(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns, Masters Candidate
Copyright claimed 2006
Abstract
This socio-political examination explores some of the consequences of viewing Indigenous oral narratives and traditions within the textual-based Academy. More specifically, I will look at the relationship between mainstream academics and Indigenous communities. Some considerations from oral traditions forwarded within Indigenous scholarship are shared that may improve the crosscultural relationships between students of religion and Indigenous communities. I investigate how crosscultural scholarship forwards misinformation by viewing “oral texts” through Christian filters and argue that pedagogical and methodological analyses are needed that will allow mainstream academics to familiarize themselves with Indigenous scholarship while also creating relationships with Indigenous academics to defamiliarize Christian exempla. This can open up dialogue between theoretical knowledge as found within university settings and the practice of community wisdom in oral traditions that will promote alternative crosscultural perspectives and research processes that truly are intracultural and representative of a globalized society.
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For centuries, European traders, explorers and missionaries recorded their ideas about the ‘Indians’[i] of North America in trade logs, expedition journals and letters. Alongside the reports about expansive unexplored lands came descriptions of contact with ‘primitive’ peoples that were described to have characteristics different from the European ‘civilized’ Christians. [ii] The standard view was that any human traits seen by the European immigrants was overshadowed by the uncivilized manner by which these ‘pagans’ lived their lives without religion. As James Axtell states, these primary documents “reflected (the writers’) sociopolitical goals and their own cultural biases, thereby refracting or warping to some extent whatever they saw.”[iii] This was standard ethnography at the time; anthropological methods were not institutionalized as a discipline as they are in contemporary times. These written reports are filled with colonial assumptions formed on a binary classification habit created from the Christian contact with ‘pagan’ peoples in Europe, Africa, and Central Asia that justified the colonization of foreign lands.
The inhumane descriptions presented Indians in terms of what they lacked as opposed to what Europeans had in their Christianized, civil ways. Christians had literacy and the ‘savages’ were illiterate, or, more in keeping with the beliefs (or maybe idealized hopes) of the Christians, pre-literate. Without literacy and a religious book, the ‘heathens’ had no religion.[iv]
Binary Universalisms in the Social Sciences
Many social and religious categories were already well established and could be drawn on as economic trade succeeded and more Christians immigrated to the Americas. The Christians had scripture while the Indians had myths, legends, and folklore. These were collected for and studied by European academics, first in Europe exclusively until academic settings were established in the Americas and Indigenous physical materials were collected under the guise of salvage anthropology.[v] “Salvage ethnography” was a method started by Bronislaw Malinowski who believed that anthropologists must “study and record cultural diversity threatened by westernization.”[vi] At around the same time Indian industrial and residential schools began to Christianize and nationalize the First Nations’ youth,[vii] and the government of Canada produced cultural prohibition and assimilation legislation that promoted cultural genocide for Indigenous communities.[viii]
First Nations[ix] activities and beliefs were compared with other European folk religions and together were categorized as nature religions [x] that would soon be extinct. The pagan cultural beliefs were expected to follow the same course as those of other primitive societies, such as the Irish and Scottish, through assimilation into the culture of the ‘people of the book.’
Myth was originally studied in the realm of humanities charged to understand social civilization, while science was created to conquer the physical world. With the expansion of European monarchies around the world and the recognition of the diversity of humanity beyond a western geographical perspective, the social sciences were organized to collect and manage the social bodies of information in such a way as to mimic the hard sciences while still providing support for the socio-political and economic capitalist gains of the European monarchies. If the physical world is conquered by scientific explanation, then the pattern of human conquest can be furthered by scientific research in social Darwinism as well. [xi]
Justification models, those that supported the actions and activities of European conquest, polarized the differences of “pre-contact and uncivilized” societies with a notion of the ideal “civilized” societies being that of the Eurodescendent immigrants that settled in North America representing the pinnacle of social development based on a racialized “evolution theory.”[xii] Objectification was valued in academic research in order to maintain theoretical distance between the civilized researcher and the uncivilized ‘social objects’ observed in their “subjectivity” to see how best to assimilate them into the mainstream. The oppositional models could be simplified into a chart of assumptions, not exhaustive but instructive, such as
| Civilized | Uncivilized |
| literate | illiterate |
| book religions | nature religions |
| scripture | myths |
| liturgy | rituals |
| education | storytelling |
| science | memory |
| written words | spoken words |
| material culture | survival culture |
Some of these assumptions are still seen in the labels used for both species and genus levels of social scientific classification structures in various disciplines that deal with crosscultural knowledge. While political legislation decentralized Indigenous groups in order to assimilate individuals, academic scholarship decontextualized Indigenous cultural objects and practices from their communal relationships. These cultural objects included oral stories institutionalized through textual academic discourses that collected, transcribed and translated, in other words, academically remade these stories into Eurocultural products by and for Eurocultural peoples on and about Indigenous people.[xiii] With the voices and oral structures of Indigenous people silenced, their cultural objects were compared, contrasted, and analyzed with and against ‘Other-associated’ data retrieved from colonial contexts all over the world, based on and defined by the Christian model of religion.
These material objects were studied not to highlight the distinct nature of Indigenous cultures, but to help in the identity formation and rationalization of Eurodescendent nation-building and colonial rights. These interpretations situated and created a linear historical narrative, that of the one pre-civilized culture modernized and soon to be expanded into a ‘global village.’ Subjected to objectification and altered in meaning and their ability to transmit knowledge, Indigenous people and their cultural objects were categorized within these types of Eurocultural academic frameworks, with Christian values driving the move from physical expansion to intellectual conquest.[xiv]
Unfortunately, the mainstream categories based on the influence of Christian philosophies continues to create the matrix of secular academic classification systems that have not been as “defamiliarized” from the Christian perspective as is expected when dealing with crosscultural data.[xv] The eurocultural academic community retains its privilege while all other cultural phenomena continue to be assimilated and appropriated to support that privilege and are defamiliarized from the contexts of Indigenous populations.
