Reading the fire : the traditional Indian literatures of America / Jarold Ramsey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ramsey, Jarold, 1937-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Folk literature, Indian--West (U.S.)--History and criticism.

Indian literature--West (U.S.)--History and criticism.

Indian literature.

Folk literature, Indian.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 332 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

Revised and expanded.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, [1999]

Summary:

Reading the Fire engages America's "first literatures," traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.

Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.

Contents:

1 Creations and Origins 3

2 Coyote and Friends: An Experiment in Interpretive Bricolage 25

3 The Poetry and Drama of Healing: The Iroquoian Condolence Ritual and the Navajo Night Chant 47

4 From Mythic to Fictive in a Nez Perce Orpheus Myth 69

5 "The Hunter Who Had an Elk for a Guardian Spirit," and the Ecological Imagination 81

6 The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives 96

7 Uncursing the Misbegotten in a Tillamook Incest Story 115

8 Genderic and Racial Appropriation in Victoria Howard's "The Honorable Milt" 139

9 Simon Fraser's Canoe; or, Capsizing into Myth 159

10 Fish-Hawk and Other Heroes 170

11 Retroactive Prophecy in Western Indian Narrative 194

12 The Bible in Western Indian Mythology 208

13 Ti-Jean and the Seven-headed Dragon: Instances of Native American Assimilation of European Folklore 222

14 Francis La Flesche's "The Song of Flying Crow" and the Limits of Ethnography 237

15 Tradition and Individual Talents in Modern Indian Writing 252.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-323) and index.

ISBN:

0295977876

OCLC:

40752829