Jasmine Spencer’s Telling Animals is based on her 2017 University of British Columbia dissertation of the same title. It represents a unique effort to account for traditional stories from across the Dene (Athabaskan) languages by combining elements of literary criticism and linguistic anthropology. The task is huge, but Spencer demonstrates both the richness of the subject matter and the potential of the method, coining intriguing theoretical concepts such as “animal deixis” and “narrative revitalization” along the way. The latter is a particularly useful notion, and perhaps represents Spencer’s core ethical message: that, as Dene communities across North America fight to restore vitality to their languages and cultures, traditional animal stories may aid the "revitalization of humans and animals in the way the identities and relationships of both are articulated in the languages and in the narrative patterns" (9). I take this to mean that the cycles of rebirth seen in many animal stories—what Spencer calls their "reincarnational message" (48)—might be recapitulated at the level of culture itself, in what Spencer calls a "deictic shift," a frequent theme of the book. This is one of many areas where the near-total absence of contemporary Dene voices is felt—there is little dialog with or citation of the many Dene people currently striving to carry this revitalization out—but the message itself is strong and well taken.
Another absence in Telling Animals is that of the dissertation’s first (and, in my view, best) chapter, on the work of Métis/Chipewyan storyteller François Mandeville, which in the book is replaced with a rumination on birdsong and onomatopoeia. Here, Spencer channels Anthony Webster's work on emergent unities of sound and meaning in Navajo, but with a much more far-reaching theoretical conclusion: a Dene alternative to the Hegelian dialectic, based on fours rather than threes (48-49). Though much has been made of organization by fours in indigenous American narratives—including by Hymes, the Scollons, and others—it is worth pointing out, that, even in the stories Spencer examines, it is not universal. Dena'ina narratives, for example, display a marked preference for three. This might have prompted Spencer to greater caution in formulating her "Dene" dialectical idealism. Moreover, the sound symbolisms Spencer highlights in this chapter all appear to be drawn from her own intuition and from relationships observed by lexicographers. This marks a key difference between her approach and that of ethnographically grounded authors like Webster. Since this is a work of literary criticism, its primary subject is and should be texts, but the kinds of claims made here would stand up better with the support of testimony from actual speakers of the languages concerned.
The second chapter, which examines a small set of porcupine, beaver, and lynx stories from Dena’ina writer Peter Kalifornsky, dispenses with bold theoretical claims in favor of lyrical observation. Here Spencer builds an interesting commentary on Dena'ina use of bones as devices for divination and reincarnation, relating these to Kalifornsky’s own philosophy of language. But once again there is an important absence: Spencer makes only a single minor reference to Kalifornsky’s collaboration with Katherine McNamara, which constitutes one of the largest and richest bodies of interpretive commentary by any Dene culture-bearer. As a result, this chapter is intriguing but tantalizing. Spencer muses, "It is, in fact, terribly easy to break textualized orature [i.e. oral literature] against one's interpretive tools. Yet bone is more difficult to break than breath, where bone is the story and breath my reading of it" (67). This ethos informs a more moderate approach to theory that makes this chapter much more convincing than the first. Here Spencer claims that, rather than shoehorn Kalifornsky's stories into theoretical categories, "I want to sit and just take a look" (67). This marks a welcome change from other chapters, where a good deal of breakage does take place. Bones, especially those that have felt the strains of (colonial) history, can turn out to be quite brittle, while the air of breath bends around almost anything.
The third chapter is in many ways the book’s heart, and it is to the material presented here that Spencer returns most often in the conclusion. It deals with a Dene Dháh (South Slavey) wolverine story told by Elisse Ahnassay and published in Moore and Wheelock’s 1994 collection, Wolverine Myths and Visions. It is here that the concepts of “animal deixis” and “animal grammar”—Spencer’s frameworks for treating animals not just as characters or literary devices, but as organizing principles of discourse and revitalization—emerge most clearly, through a discussion of one of the most remarked-upon features of Dene languages: the highly contextual alternations in their third-person pronominal systems. In these systems, animacy "hierarchies" are often contextually determined, and animals can be marked grammatically as "human" in key moments of stories. Observing that speech is often a marker of these transformational moments, Spencer invokes a notion of "soundscape" to connect animacy shifts to music and sound symbolism, stating, "animals are not divided from us because they are... inarticulate…. In fact, they are instead highly articulate, and in this, divided from us—but nonetheless in communication with us for the purpose of spiritual as well as physical sustenance" (95). The contextual nature of the human-animal divide rings true for many Dene story traditions, but a more thorough engagement with the substantial literature on Dene pronominal syntax might have helped to bring this chapter's sometimes extravagant claims down to earth.
A refreshing aspect of the book is its joyful writing style. Theory is neither dull nor dry for Spencer, whose delight at putting such thinkers as Derrida, Bakhtin, and Levi-Strauss into dialog with Ahnassay, Kalifornsky, and other storytellers is at times exhilarating. However, much of the book seems rather raw. Spencer strives to pull together many disparate threads, from languages and cultures spread across thousands of miles and millennia of history, a fact which by no means negates their deep shared heritage, but which does demand to be somehow accounted for. Ultimately, there is perhaps a shared narrative ethos across the vast Dene region, and in her attention to the contextually shifting relationship between human and animal, Spencer hits on many crucial aspects of it. Yet much remains to be done. Telling Animals is a step down a promising trail, and if those of us who share Spencer's interest can allow ourselves to follow the lead of Dene people, we may find it takes us somewhere interesting.
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[Review length: 1070 words • Review posted on October 21, 2023]