The Koasati (also known as Coushatta) are a Muskhogean-speaking American Indian people who nowadays reside primarily in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma. Formerly a part of the Creek Confederacy, they once lived in the Tennessee Valley, but with removal of other Native southeasterners to Indian Territory in the mid-nineteenth century, they made their way to their present locations. Currently their population numbers about 1500 people. In 1910 John R. Swanton, who did fieldwork among many southeastern Indian groups, recorded narratives from Koasati storytellers in the indigenous language. Some of these were included (only in translation, though) in Swanton’s anthology of southeastern tales published in 1929. A decade after Swanton’s book came out, Mary R. Haas spent a brief period in Louisiana and recorded some Koasati traditional narratives, none of which apparently were published. Yale University graduate student Lyda Paz-Taylor recorded a few stories in the 1930s, but only English texts have survived. Except for the work of these fieldworkers, very little research has been done on Koasati verbal art, so Geoffrey D. Kimball’s volume of materials translated from Swanton’s and Haas’s publications and manuscripts, and of stories which he and others recorded on tape beginning in the 1970s, is an important addition to the library of texts and translations of Native American verbal art.
The researchers recorded the stories in this collection between 1910 and 1992. Kimball divides them into two major categories. “Mythological Narratives” includes rabbit stories, most of which focus on the familiar southeastern manifestation of Trickster; origin tales, a rubric for creation myths and other etiological accounts, not all of which are regarded with high seriousness; and monster stories, an almost obsolete genre that relates encounters between humans and threatening forest creatures. The other kinds of Koasati stories which Kimball places in this category are animal tales, the expected stories of anthropomorphic creatures; medicine origin tales, poorly represented in the contemporary storytelling repertoire because many of the medicinal substances whose etiology they explain are no longer used; and Christian tales, retellings of Bible stories in Koasati as well as other narratives which emphasize the Christianity that has been the principal Koasati faith since the influenza epidemic of the late 1910s.
“Semihistorical Narratives,” Kimball’s other category, consists of encounter stories, war stories, and miscellaneous historical stories. Koasati accounts of first meeting with Europeans seem to be borrowings from other American Indian traditions since references to arrival of ships, which the landlocked Koasati could not have witnessed, figure prominently in these stories. Kimball also presents a narrative about the origin of the name Koasati and a sketchy account of the history of African Americans, whom the Koasati never owned as slaves. Though the historical bases for some of them may be tenuous, “War Stories” includes several accounts of armed hostilities in the early-nineteenth century between the Koasati and either Tonkawas or Comanches. A final, brief section, “Other Semihistorical Stories,” includes material whose content did not neatly fit into Kimball’s other categories.
A brief introduction introduces each of the book’s sections. Kimball also provides a preface to each story text in which he identifies collector and storyteller, cites date and method of recording, and comments on a variety of issues, including similarities to and differences from other narratives in southeastern traditions and any special relationship the storyteller may have with the material. A Koasati text with a faithful though readable translation in parallel presentation is rendered ethnopoetically. Kimball assumes that Koasati verbal art is poetic, and he follows Dell Hymes’s practice of basing his versifications of the material, for the most part, on grammatical markers. If the story came from Swanton’s or Haas’s collection, Kimball makes emendations in the transcription. Then a textual commentary which offers insights primarily into literary matters and cultural references concludes each presentation.
Generally speaking, Kimball’s approach to presenting the material is exemplary. However, I wish he had indicated paralinguistic devices used by the narrators for the material for which he had tape-recorded originals. Perhaps the typographic manipulations pioneered by Dennis Tedlock would be too distracting, but some idea of whether storytellers varied vocal dynamics, tempo, and timbre and dramatized the narrations through gestures and facial expressions would provide a more complete sense of performance. More information about performance situations would also be useful: who besides storyteller and linguist were present, and the kind of responses which the stories elicited from those who heard them, for example. Kimball does occasionally provide such information but not as frequently as many readers might like. More consistent and thorough comparative information would help readers to contextualize the Koasati material into general traditions of storytelling throughout the Native Southeast and elsewhere. I would also like to have had a brief general introduction providing an overview of Koasati history and ethnography.
None of these suggestions, though, should take away from what Kimball has accomplished. He has performed an invaluable service for students of orally expressed verbal art by documenting a corpus of well-translated, well-presented texts from a community that has been underrepresented in the available literature. Koasati Traditional Narratives is an extremely valuable addition to the library of resources on folklore, literature, and American Indian studies.
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[Review length: 855 words • Review posted on April 20, 2011]