Many Stories To Tell is an eminently engaging and erudite work of folklore scholarship, bringing to text a collection of thirty-six stories from the Yup’ik tradition. This is the second book in a series funded by Calista Education and Culture via a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to produce bilingual books of traditional narratives from the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta.
The stories are garnered largely from the audio tapes made by Ann Fiennup-Riordan during her fieldwork in the 1980s and early 1990s, mostly on Nelson Island. This material is supplemented by more recent tapings beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s. The stories themselves are presented in bilingual format, with exceptional fidelity to the field recordings themselves. This is fantastic, raw, narrative data, and as a folklorist, I think I gained the most insight from the narrators’ side comments, such as when they made asides to the audience, or admitted gaps in their knowledge, or—perhaps best of all—when they realized they had left out important information that should have been covered earlier in the timeline. These “mistakes” give first-hand, emic accounts of what should be, and how narratives should be told, perhaps more clearly than any other way. Several tales are repeated, which provides an excellent view of the variation and elasticity in the oral tradition.
Further, the bilingual presentation of the source material also substantiates this work as a serious work of folklore scholarship, rather than a “retelling” of tales for popular consumption. This bilingual presentation is also a very helpful resource for Yup’ik language learners, teachers, and educational programs, in addition to the profound cultural lessons that the tales provide.
The book is comprised of three main elements: the introductory materials, the bilingually presented stories, and the photographs and supporting materials which help enrich the main offerings.
The introduction deserves special mention, as it provides a wonderfully detailed yet concise overview of Yup’ik culture, language, history, and scholarship, helping to situate the stories in terms of the Yup’ik language and culture. For example, the author remarks that “Animals are not mere resources but co-inhabitants in a sentient universe viewed as responsive to human thought, word, and deed” (12).
The implications of such a belief system are brought forward in thoughtful detail in the introduction, ranging from the mundane (the hunter who fed a raven, and was later led by the raven to a bearded seal [16]) to the numinous: “Many stories describe humans encountering animals in human form and learning from them, being cared for by them, and sometimes marrying them” (21).
These interactions form the largest part of the material, weaving in and out of daily life. As such, this book also has special appeal to those working with the concept of posthumanism, as it provides in great detail the vastly foreign way that Yup’ik society has considered the topic of the numinous quality life on earth. Not only are humans and animals constantly interacting and changing forms, but they are also constantly enmeshed in ethical and spiritual relations with each other, the fabric of which constitutes the basic positioning of ethics as a whole for Yup’ik society.
Also included are several tales of the ircenrraat, the supernatural “others” of the Yup’ik world. This makes sense, since although ircenrraat often appear as (usually small) people, they also appear quite frequently in animal form and also frequently shift between the two. At times, the ircenrraat seem to play a special role in mediating between the human and animal worlds, via their ability to appear in either form. The details in this work given to the ircenrraat are particularly noteworthy: the ircenrraat may reveal people’s futures; they may provide songs to people; time seems to move differently in their world; they are mostly connected with the underground. Besides the ircenrraat, the “spirit helpers” or tuunrat, are also discussed, particularly in regards to the practice of shamanism, which is, not surprisingly, richly detailed in several stories.
Many of these stories have seen print elsewhere, and as such this work provides a great opportunity for witnessing the variations implicit in folk discourse. Of particular interest to me was the inclusion of a version of the widespread “Dog Husband” tale. Here, the tale is told as an ancestral tale of Nunivak, yet in much of the wider Eskimo world, the story often forms a part of the Sedna (goddess of the sea) origin story. This is the longest story in the collection, and richest in detail. The graphic details of the dog mating with the woman in public are given in full, alongside the acknowledgment that the topic is viewed by contemporary Western culture as “shameful.”
My few critiques are minor. As a folklorist, I wish that each story were presented alongside the detailed context in which it was performed. Secondly, the author translates qulirat (“distant-time stories”) as legends or traditional tales, in spite of noting that many are origin stories—the translation of which is usually “myths,” yet this word is completely absent from the collection. Lastly, the format of the book, with its fidelity to the oral performance and repetitions of some stories, while excellent for scholarship, might present difficulties for the general reader.
In conclusion, this book is an important addition to Yup’ik scholarship, with relevance emanating outwards generally into Eskimo, Native American, and global Indigenous scholarship. It is also an excellent example of folklore done right. Finally, it is valuable as an important documentation of the variety of ways in which cultures have considered their ethical and spiritual relationship to life on earth. As such it joins a growing corpus of works which, in light of the ongoing ecocide, grows ever more important by the day.
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[Review length: 951 words • Review posted on May 6, 2019]