Indigenous Scholarship and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS)
The history of Indigenous people and their culture’s ability to withstand physical ethnocide and cultural genocide creates an empowerment model that is tapped into by Indigenous scholars around the world and stands as testimony to the tenacity and flex-ability of the diverse oral structures[xvi] of Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). As Chief Dan George from British Columbia states in his Lament for Confederation:
Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of white man’s success---his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. Before I follow the great chiefs who have gone before us, Oh Canada, I shall see these things come to pass.[xvii]
John Friesen, a EuroCanadian scholar at the University of Calgary, recognizes that it was First Nations’ groups that created and maintained the first educational institutions in Canada, with their “reliance on oral tradition (that) developed the first effective means of transferring valued cultural knowledge to succeeding generations in North America.”[xviii] This recognition is secondary to the self-affirmation that Indigenous scholars create within their ethnically and geographically diverse communities and within the mainstream Academy. Yet there is a glass wall between mainstream institutions and their indigenous studies faculties. Indigenous scholars do not write for the acknowledgment of mainstream disciplines and academics since many recognize that “outside researchers were not interested in all kinds of knowledge, (but) remain specifically interested in knowledge that parallels the western scientific discipline.”[xix] Instead, alternative research methods are used that explores how writing can be utilized as an extension of the oral framework of the IKS and in service to the Indigenous communities.
IKS (Indigenous Knowledge Systems) is an international term that recognizes the variety of geographically-distinct structures of knowing the world that are created, maintained and utilized by various Indigenous populations around the world.[xx] It is a political term that Indigenous academics have created to affirm that, while there are many differences between the various linguistic groups that are “native” to specific geographical areas, there is a similar socio-political need to organize together against the globalized village identity politics that further oppresses the marginalized. The international term, IKS, also highlights that notions and preferences of orality and structures that support orality are a common ground of transnational and “global ingenuity” shared by this marginalization of Indigenous voices within the textual document-based campaign of socio-political nationalism.[xxi] Oral traditions were commonly seen by the mainstream traditions as unreliable, and at best, pre-literate historical positions to the invention of the printing press. The printing press created an ideological shift from the reliance on memory by small tribes and clans to a “false security” in the “printed page … as constituting a provable record, even a legal foundation by which to affect future developments. Now it was possible to refer to recordings of past happenings”[xxii] and move from the ‘situational thought’ used in tribal and clan cohesion to ‘abstract thought’ that created identities of nationalism.
These ideas of nationalism originally excluded voices such as First Nations in Canada. Indigenous scholarship, ethnic studies, International programs and movements in universities attempt to rectify this situation by the use of the “‘space between’ old stories and contemporary experiences (that) allows for creative possibilities to emerge.”[xxiii] Neal McLeod, a Cree-Swedish scholar, writes that Indigenous scholars are fulfilling the prophecy of Chief Dan George, mentioned earlier, one voice along with many other leaders and Elders from various linguistic groups:
Today, we are adopting written forms of Cree narratives (both in Cree and English), and use writing to supplement our “hearing” these narratives. Within Cree narrative memory, there is the story of mistânaskowêw which deals with the origin of the syllabic writing system for Cree. When mistânaskowêw is taken to the Creator’s Sun Dance Lodge, he is told by the Creator that “he will be given syllabics so that the Crees in the future, when the language is threatened, will have something to remember their language” (Dion Tootoosis, personal communication 1998). Syllabics were compared to “medicine”; they were imbued with spiritual power (ibid.). Consequently, there is within Cree collective knowing a narrative embracing and foretelling the use of a written form of the language.[xxiv]
Indigenous scholars highlight the previously unheard stories ‘between’ the various Euro-historical textual records; they deconstruct the polarized boundaries constructed in the comparative method applied to crosscultural knowledge and its interpretation in historical formats.[xxv] This story of Cree syllabics as “medicine” given by the Creator, a pictorial text-based language that retains the oral sounds and structures of spoken Cree, is an example of the ability of oral traditions to fuse situational relationships into its dynamic holism. This story is an example of how oral traditional knowledge enters into Indigenous scholarship and shows alternative ways in which to deconstruct categories; the story clarifies how intentions are at work behind the research procedures and processes, even in the design of the research questions. Rather than questions formatted to fit comparison endeavours, such as “why or how”[xxvi] or when, Indigenous scholars see research questions in a layered contextual format of the ‘who,’ the various people within the research process who tell stories, transcribe, write, and interpret the object of research, and the dynamic situation of ‘what’ is being interpreted in and out of the object’s contextual relationship to those who have an original relationship to it.
