So what, then, is being performed, and how does it mean something to those who do it? You can see it happening, but its significance must be extrapolated from the way the event is actualized in its cultural context. The feathers and beadwork and dance steps and music can be treated as objective correlatives of a set of cultural assumptions, just as the events in a story, the shape of a dwelling, or the items of traditional food can be profitably viewed as icons of cultural meaning. Their significance is seldom overt or explained in the text itself, but they come to life or are epitomized in the cultural performance.

Of course, on one level we sensibly hesitate to make a serious parallel between snails and cultures, partly because they are not really analogous and partly because we're not altogether sure that a snail feels anything in our sense of the word, let alone that a snail produces its shell as a reflection of anguish for others to read. And we also know that in the cold light of denotation, it probably can't be said that a culture has feelings or values that it records through the vernacular expressions of its members. Agreed, these propositions are good examples of pathetic fallacy—attributing feelings to something which doesn't feel. But that's what metaphors and figures of speech are for: they make connections that may not otherwise come to mind, just as the tortured markings on an abalone shell stressed by sponges and bored by clams, or the pearl in an oyster shell, or the twisted limbs of a tree constantly assailed by the wind can suggest some of the most delicate human experiences expressed in nonhuman terms. From an oyster's perspective, if there is such a thing, a pearl results from an act of creation that emanates from a pain that won't go away—in itself an apt description of what a good poem, or song, or story can do for us. From the human perspective, a pearl is an item on which to exercise judgments about beauty, shape, rarity, possibilities of human adornment, or monetary value. Are these judgments wrong because we're not oysters and thus have no right to an opinion about them?

We do not have to think like an oyster (or dance with snails) to read their artistic output; neither do we have to limit our understanding of them by noting only their genus and species. And while we cannot presume to know what an oyster or a snail or a tree thinks, or even if they do, we have a sumptuous advantage in the case of our Native American neighbors: they do think, and they have produced several thousand years' worth of accumulated feelings and values that are eloquently communicated in their intentional folk performances. And they have been creating their arts in our presence and in response to our appearance for more than five hundred years. There are plenty of these deliberate pearls and snail shells for us to examine.

In addition to establishing the idea of approaching our subject respectfully by reading—and experiencing—those clues obvious on the outside, there is another reason for using the snail-shell metaphor, and that is its circularity. If we can characterize the organization of European American cultures as lineal, we can as definitely describe the organization of Native American culture as circular. Circles abound in Native architecture, narrative, ritual, art, dance, and gesture; circular imagery pervades this book. And while almost any circle would do to symbolize Native concepts of inclusion, balance, symmetry, and relationship, the snail shell—which spirals and builds upon itself in an interrelated, connected, self-referential, growing way—is a perfect metaphor for the ways the subjects of the chapters in this book depend and build upon, reflect, and interrelate with each other.

While most of this book focuses on everyday expressions of impressive beauty and deep meaning, many other levels of Native culture would admittedly be interesting to talk about. Indeed, those who have spent considerable time with Native American people have seen and probably taken part in esoteric events, and they may well have experienced things that seem almost unbelievable—or at least difficult to categorize using their own cultural logic. It is often this esoteric and exotic range of experiences that inquirers choose when they seek to use Native insights as a way of escaping the apparent confines of their own culture. But think for a moment: these kinds of odd and enlightening experiences are available among any group of people. Spend ten years in an immigrant community, or among the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese, the East Indians, or the Balinese, and you will certainly have tales to tell of unique, dumbfounding—even traumatic—events. Why the American Indian should have become today's leading source of special enlightenment, inscrutable wisdom, and inexplicable wonder is an interesting and important question; perhaps some of the examples in this book will provide insight into that puzzle.

But extraordinary events and striking phenomena—while fascinating—are rarely the most representative elements of a living culture. Besides, it is often the naïve outsider who finds such events striking because he or she does not understand the cultural logic which imbues the event with normalcy. For example, back in the 1950s, when non-Hopi visitors were still welcome to observe seasonal rituals like the Snake Dance, in which dancers hold live rattlesnakes in their mouths, I witnessed the anticipated concluding rainstorms on three different occasions. I found those events very striking and was moved to tears every time. My Hopi friends smiled confidently and acted the way you and I do when our car starts on a very cold morning: relieved, satisfied, but not teary and dumbfounded.

Part of the job of this book is to discuss some of the most interesting aspects of cultural logic and explore the many ways Native American societies have constructed their sense of logic and ritual in relation to the world around them. But according to our metaphorical plan, we are not going to focus on the surprising and awesome; rather, we will look at the expressions of everyday life and the customs that animate the generalized values and worldview assumptions of Native Americans, for these common cultural goods most accurately illustrate the baseline of any culture. Folklore, the study of traditional, culturally situated expressions in their normal performative contexts, like anthropology and social history, is especially equipped to discuss these matters precisely because it is predicated on the importance of the ongoing, shared, vernacular voice.

