Elaine Jahner opens the conclusion of her book with the following: “You tell the stories you need to tell to keep the story tellable,” a quote from Richard Powers’ novel, Galatea 2.2. Describing the process of constant updating as an ideological necessity, she notes that keeping a story tellable is often a trust passed from generation to generation and across distances with political as well as artistic implications. Shifting through the different spaces of the mind creates further narratives “whose performative potential makes narrative into a renewable resource,” generating an energy that feeds the political imagination (157).

Jahner, a professor of English at Dartmouth College, received her PhD from the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in 1975, and soon after joined the faculty at Dartmouth where she taught until her untimely death in 2003.

Recognizing the ubiquity of narrative as a genre Jahner focuses on both oral and written forms. Based on her years of fieldwork with the Yanktonai Sioux on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in a village known as Cannon Ball, she devotes one chapter to the analysis of Sioux narratives in their context, and another chapter focuses on the oral accounts she collected from the German Russian communities located across the Missouri River from the Sioux where she spent her childhood. Her analysis of written narrative includes two novels. In one chapter she explores four novels by James Welch, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, and in another she turns to the novels of Mildred Walker, originally from New England, who migrated to Montana and places her novels there.

Jahner attempts to integrate the concept of cognitive style with implicit narrative, taming the genre and matching it to time and place, identifying the local features that maintain the integrity of distinctive communities. Her major goal in all instances is to establish the presence of continuity over time— “to show how narrative shapes the details of historical continuity at work in relation to definite communities in all their sociopolitical complexity” (4).

The material she identifies as “style” is that excluded by earlier scholars (Dundes, Propp, Chatman, Greimas, and others), “the scaffolding of abstracted meaning that is the residue of formalist or structuralist analysis really did seem to highlight important elements of relative stability that allowed me to demonstrate a basis on which to postulate continuity from earlier more structured oral folktales to more recent, more natural narrative genres” (4). In her chapter on “theoretical foundations” she traces her influences, notably Paul Ricoeur, and methodologically, Madeleine Mathiot (1968).

In both chapters focused on oral narratives she presents detailed histories of the communities. In the Yanktoni Sioux community of Cannon Ball, she worked with Lillian and Harry Fast Horse who generously shared stories with her concerned with the loss of their village due to flooding and the building of the Oahe Dam, trickster stories (Iktome, the wily spider), and the uncanny, and others from an earlier time dealing with gender told by Lillian. These latter outlined a pattern of beliefs that constituted the mythic paradigm derived “from the way Sioux culture made sexual difference the foundation for a way of knowing” (71). She was told a story about the devil appearing at a dance, appearing as a nice-looking gentleman and then disappearing. This story is widespread today in Mexican-American culture, and has even appeared in a newspaper as a report of an incident (in Austin, Texas in the 1970s).

Together, the rich examples of narratives Jahner collects in Cannon Ball allow her to assert that Harry’s and Lillian’s stories display a cognitive style that is traditional and speaks to a communal process of deciding on the legitimacy of evidence of tradition.

Introducing the German-Russian immigrant community, Jahner explains that in the early-twentieth century, in winter, a “startling cultural juxtaposition” occurred when the Catholic Church held services on Sundays. In the front rows sat the Sioux, and the sermons were in Sioux, but behind the Sioux sat the German-Russians who could attend the services because they could cross the frozen Missouri River. In this chapter she also provides the history of these Germans who had settled as colonists in Russia until they were persecuted and fled to the U.S. Her work among the Germans, her own community, yielded local and family histories. A group of immigrants who struggled to survive in barren North Dakota after living in lush Ukraine, they emphasized the communal, and the instinct that shaped narrative was “arising from the most fundamental human capacity for using narrative as survival strategy” (89). Jahner draws on Derek Gregory’s metaphor of the looking-glass to explain the immigrants’ public and private narrative patterns—the “subject” passes through the looking-glass and becomes a lived abstraction, marking “the transformation from absolute into abstract space” (89).

Jahner’s brilliance is most in evidence in her analysis of the Welch novels. Consistent with the previous chapters, she provides selected historical events of the Blackfoot people, in particular the winter of 1883-84 when approximately one third of the people died of starvation while Congress stalled efforts to provide funds for food.

It is in this chapter that her effort to establish a cognitive style with continuity from the oral to the written over time is most convincing. Recognizing the Star Husband Tale as the fundamental pattern Welch employs, she explains both the tale and how the four novels elaborate on the relationships, featuring Feather Woman, the founding mother of the Blackfoot tradition and the mythic mother who inaugurates the Medicine Lodge Ceremony, and the hero, her son who is abandoned.

The Star Husband myth in its Blackfoot realization is also the foundational narrative for the Medicine Lodge Ceremony. Feather Woman’s watchful care over the transmission of history implies that the maternal function includes vigilance over conditions that safeguard the life of knowledge. Jahner argues that mythic narrative assures continuity of life, but also reveals the human condition as something unknown and overlooked. “That is why ritual is necessary” (130).

While it is unfortunate that Jahner ignored all of the scholarship by contemporary folklorists and anthropologists dealing with narrative, performance, and place that would have enriched her analysis enormously, her critical discussion of the Welch novels benefits from her knowledge of Native American myth and reaches the level of exquisite analysis, offering proof of her method and a model for the analysis of narrative literature invoking cultural continuity. She was a gifted writer and a master/mistress of the postmodern sentence.

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[Review length: 1075 words • Review posted on September 4, 2010]