Social Location is Sacred Narrative
A common response of First Nations people to research questions about their cultural context is to tell stories, which may be life experience stories or stories that resonate with tradition. Even though there is much humor embedded in these stories, they are to be taken seriously. First Nations peoples’ stories told for teaching/learning purposes are not anecdotes waiting to be told to eager listeners. To relegate First Nations stories to an anecdotal level is to show disrespect. First Nations peoples’ stories are shared with the expectation that the listeners will make their own meaning, that they will be challenged to learn something from the stories.[xxvii]
While many mainstream scholars view stories, storytelling and real life testimonials as subjective anecdotes that do not belong in academic settings, most Indigenous scholars see these life experiences as the only way to teach, through experiential knowledge. While mainstream academics examine social location when it pertains to the cultural objects and communities under observation, the academic social location of the scholar and her/his research process is not often analyzed and shared with the readership in the publication of her/his research findings. The academic preference of research is textual, whether that is from the beginning to the end of the methodological process or in the concluding results of ethnography and interview methods. To have written personal expressions of social location breaks the academic law of objectivity through distance. One example of a technique that creates scholarly distance is writing as if no person is writing, but an omniscient know-all and see-all ‘expert.’ “I” as a mainstream academic still find it hard to break through my training to distance myself as I write, as seen within my multi-vocal perspectives in this paper, alternating between first person and omniscient perspectives. This style of writing techniques is a perfect, though personal, example of ‘academic lying,’ which infuses and builds upon what Jonathan Z. Smith, a Euroacademic in religious studies at the University of Chicago, calls “disciplinary lying.”[xxviii]
Academic lying would have me not mention any personal context to my “being” a scholar “doing” social scientific research. In articulated honesty, or what can be called a “corporate historical self-consciousness,”[xxix] I am an IrishCanadian scholar who is trained by the nēhiyaw[xxx] (Cree) oral traditions of Treaty Four Territory as well as the academic disciplines of religious studies, psychology and Indigenous studies. My Indigenous studies instructors at First Nations University of Canada (FNUC) are First Nation, Métis and Amerindian people who are grounded within their geographical and familial oral traditional lineages, including Neal McLeod, one of my graduate mentors now located at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He has relabeled Cree oral tradition as “Cree narrative memory” which is “storytelling grounded in history, cultural understanding, and personal relationships.” [xxxi] Neal McLeod emphasizes that what is misunderstood about oral stories is that they are not “completely embedded in a particular situation. Cree narrative memory is an active process dynamically reshaped across time and across generations.”[xxxii]
Essentialism is usually the imposed label when experiential testimonies enter academic debates. Experience is a way of knowing that does not need to hinder the recognition that there are other ways of knowing, as essentialism tends to do. Academic experience recognizes that a scholar brings an unquestioned social “location of privilege” to the reading of a printed text.[xxxiii] Her/his academic social location “is an active process” shaped “across time” that includes her/his life experiences[xxxiv] as s/he matured into adulthood, her/his educational experience, her/his mentorship guidance and influence, and the whole social body of people that created the sources that amassed the bulk of her/his research. Relationships abound that interact within the perceptive lens of the scholar so that her/his reading ability is a communal experience assumed to be an isolated personal experience. While the physical body is isolated from a physical social group and the perceptual skills are focused on the process of reading, much like ritual formats focus perceptual skills while in a social situation, reading involves communities of people in the production of the written works that are read. With the long distance in time and space between the author and reader, it is easy to forget that scholarship is based on relationships of people sharing social locations of power in settings, whether physical or intellectually-constructed, based on class, gender, ethnicity, culture, institution, discipline, theoretics and the like. Also, like rituals that focus individual identity into the collective, reading is usually an activity that is formatted for mass social consumption, unlike the contextual formats of a letter between two friends or a journal entry where the reader and writer are the same.
To return to my discussion of social location from a locative position that expands relationally into the universal; for the last six years I have had a social location within an academic “lived experience.”[xxxv] I work as a student towards my masters’ degree in religious studies, yet still maintain my holistic roles as mother, partner, adopted daughter and sister. Even though my physical body may be isolated from the people that created the texts that informed my research, I have relationships with the people through their ideas in their written communication. I enjoy mentorship relationships that inform which texts to read and how to critically analyze the texts in specific ways. Foundational to my academic career is the experience I arrived with as a mature student with research questions and directions created from my role as a mother in an ethnically blended family. My scholarship is based on the “lived experience”[xxxvi] of biculturalism within my family. As my mentor, Neal McLeod states,
Central to the notion of “lived” experience is the notion that experience is grounded and emerges from people’s experience in the world. Instead of pushing for an objective notion of detachment, “lived” experience embraces subjective experience and the concrete, embedded nature of how human beings live in the world.[xxxvii]
Oral stories are concerned with lived experiences while the textual Academy is more concerned with descriptions of objects, philosophical ideologies, and ordering information in a discursive fashion.[xxxviii] Academic debates and most methods of scholarship are based on argumentatively persuasive power, which works in some research situations to handle the material under study. If I can persuade others of the credibility of my argument through the use of source material, my publications and my speaking abilities, then I am valued in the system and viewed as a successful scholar. Yet, if I was to be ‘argumentatively persuasive’ in a personal one-on-one relationship, psychologists would label me as unhealthy, as being ‘co-dependent’ and abnormally in need of control in the relationship. It is interesting how intellectual generalizations and universal frameworks of regulations allow for relational actions and intentions that would not be acceptable within specific contexts.
