Brian Swann’s Sky Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song is an impressive survey of Native American oral forms. He amasses a broad assemblage of North American storytelling wherein the authors embed their offerings in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and poetics. The contributors preface their stories with introductions and varying levels of analysis before offering their translations. The stories come from all over North America, with the majority originating from the Great Plains and the West Coast. Many of these texts have circulated in other publications over the last hundred years. Among the writers included are such well-known figures as Dell Hymes, Ives Goddard, Ann Fienup-Riordan, John Beinhorst, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer. Early in his introduction Swann declares that he wants an “accurate, attractive, and authentic translation by people specializing in the language and culture under attention.” Additionally, he wants these stories to be seen as art. His hand-picked choices for Sky Loom honor his objectives and offer a worthy contribution to a broad range of studies.
A few entries stand out, as does Judith Berman’s “Oolachan-Woman’s Robe: Fish, Blankets, Masks, and Meaning in Boas’s Kwakw’ala Texts.” Her chapter is dense and engaged, perhaps the keenest analysis in this volume. She discusses Boas’s history with the Kwakiutl, his interpretation and translation of their tales, and her own involvement with the language, which results in a new translation of the tale she has chosen to present. Berman’s chapter, my favorite entry, is placed near the beginning of Swann’s book, so I thought it would set the standard for the remainder of the volume. She counters the thesis of Claude Lévi-Strauss that it is unnecessary to read mythology in the original or even to have a good translation because the internal structure will be revealed even in synopsis. Berman demonstrates how it is necessary to comprehend the nuances of language, and shows how culture is embedded within language. She also questions Boas’s knowledge of Kwakiutl and Northwest cultures, arguing that Boas’s translation of this tale is a distortion of Kwakiutl reality (31). She provides examples of what she calls Boas’s hubris from his letters: he claimed to know more about the Kwakiutl than they know about themselves. She presents her case with such respect that, in the end, I continue to hold Boas in high regard despite the arrogance she finds in his statements.
Berman’s contribution to this volume serves as a reminder that scholars working on oral narrative need to have a good grasp of the language. Moreover, to understand wordplay and cultural concepts, we need to have some knowledge of worldview, and language is the tool required to obtain these insights. It is difficult to evaluate a compendium like Swann’s Sky Loom as it requires readers to possess a decent understanding of linguistics, folklore, and anthropology, and to know something about the numerous cultures discussed and a wide array of topics. The reader must know something about the history of the people as well as the academic perspectives presented, or simply accept whatever the authors present. Some of Swann’s selections are difficult to follow because the authors attempt to present an authentic, traditional point of view, often in a word-for-word translation from the original language. With some of the theory-driven chapters, I found myself caught between the Lévi-Straussian position that readers only need a limited purview and the argument for the detailed original language.
A concern I have with some of the selections, which can be generalized to the realm of cultural studies, arises when contributors compare their entries with the Greek prototype of the European oral tradition. These Native American tales, in my opinion, should stand as a literature on their own, and should not be compared to Western oral and written art forms.
Reading Swann’s introduction, I expected the text to be a heavy-handed academic exercise from beginning to end. The book starts off heavy on theory but ends with mostly light linguistic analysis of the language and brief portraits of past ethnographic research. Sky Loom does not follow a unified organization, since each entry is unique and brings a different take on translation, interpretation, and presenting Native tales. Judith Berman’s contribution and Julian Rice’s “Narrative Styles in Lakota Texts” serve as excellent examples of interweaving linguistics and cultural studies into a deeper understanding of a people’s worldview. Rice’s “Narrative Styles in Lakota Texts” comes off as audacious as Rice, a second-language learner of Lakota, corrects Ella Deloria’s translation of the Lakota story, “White Plume.” He attributes the shortcomings in Deloria’s translation to her Boasian theoretical orientation, since she has familiarity with Lakota language and culture. I found his critique to be problematic, and it made me question Rice’s authority on a subject area that he acquired as an adult.
Ives Goddard’s “Winter Stories” offers a good explanation of how Meskwaki differs from English, and this entry displays a realistic, though perhaps limited, view of language. He discusses the Meskwaki hero, Wa Wa Pikiahsemit, but cannot decide if the root—wa pekuahs—connects to one of two very distinctive cultural items (434).
Overall, each chapter presents a different set of criteria to work with; even the role of Native people varies from chapter to chapter, featuring either Native authors or non-Native authors relying on secondary sources.
Because of the great diversity in approach and content, this text as a whole or selected chapters could serve as an excellent resource for folklore and linguistic undergraduate courses and graduate seminars. I do not know if I achieved a deeper understanding of what Brian Swann had hoped to convey to his audience, but I did enjoy reading these tales and the research around them. I found myself returning to the anthology day after day with joy and curiosity for what I might next uncover in its pages.
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[Review length: 966 words • Review posted on April 29, 2015]