The “Blind Man and the Loon” is a complex, alluring folktale, and one could easily, gladly, and productively lose one’s way within it. Clearly, Craig Mishler, with his forty-three years and more of devoted work with this tale from Inuit and Native arctic worlds, has done just that. The result is this “biograph[y]” (xx) of a tale that makes a vital contribution to folk-narrative research. Arguing that the tale is “an archive of late prehistoric and early historic Indian and Eskimo cultures,” Mishler sets out to “reopen the story to its many ethnographic, linguistic, and biographical contexts” (xxii, xxiv), and he certainly succeeds.
The preface offers a version of the tale, hand-recorded by Moravian Brethren missionaries in Labrador in the early 1800s: when a polar bear comes to their winter house, a mother helps her blind son take aim. He kills the bear, but his mother tells him he missed. She takes her daughter to their tent and tells her not to give her brother any meat, but the girl sneaks food to her brother, Kimungak. Two loons hear his cries and dive into water with him several times, and he regains his sight. Feigning blindness, he returns. When his mother discovers he can see, he takes her to the edge of the sea, uses her as a beluga float, and harpoons a beluga. As the beluga swims off, it drags the mother into the sea. She is transformed into a beluga.
In chapter 1, Mishler presents the morphology of the tale and argues for its being considered an AT[U] tale type. Mishler identifies two major subtypes (the “Eskimo subtype” of the high Arctic; the “Indian subtype” of the Subarctic, Northwest Coast, the Plains, and Great Basin) and eight oicotypes. Through a detailed discussion of the oicotypes, Mishler presents the similarities and the variations within the tale type. Using archaeological and linguistic research, Mishler suggests a possible region for the tale’s “early development” (18), and he maps out possible routes for its migration eastward and southward. His focus, though, is not on origins, but rather on the “larger questions . . . who told it and who recorded it under what circumstances, and what is its underlying power and its appeal to the people who tell it?” (3).
Mishler’s balanced viewpoint emerges here and continues throughout his book. When Mishler proposes his oicotypes, for example, he makes sure to discuss those variants which do not fit smoothly into his schema (10). Mishler consistently respects what cannot be known and acknowledges the limits of research.
Mishler uncovers how the variants of the tale available today found their way into writing and then into print, in chapter 2. His detailed histories of such men as Hinrich Rink, Danish geologist and government administrator in Greenland, Franz Boas, and Knud Rasmussen, the “master collector” of the tale, an explorer-anthropologist born of a Danish missionary and Greenlandic mother, provide a case study of textual practices, vital for discussions of folklore practice today. He briefly explores why missionaries, early explorers, administrators, and geologists collected the tales, and ends with a discussion of “semi-literary” texts that offers a compelling—and balanced—critique of writers who see oral traditions as “a common-pool resource . . . no longer recognized and respected as the private property of the storyteller, of the community, or of the indigenous tribal group they came from” (43).
Declaring in chapter 3 that the full list of collectors of the tale “reads like a Who’s Who” of Danish, French, North American, and French-Canadian arctic anthropology (50), Mishler selects several collectors and pairs them with their storytellers. He reveals the attitudes of the collectors, and gives biographies and photographs of the storytellers. In the section on Rasmussen, for example, Mishler declares the explorer to be one of the first to recognize Inuit storytelling as an art form and discusses the storytellers he learned from, including Ivaluardjuk (Iglulik Eskimo, Repulse Bay) and Netsit (Copper Inuit).
Chapter 4, the keystone chapter, presents Maggie Gilbert’s 12-minute 1973 telling of “The Blind Man and the Loon” to Mishler in Arctic Village, Alaska. Mishler gives a brief biography of Gilbert (1895 or 96-1983), a Gwich’in Athabaskan. He outlines the performance context and tells of his use of interpreters. Mishler presents the full text of the tale first in Gwich’in, then in English; both are lineated and contain a few words in italics to show volume, stress, and words spoken in another language. Especially important is Mishler’s discussion of the repeated, end-line phrase “they say,” a central practice of Native and Inuit storytellers who use it to signal that they are passing along the “collective voice of the ancestors” (84). Mishler analyzes the tale by discussing the “voices of the characters, the voice of tradition, and Maggie’s own voice” (82), carefully noting that any such interpretation can offer only partial understanding.
In chapter 5, Mishler divides the multitude of “folk art” and “commercial art” that responds to the tale into ten categories, based on eight scenes of tale and on scenes not found in the tale. Through these sculptures, prints, sketches, and wall hangings, Mishler wants to see artists’ “additional ways of reading, hearing, or ‘seeing’ [the tale]” (94). He could, though, also ask more questions of the fine material he has amassed. Why, for example, is the scene that most artists recreate the scene in which the “wicked” mother/grandmother, attached to a harpoon rope, is towed into sea by a harpooned beluga or narwhal or walrus? And more than transformation is being made material in the magnificent Toonoo Sharky sculpture that merges human and loon. Sharky’s work—so reminiscent of the ivory carvings of Earl Mayac of King Island, Alaska, with a hunter’s torso on one end of a body and a seal or walrus torso on the other (Fair 40-41)—points to the total interdependence of people and animals (104).