This Eurocultural emphasis on the theoretical and structural practice of control in the pedagogical process runs contrary to the value system of IKSs. For example, in “Cree oral history and tradition, Cree elders are engaged in a dialogue: they offer the listener insights and memories. …Through negotiation of the ‘space between’ the Cree elder and the person listening, understanding emerges.”[xxxix]
This type of “negotiation” of lived experience is hard to comprehend within a textual-based academic frame of reference concerning knowledge. Certain elementary knowledge will be shared in an introductory class that may not be truthful in its presentation and complexity, what can be called ‘introductory white lies.’[xl] Specific discourses unfold over time as a student moves within the systematic limitations of courses with prerequisites in place to make sure that students learn at the proper level. Oral traditions, such as Cree narrative memory, negotiate “the space between” the learner and the teacher, in a personal relationship that is as organized as institutional courses of learning, with later storytelling opportunities available where “layers of narratives are unravelled and imbued with more meaning, as various people have more time to reflect upon the potential meaning of the Old Person’s words.”[xli] While the organization of the dissemination of knowledge may be similar, the flexibility of the structure that forms knowledge and transmits it is not. As oral stories are introduced into the academic institution, they become decontextualized from the flexible structures that imbue them with meaning and are disconnected from the people that know how to use the cultural products in the modes of education within which they were developed. While oral stories are seen as communal products of knowledge in service to the community as a whole, systems of regulations are in place to safeguard how and when these are disseminated through respected individuals recognized by the community itself. While texts do not contain such systematic regulations, they are found within the relationships of people. Academically, the most well known of these professional individuals acting in Indigenous communities are Elders, who hold many social roles: “Respected Elders serve as the philosophers, professors and visionaries of a cultural community.”[xlii]
What is not as well known to the academic community is that not all elders are Elders and not all Elders are old people. By this I mean that an individual is critically viewed by the requirements of both the quantity and quality of their lives lived in service to the community and to the cultural traditions as measurements for community respect. As stated within the Guidelines for Respecting Cultural Knowledge,
the identification of ‘Elders’ as culture-bearers is not simply a matter of chronological age, but a function of the respect accorded to individuals in each community who exemplify the values and lifeways of the local culture and who possess the wisdom and willingness to pass their knowledge on to future generations.[xliii]
Knowledge keepers tend to be Elders, but other community members include lodge makers, medicine helpers, and Elders’ helpers who are the Elders’ students-in-training, such as the oskāpēwisak in nēhiyaw (Cree) tradition. Knowledge keepers live within and utilize oral tradition in ways that support the interconnectedness of individuals and their communal relationships. Through oral stories, along with their function within other components of oral tradition such as rituals and ceremonies, the Elders and other professionals build individual identities in their “students” through their relational connections and contexts: “The narrative process is grounded in the notion of wâhkotowin -- kinship. People tell stories to those that they know, those to whom they are related, and those that they trust.”[xliv] The Elders are in relationship with their students and understand how – and when – a student needs direction. Directions are not told as orders, but as suggestions, usually emphasized through repetitions. Neal McLeod expands on both the individual and communal importance of living through narrative stories:
Stories are often told repeatedly in order to impress upon the listener the narrative structure as well as moral imperatives, and also to remind children or grandchildren of how their lives ultimately relate to the stories. People have a moral responsibility to remember. One could say that the survival of nêhiyawak is dependent on people remembering and retelling stories.[xlv]
The individual is given room in the “space between” the storyteller’s story and the listener as s/he actively listens and interprets the story into her/his life; s/he is identifying as both an individual and as part of a collective group in interpretative layers of social belonging. Yet the moral relationships do not end there:
Not only are the storyteller and the audience linked, but nêhiyâwiwin (Cree culture) is also linked to the rest of creation. This is the second level of the meaning of wâhkotowin. People are related to each other, and also related to other beings. nêhiyawak see themselves in the rest of creation, in other beings and in the landscape. There is a general concept of the totality of being within Cree epistemology. A central part of nêhiyâwiwin is to be able to tap into this energy that exists in all living things.”[xlvi]
Individual being, the world, knowledge, memory, understanding, stories and more are all interconnected in a web of relations that begins in the story’s narrative, in the storytelling process that creates an individual’s identity and expands through that individual’s relationships to their place in the universal. Unlike what is taught in mainstream academic courses, there is no polarization between locative and universal,[xlvii] or between the individual and the collective, labelled as “individualistic cultures” and “collectivistic cultures.”[xlviii] Oral tradition emphasizes the social location of each individual through stories that are
anchored in narratives passed through families across generations. Over time, these narratives have been enriched through new layers of understanding and interpretation. nêhiyâwiwin (Cree culture) involves the dialectical play between narratives and how people incorporate them into their lives. With Cree narrative, there is an ongoing dynamic interplay between the past and present: people constantly weave traditional narratives into new experiences.[xlix]
NOTE: At this point in academic writing, I am suppose to tie my introductory description of the student’s relationships in the Academy with the Indigenous notions of educational relationships just explained, and this note does this. Within Indigenous educational structures, the student is responsible to make comparisons of the material given to them and thus be able to think for themselves. It is hard to use this process within academic scholarship, both in classroom settings and within academic written structures, since students expect the “specialist” to do this work for them. Much debate in university settings is around how to have students become more proactive within their educational process. We as Eurocultural scholars and teachers have much to learn from Elders and Indigenous academics.
Religious Studies Scholarship and wāhkotowin
wāhkotowin is a complex notion of relational processes of kinship that expresses itself similarly to quantum physics models of the universe which deals with relational wholes. These scientific theories are not as well known to mainstream social scientists, so are not used as models[l] to reinterpret information. It is the mechanistic and functional scientific explanations used in the hard sciences, such as biological classification structures, that justify redescription of crosscultural information in service to conquest activities.[li] This latter mechanistic paradigm may be somewhat adequate for hard sciences, but creates misinformation when specifics from crosscultural social evidence are isolated from their social contexts. Social scientists within their unchallenged social locations of privilege then give “the assignment of positive or negative valences”[lii] which give credence to the mainstream’s socio-political constructions, but are useless in the pursuit of crosscultural knowledge.[liii]
Various religious phenomena created from different cultural meanings and value systems enter the Eurocultural Academy as objects that are then compared with a specific Christian object named as a “species” within the Christian hierarchal structure. This “species” label is then attributed a higher ranking as a “genus” label in the hierarchal schematic of the researched community, delegating this community’s cultural capital as inferior. This type of classification strategy allows for the observing researcher (and her/his community) to remain unchallenged in her/his/their notions of secularism and the Christian assumptions that infuse and anchor these categories as cultural constructs.[liv]
Take for example the species category, “scripture,” within the study of Christianity. The word literally means, “a writing, something written,”[lv] “holy writ,”[lvi] a word that was then appropriated in the Mediterranean “to mean specifically the Christian Bible.”[lvii] This is the prototype of the species category in contemporary usage, even as scholarship has moved into an secularized academic arena. The idea of a “sacred book”[lviii] is prevalent among cultures indoctrinated in the written word and is usually supported by “the notion of a heavenly book”[lix] that is transcendent and enables the identification of the ‘people of the book.’ Scripture is found within book religions while “myths are other groups’ sacred texts.”[lx]
This justified the missionary campaign that flourished within colonial land expansion and later allowed Eurocultural Christians to intellectually colonize conceptions that assimilated and expanded the species, “scripture,” into a genus category. This theoretical expansion began in the mid eighteenth century starting with the comparison of the Qur’an to the Bible.[lxi] This theoretical change required the expansion of the notions that supported the hierarchal framework to include textual notions, such as “textual performances,” and “oral texts,”[lxii] along with the ideas that concern the processes used in authorizing scripture, such as “open” and “closed” canonizations. While current Euro-historians of religion see this process as being instigated by those “powerful segments of the community” of the traditions, such as the priests, shamans and prophets – the religious leadership[lxiii] - the authoritative decision makers in contemporary Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan tend to be the political leaders and the academics who do not always consult the traditional specialists of their oral systems.