Like snail shells with consciousness of kind and volition built in, the expressions of folklore are directed toward others, in the process engaging those others as cultural participants—either audiences or coperformers. Traditional foods require many hands to make them and many mouths to eat them, and seldom is nutrition alone the main reason for their creation. Similarly, jokes, dances, traditional housing (even the decoration of commercially built housing), and songs are ways of expressing, perpetuating, and making palpable—experiential—the complex abstractions of cultural values and assumptions. It's difficult to explain what makes ethnic foods, for example, important to weddings or birthdays; but when you, as an insider, see and taste those foods, you experience a powerful sense of kinship quite independent from analytical commentary. Insofar as folklore is the performance of what closely related groups have felt and believed and assumed over the years, we may fairly use the term anguish —despite its initial melodramatic impact—to represent the depth and intensity of the accumulated emotional load articulated in traditional contexts. Moreover, since the performance of arts, crafts, foods, stories, songs, and dances requires not only intellectual competence but physical and emotional commitment in the form of body movement, breathing, use of vocal cords, tasting, and hearing, the resultant "texts" are redolent with ongoing human feeling. Indeed, folklore could not exist without it.

I have chosen the categories of folklore for this book with several considerations in mind; foremost is the fact that they are all available to non-Indians without the necessity for us to intrude. The first chapters focus on traditional forms, patterned formulations of complex, shared value systems: visual art and architecture, dance, oral narrative. Later chapters deal with cultural attitudes and worldviews expressed through humor and in stories and customs detailing the excitement of scientific and geographical discovery.

In our discussion of Native visual arts, we will look not only at decorative tours de force—which they certainly are—but also visible constellations of meaning. We will discuss the way color, pattern, imagery, medium, and context visually suggest important elements of Native life relating to gender, status, tribal affiliation, and worldview. Perhaps to the surprise of some, we will discover how many Native artistic expressions have incorporated and coopted materials and designs from the encroaching Euro-American world—often producing a sensitive commentary on the relationship between Native and non-Native.

Traditional Native architecture varies widely from tribe to tribe, distinctly expressing a spatial model of human relationships within the natural world. The overall preference for round dwellings where a family or extended family live together in one space is not simply due to the lack of lumber or the absence of a decent regard for privacy but physically evokes a system which views the group—not the individual—as the basic unit and therefore shapes the immediate living space to reflect (and require) constant interaction among closely associated members. We will find that the patterns in architecture, visual arts, and narrative, along with the social assumptions that underlie eating and dancing, grow out of and reflect each other, providing rich networks of cultural experience for Native Americans who participate in these folk expressions.

Folk narratives are extremely valuable for understanding cultural assumptions because their ongoing existence is predicated on the ability—and the interest—of the audience not only to understand what is being dramatized but to pass it on to others who are interested in hearing it. Such narratives arise and are transmitted without the aid of print and are continually reshaped, polished, and reexamined by their tellers; the fact that they have survived indicates that they are considered memorable, they make cultural sense, and they are entertaining on one or more levels. A printed book or a written letter can exist long after its contents have immediate interest for anybody; when an orally transmitted story ceases to make sense or be interesting, however, people simply quit telling it, and it is no longer there. The survival of an orally transmitted story is in itself a testimony to its ongoing validity as an expression of cultural meaning in dramatic terms. A narrative is a sequence of related events, acted out by characters who experience an important complication and then witness its resolution. Of course, most narratives must be interesting and entertaining, or else why keep telling them? On the other hand, many stories, including some sacred narratives, impact us through wonder, awe, or fear, so we may say that mere entertainment is not always the principal reason a story is told, just as nutrition is not the main reason ethnic foods are eaten. But, just as food must offer real nourishment, a story has to be sensible, coherent, and somehow logical to the listeners, or its point is lost.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Anguish of Snails by Barre Toelken. Copyright © 2003 Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission of Utah State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Dedication and Acknowledgments,
She Comes Along Carrying Spears,
Prologue: The Snail's Clues,
1. Cultural Patterns in Native American Folklore: An Introduction,
2. Visual Patterns of Performance: Arts,
3. Kinetic Patterns of Performance: Dance,
4. Oral Patterns of Performance: Story and Song,
5. Patterns and Themes in Native Humor,
6. Cultural Patterns of Discovery,
Epilogue: "Gleaning" and the Active Audience,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

A valuable, nearly indispensable, contribution of very significant use to students and teachers of anthropology, folklore, and Native American studies, and to all who have an interest in this fascinating subject. Strong, original, immensely interesting, well written, and perfectly readable.

N. Scott Momaday

From the Publisher