Chapter 6 is devoted to a discussion of media based on the tale: films, CDs, classical music, a ballet, radio broadcasts, internet pages, and countless stage performances by professional storytellers and actors. Mishler’s critique of the 1949 Canadian film The Loon’s Necklace shines. Mishler documents the complex history of this twelve-minute film. His carefully researched case study shows what a travesty it is that this film’s viewers—over thirty-three million people, including many elementary students—continue to be told that what they are watching is an “authentic” Native traditional tale.
In chapter 7, Mishler asks, Why has the tale traveled so widely and persisted so strongly? He reasons that “it weaves together several themes or tenets of indigenous Native American and First Nations life” (137): importance of subsistence way of life, of sharing food, of support for the handicapped, and the acknowledgement of deep-seated nuclear family conflicts and of the consequences of violating cultural customs and taboos. Mishler discusses several “dimensions” of the tale: ethnographic (bear lore, taboos), symbolic and ecological (loons, water bugs), religious (ritual, shamanism), psychological, social justice (violence, revenge), and Native and Inuit interpretations of the tale. His presentation of ethnographic evidence about arctic people’s treatment of the disabled contributes to the growing field of Disability Studies.
Mishler has surely opened up the world of this tale and brought its tellers into better view, and several changes and additions would contribute to these goals of his. He wisely opens the book with a version of the tale, but as I read through the first three chapters—and especially the chapter on storytellers, I would have liked to have more story texts available among those pages. And, if chapter 3 could be organized by the tellers and their texts rather than the collectors, storytelling would be highlighted. Also, placing the Gwich’in and the English versions of Maggie Gilbert’s tale on facing pages would better enable non-Gwich’in speakers to experience the Gwich’in language, with its poetics and rhythms. Mishler’s discussion of the tale would benefit from comparing it with several Native / Inuit tales that take up similar issues. “The Cormorant Hunters” told by Frank Ellanna of King Island and the (untitled) Yup’ik tale of a seal hunter and his wife told by Elsie Mather, for example, also dramatize family conflicts and the tragedies that occur when hunting customs are violated. Finally, Mishler notes the open-ended nature of the story of the blind man and the loon (153), and more could be written about the tale’s provocative ambiguities, especially those in Gilbert’s telling, where her reflexive asides and questions seem to zero in on major questions and dilemmas that the tale poses and does not answer.
As a writer, Mishler adopts a strategy of asking many questions he does not answer: “Is it matricide or something more benign?” (4); “Could this tale then be a coming-of-age story?” (141). He often prefaces his interpretations with phrases such as “it would seem that” (145) and “[this world view] allows a peek at” (144). And he usually offers several possible interpretations, as he does when discussing symbolic meanings of the loon (144). Through such writerly moves, Mishler shows respect for the storytellers, and he signals his recognition of his own partial knowledge. If Mishler would discuss his writing strategies, as a white man writing about and working collaboratively with Inuit and Native people, he would be contributing to the important study of non-indigenous/indigenous collaboration, such as the essay by Elsie Mather and Phyllis Morrow where they discuss their writing process and the dilemma of what to say, how to say it, and what, out of respect to Yup’ik culture-bearers, to omit.
Craig Mishler’s The Blind Man and the Loon makes a fine classroom text and provides a model for scholars writing on traditional narrative. The appendices offer never-before-published tale versions, including those collected by Knud Rasmussen in Greenlandic and English, and much more. And the gracious tributes in his acknowledgements are not to be missed: they read like a bright ribbon through a research labyrinth. Craig Mishler surely shows us that “The Blind Man and the Loon” is, as he says, “a bright thing of wonder in our social galaxy” (156). And his life’s labor, this book on the study of a single tale, is not far behind.
Works Cited
Fair, Susan. 1985. “Alaska Native Arts and Crafts.” Alaska Geographic Quarterly 12, No. 3.
Mather, Elsie P., and Phyllis Morrow. 2001. “‘There Are No More Words to the Story’: Yupik Traditional Stories.” In Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation, 200-242. Edited by Larry Evers and Barre Toelken. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Kaplan, Lawrence, ed., assistant editor Margaret Yocom, and collectors and translators Margaret Seeganna and Gertrude Analoak. 1988. Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit: King Island Tales. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, Alaska Native Language Center.
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[Review length: 1776 words • Review posted on December 17, 2014]