The authorizing of scripture is not solely left to the researched community, but is delineated within hierarchal structures that are value-laden within their lateral postulates. Concerning the discussion of “scripture” in religious studies’ hierarchal classification structure is complicated at this point with its use of top-down structural approach for Christian exempla and its bottom-up value-laden approach for other religions. This can be seen, simplified but not exhaustive, as
Christianity
/ \
Catholic Eastern Orthodox
/ \
Canon Non-canonical …..
/ \
Scripture Classics …...
World Religions
/ \
Textual Oral/Nature
/ \ / \
Western Eastern PreEuropean Non-European
/ / \ / \ \ / \ \ \
Judaism/Christian/Islamic Vedas/Chinese/etc. Greek/Celtic/more Indigenous
/ / / \ / \
Canon myths, legends, folklore* (now called ‘Scripture’)
(genus) -catalogued but in need of canonization
/ \
Scripture (species) individual stories
*divination systems seen as closed canons[lxiv]
This one label, scripture, now operates within the theoretical framework of crosscultural knowledge within two levels of the ordering system, that of species and genus, without any increase in crosscultural knowledge or any modulation of the original categories that would increase and “achieve reciprocity” between the two or more cultural systems.[lxv] This analysis does not even take into account the assumptions held in check at the levels of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and I have only briefly looks at genus and species.[lxvi] Also unanalyzed in this arrangement are the notions of originality in the construction of both culture and social organization and the use of such models in the research for “original or archetypal” evidence to justify missionary and political conquest activities.
In this contemporary discourse, oral stories that have been transcribed into print are now called “sacred texts”[lxvii] or “oral scripture.”[lxviii] These enter the discourse on scripture as supposedly equal to the Bible for comparison, but as seen in the chart, this is not the case. In the first hierarchy, scripture is a species, whereas this Eurocultural construction is used in the latter as a genus that assimilates all other comparative material from other cultures into its formulaic conditions. Oral texts become a ‘bi-framed’ object, re-represented through two culture’s lenses, while scripture remains ‘uni-framed’ within its own cultural conceptual frameworks as exemplum. This gives me reason to believe that our society, especially the academic segment, has never moved into a ‘postcolonial’ phase of social development.
Yet, with another layer of analysis that uses the concept of wahkotowin, this hierarchal organization based on similarities and differences is an illusion since all products are interrelated and renegotiated because of the structure and the structural relationships that create an organic whole that may create identity for the Euroacademic creator and her/his culture to expand into the global era, but not for crosscultural communal information and interests. Crosscultural information concerns various different value preferences, classes of social power strategies, structures of knowledge and systems of information, and processes that deconstruct the two-dimensional utility of classification structures with the various different conscious perspectives that create change within situational relationships. The concept of wāhkotowin applied to a theoretical classification structure shows how each of the objects are “in kinship” with each other and mutually developing, reordering, renegotiating the “space between” each of the categories. A view such as this shows that the tropes have been hard to change and it is the relationship between these identified categories that needs to be accentuated and redeveloped. This requires a paradigm shift from an oppositional valued emphasis to a complementarian redescription of “the between” areas, the relationship areas between the categorical labels.
This classification condition of mixing species with genus was not always the case. The structure used within most of the social science disciplines that deal with crosscultural research originated in the terminology of Christian theology. The religious studies department as a structural discipline originated first as a theological section in some universities while in others it started as a secular reaction to this religious framework in academic settings. [lxix] Scriptural texts became somewhat viewed in secular discourses as “myths” defamiliarized as “our own that we have come to disbelieve,”[lxx] yet the categories and assumptions that framed religious studies remain mostly unchanged. The academic study of Christian theology then expanded into crosscultural religious studies, based on the structural assumptions and theoretical religious ideology which still creates a contested boundary within the academic study of “religion.”[lxxi]
While the history of religious studies is an interesting and complex act of scholarly imagination[lxxii] in disciplinary identity, which in itself shows the “creative non-fiction”[lxxiii] of social narratives used in the Academy, this overarching debate is beyond the scope of this paper, but needs to be recognized. It is pertinent that scholars realize the continued historical use of Christian terminology and the value placed on Christian objects as “prototypes”[lxxiv] in the theoretical comparison of oral narratives and oral traditions with written texts from textual cultures, as well as at the structural level of the textual enterprise at work in the research methods of scholarly translation and interpretation.
In academic research, before translation can even begin, the researcher must recognize a focus that needs elaboration, such as an oral story or action that causes dissonance, or as J. Z. Smith elaborates, “situations of intercultural conflict,” more commonly referred to as a ‘situational incongruity.’[lxxv] The story, for whatever reason, cannot be ignored and the “unknown” must be made “known.” In identity theory, the beginning course of action is to compare the unknown with the known. Not only is the Indigenous cultural product usually in an oral format, it is usually partially transcribed between the language of the culture that is “sharing” the story and the language of the culture that is “receiving” the gift.[lxxvi] This accommodation is two-sided, but because of time and space constraints, I will only focus on the “reception” side of the relationship.
While each of the processes of translation, interpretation and classification begins immediately from the introduction of the storytelling setting and the researcher ‘listening’ to the story shared, I will focus this part of the discussion on the transcription process, since the oral story must be recreated, first usually in audio or video formats, and then transcribed into print for academic purposes and thus becomes a primary document.[lxxvii] Transcription is usually defined as the process that starts as a post-interview procedure.[lxxviii] As an interviewer myself, I see transcription beginning with the pre-interview context where interview questions are developed, the choice of which participants within a community to interview is decided and the interview setting is chosen, along with meeting and setting up pre-interview relationships to establish dialogue and respectful relationships. The idea of writing as close as possible verbatim transcripts, along with memories of past interview and transcription experiences, brings the intellectual considerations of the practice of transcription right to the start of the research process with the construction of the intention and goal of research.[lxxix]
In trying to isolate one component of an intricate research process, I cannot emphasize enough the importance in understanding how difficult it is to construct interactive and concurrent processes within the linear structure of written formats; much has to be left out, not out of lack of emphasis, but because of the lack of vertical (such as multiple actions shown in a movie scene or in a picture) and attitudinal attention to complex descriptions. For each of the aspects of a process that are analyzed, these are imposed into a structure that delimits time and space, even when the reality of the process is perpetuated concurrently. This is one of the main concerns of oral traditional specialists about the transformation of three-dimensional oral processes based in and on relationships between people interacting with each other, as epitomized within the process of storytelling into two-dimensional printed texts. These stories are seen to loose power from the conceptual arrangement of wāhkotowin, as emphasized in statements concerned with the stories losing spiritual power, its force of animation. Many times the textual versions are seen by Indigenous people as doctrines “frozen on the printed page”[lxxx] because of the experiences of religious indoctrination in Indian residential school systems. Again, this is another investigation that is outside of the scope of this paper but is worthy of future consideration.
Another separate but concurrent process is the act of translation that is necessary within the “receiver” to anchor the oral story within her/his cultural base in order to be able to “listen” to the story, [lxxxi] first in the interview context and then along with some interpretation skills in the transcription process. While this occurs unconsciously in everyday communication, a researcher needs to be conscious of these processes as they occur (or do not occur). Translation and interpretative processes are operating that allow the scholar to then “read” the transcript and then negotiate the information and “write” the story in acceptable print format for a particular audience reception.[lxxxii] A large variety of unconscious cognitive functions are at work in crosscultural research, below the recognized level of academic endeavours.
With a story that creates dissonance in the receiver, a level of ‘understanding’ is first obtained through the identification of differences in order to maintain a distance. This allows the “receiver” to maintain their cultural integrity while familiarizing themselves with the unknown elements in the story or storytelling setting that created the ‘situational incongruity.’ Academics have a long history of handling such categories as myth, legend and folklore to accommodate stories that were different from their own cultural constructions, especially with Christianity’s firm hold on the narrative choices at that time.[lxxxiii] Christians had ‘scriptural truth’ while all other pagan beliefs were associated with the lesser valued labels of myth and the like, as already noted.[lxxxiv] With these categories, comparisons could be made within the categories of myth, legend and folklore, while Christian narratives remain intact until secular, but still Christian-acculturated, scholars began to compare Christian scripture to the myths of other cultures, starting first with religions who share an emphasis on ‘the book.’[lxxxv] Through this emphasis, an unequivocal relationship is addressed through similar notions of text as sacred[lxxxvi]; a kind of Eurocultural tutelage, almost a kinship similar to a preliminary wāhkotowin through the written word is explored.
Returning to my narrative about one scholar dealing with one unknown story, transcription is the process of recording oral narratives and processes in print. These can then be translated into various languages or philosophical strategies as the scholar and her/his “politics of translation” sees fit.[lxxxvii] Stories transcribed under the category of myth are then translated around the constructed boundaries given by the category, a safe distance away from the Euroacademic collector who can then organize and rearrange them as necessary to maintain their cultural identity and positions of power within the crosscultural relationship.[lxxxviii] These are not “in kinship” with notions from the Eurocultural structures of relationships, but are oppositional models that allow mainstream value systems to operate, such as notions of uniqueness, individualized identity, evolutionary progression and the like. These notions are different than the various Indigenous notions that support the concept of wāhkotowin. Indigenous oral narratives were universalized under broad categories of “Native American myths,” “Australia Aborigine myths,” “Ainu myths” and the like, all based on Eurocultural arrangements of linguistic patterns without the accompanying traditional oral structures based on relationships of kinship that give them life, such as wāhkotowin to nēhiyaw (Cree) narratives. These “myths” are first listed within the table of contents in encyclopaedias that catalogue[lxxxix] their presence only loosely connected in relation to their geo-ethnic origins. Later, especially quickened by psychological theory, thematic dictionaries and encyclopaedias began to interpret and organize Indigenous stories into more orchestrated collections, without this geo-ethnic anchor into kinship, more as objects produced to be marketed as Eurocultural curiosity pieces.[xc] Since these stories were labelled as “myths” these were open-ended collections that did not have to be seen as serious to the study of scripture, nor as “canons” that could possibly be involved in a “canonization” process. This has not been a valued process in academic circles until recently, through religious studies frameworks, and has never been seen as beneficial for Indigenous communities themselves.
Even though multiple textual traditions are recognized as having tangible similarities and commonalities, oral traditions have been maintained as a polarized category discerned by ‘Otherness,’[xci] not only by Eurocultural scholars but also by Indigenous scholars, and more importantly, by Indigenous communities themselves. This latter distinction is understandable since many oral stories were shared openly and with trust within research processes, only to be taken out of communal context and control before their further objectification and devaluation by their comparison with Christian exempla.[xcii] At the same time, some religious studies scholars incorporate oral narratives as oral texts and as scripture which devalue the differences of the wāhkotowin constructions and functions of these stories in their relationships with the original oral traditional contexts.[xciii] This places the Indigenous oral stories within the textual construction of knowledge, with textual-cultural control over the translation, classification and interpretative enterprises.[xciv] This also allows the cultural assumptions and value preferences and emphases that support textual-based knowledge, conceptions, methodologies and institutions that utilize these – while institutional segments also consume the products of this producer in order to create more products for the institution – to remain unchallenged. Along with this, Indigenous stories are transformed into products not recognized by their own cultural communities, or even more erroneously, as Eurocultural reinterpretations “bought” as revivals of these community’s own original stories.[xcv] The “oral texts” are seen as having different wāhkotowin ties, kinship relationships that bind these texts into the relational histories of the colonizer over the colonized.[xcvi]
Fortunately, Indigenous scholarship rectifies this situation through reinterpretation, reframing, and the use of other Indigenous methods of research that brings the cultural products home to the oral traditional emphasis of the cultural construction of knowledge. Unfortunately, not many students of religion are in contact with Indigenous scholarship or communities in which they could learn about multiple conceptions of knowledge or how to apply such a perspective.
Successful Bundling or Eurocentric Branding
Much more has to be researched and analyzed along the lines of identity theory, translation, interpretation, and notions of knowledge concerning such labels as scripture, oral texts, and myths. Each of these have received preliminary exploratory analyses to show points of entry into the context of the problems and consequences of dealing with crosscultural research that need more attention before continuing to attempt to theoreticize oral narratives into universal frameworks of Eurocultural design. Unfortunately, this exploration was without wâhkotowin in the sense of physical communication between mainstream academics, Indigenous scholars and communities with living oral traditions. This condition has to change.
Originally I attempted to expound a notion of canonization that would frame oral narratives within respectful oral processes. I could not continue on this course of intellectualized action since I would have become another white colonialist acting and speaking where Indigenous people can act and speak for themselves. There is no “in between” space where ethical discussions are occurring within religious studies departments between IKS communities and scholars of religion, that I know of. This preliminary analysis into the consequences of viewing oral narratives as scriptures functioning as texts needs to be further explored through deeper analyses of cross-disciplinary research using collaborative research practices and community symposiums. Scholars must also become accustomed to using the expansive tools from various socio-political and socio-disciplinary perspectives, pedagogical perspectives, and methodological frameworks before mainstream academics, Indigenous scholars and various Indigenous community members can sit in a circle of wāhkotowin and share ideas concerning knowledge and the use of sacred stories in a respectful and meaningful way. I state that my research is preliminary in the sense that all I can bring to the discourse on orality and textuality within the study of religion are some of the academic voices that have been accepted into print. This remains unequivocally a textual discourse that could make room for alternative knowledge structures and processes.
In conclusion, I leave you with an open-ended and academically challenging statement from one of my graduate studies’ advisors, Neal McLeod. He speaks and writes of decolonization as a process of “Coming Home through Stories.”[xcvii] The Academy and the scholars all have stories that reverberate through their relationships with society as a whole and these need to be recognized as such in order to responsibly overcome the traditional colonial relationships and frameworks that interfere with intracultural relations within a multicultural society. This statement below “cuts” to the heart of the problem with contemporary scholarship in this age of globalization and epitomizes the potential violent conditions of the Academy’s dismemberment from crosscultural understanding:
Because Cree narrative is not simply description, but also interpretation (explanation), it tends to be open-ended. There are always new narrative possibilities and new ways of understanding a story. Also, people could reject a story and ignore Cree narrative memory. While this is true of any culture, there is a particularly vivid way in which Cree people would promote this idea. Some old people, for example, would stick a knife in the ground and say, ‘If what I say angers you, you can use this knife on me’; or there might be a variation on this method, such as ‘If you do not believe what I say, you can use this knife on me’.
There are various ways by which one could understand using the knife within the storytelling tradition of the Crees: I will offer one pathway, one way to understand this narrative technique. The first important component of this powerful symbolism is the relationship that the person speaking, the old storyteller, has with those listening. The connection would be perhaps kinship or friendship, but there would be a relationship between the people involved. The second major component in this process is the knife and how it could be used to destroy the relationship that exists between people. It conveyed the notion that the listener did not have to listen to the words of the old story-teller. Since they were both working within an oral tradition, the refusal of the younger person to listen would amount to killing tradition.”[xcviii]
Notes
[i] This is a legal term (I.e. the Indian Act) for Indigenous people of North America and is not to be eliminated so easily because of the debate around its use. While some view it as degrading, many others recognize that to eliminate this term is to eliminate the legal rights from treaty negotiations. Also, in the reserves and communities of First Nations, this is the self-identifiable term that addresses who they are to one another. See how Thomas King uses the term Indian in his scholarly narration: King, Thomas. (2003). The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi, 9.
[ii] Said points out this pattern’s occurrence within early Orientalism that justifies notions of “interests” that are then brought over to North America. See Said, Edward W. (2003). Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Ed. New York: Vintage, 100.
[iii] Fixico, Donald L, ed. (1997). Rethinking American Indian History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 14; see also Long, David & Olive Patricia Dickason. (2000). Visions of the Heart: Canadian Aboriginal Issue. Toronto: Harcourt, 13.
[iv] Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000). “Classification,” Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. By Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon. London: Cassell, 40.
[v] Gill, Sam D. (1985). “Nonliterate Traditions and Holy Books: Toward a New Model,” The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective, ed. by F.M. Denny & R. L. Taylor. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 26.
[vi] Kottak, Conrad Phillip. (2000). Cultural Anthropology, 8th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 40.
[vii] In looking at the motives the different churches had for their participation in the national campaign of residential schools, the Catholic Church “Standard Account” states its Christian responsibility was to share its faith, while the United Church account adds its participation in nation-building. See Chrisjohn, Roland, Sherri Young & Michael Maraun. (1997). The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada. Penticton: Theytus, 10-11.
[viii] Ouellette, Grace J.M.W. (2002). The Fourth World: An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Activities. Halifax: Fernwood, 86-88; Wilson, Waziyatawin Angela. (2004). “Indigenous Knowledge Recovery is Indigenous Empowerment,” American Indian Quarterly, 28/3&4, 360. Wilson refers to imperialism as a “cultural bomb”; See also Churchill, Ward. (1998). A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 81-95.
[ix] In this paper, First Nations represents some of the Indigenous populations of Canada while Amerindian represents those of the United States. While there are definite problems with these labels, such as the exclusion of Inuit, Métis, and non-status Indians, a label that is not so general is needed to move between locative and universal concerns.
[x] Being of Irish ancestry, I found it fascinating that in my introductory religious studies class my own ancient oral tradition is classified both as a “dead” folk religion and as a nature religion, packaged together under the chapter on oral traditions along with a mixture of small descriptions of various Indigenous groups around the world. See Molloy, Michael. (2002). Experiencing the World’s Religions: Tradition, Challenge, and Change, 2nd ed. California: Mayfield.
[xi] Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. (2002). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 49.
[xiii] St. Denis, Verna. (1992). “Community Based Participatory Research: Aspects of the Concept Relevant for Practice,” Native Studies Review, 8/2, 53.
[xv] Smith, Jonathan Z. (1997). “Canons, Catalogues and Classics,” Canonization and Decanonization, edited by A. Van der Kooij. Leiden: Brill, 306.
[xvi] Friesen, John W. (1999). “The Function of Legends as a Teaching Tool in Pre-Colonial First Nations’ Societies,” Interchange, 30/3, 309.
[xvii] Armstrong, Jeannette C. & Lally Grauer. (2001). Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 3.
[xix] Simpson, Leeann. (2001). “Aboriginal Peoples and Knowledge: Decolonizing our Processes,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 21:1, 138.
[xx] This debate is mainly Internet based and is slowly entering into the written domain of the Academy under both IKS and TK (traditional knowledge). See National Research Foundation. (2005). Indigenous Knowledge Systems. www.nrf.ac.za/focusareas/iks Last viewed November 26, 2006.
[xxi] Harris, Laura & Jacqueline Wasilewski. (2004). "Indigenous Wisdom of the People Forum: Strategies for Expanding a Web of Transnational Indigenous Interactions," Systems Research and Behavioral Science, V21 I5; P509.
[xxiii] McLeod, Neal. (2005). Exploring Cree Narrative Memory. Regina: University of Regina Doctoral Dissertation, 25.
[xxv] See Fenton, William. (1962). “Ethnohistory and its Problems,” Ethnohistory, 9: 7.
[xxvi] Wilson, Angela Cavender. (1998). “American Indian History or Non-Indian Perceptions of American Indian History?” Natives and Academics, Devon A. Mihesuah, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 25
[xxvii] Archibald, Joanne. (1993). “Researching with Mutual Respect,” Canadian Journal of Native Education, 20/2, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 191.
[xxix] Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. (1993). What is Scripture?: A Comparative Approach. Minneapolis: Fortress,1
[xxx] I use a Cree dictionary to utilize a written format for the oral construction of the language that is not fully standardized by the nēhiyawak themselves. See Wolvengrey, Arok., compiler. (2001). Nēhiyawēwin: itwēwina (Cree: Words), Vol 1&2. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center.
[xxxiii] hooks, bell. (1991). “Essentialism and Experience,” American Literary History, 3/1: 175.
[xxxv] There is a long philosophical lineage behind this notion, starting with Dilthey and introduced to me by the thought of Gadamer. See Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1998). “Overcoming the Epistemological Problem Through Phenomenological Research,” Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 242.
[xl] J. Z. Smith 2005(?) actually refers to this under the heading “The white lie” and later states: “The self-justified white lie is done in the name of our students, in the name of simplifying, of generalizing, of speaking to a wide and a diverse audience” which he then compares to structural lies under the heading “Disciplinary lying.”
[xlvii] This is a point that J. Z. Smith has attempted to move beyond in his essay, “Here, There and Everywhere.” See Smith, Jonathan Z. (2004). Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago, 323-339.
[xlviii] These concepts are also taught in psychology. See Baron, R.A., & et al. (2005). Exploring Social Psychology, 4th ed. Toronto: Pearson, 26-27.
[l] Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago, 36; to expand on how models serve as redescriptionary devices used in classification systems, see also J. Z. Smith 2004, 40-41.
[li] J. Z. Smith 2004 , 2-5.
[liii] W. C. Smith, x, states, “it is not easy to develop a conception of scripture that will not oversimplify… (and) under-estimate its wide-ranging importance in world history, to the present day.
[liv] J. Z. Smith 2000, 39.
[lv]Graham, William A. (1987). “Scripture,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. By Mircea Eliade, v13, 135.
[lx] Detweiler, Robert. (1985). “What is Sacred Text?” Semeia 31: 215. Retrieved through ATLAS database, September 11, 2006.
[lxii] Whaling, Frank. (2000). “Scripture and its Meaning: A Comparative Perspective,” Studies in World Christianity v6.1, 79; See also how Graham, 134 who mentions that differentiating scripture into “‘oral scripture’ is a contradiction in terms and ‘written scripture’ a redundancy.”
[lxvii] Levering, Miriam. (1989). “Introduction: Rethinking Scripture,” Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective, ed. By M. Levering, 13, where sacred texts is usually recognized as a “catch-all category” that remains undeveloped and usually means that the texts in this genus “are not parallel to Western scriptures as commonly understood.” See also Detweiler’s article that uses this taxonomic label.
[lxviii] Coward, Harold. (2000). Scripture in the World Religions: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Oneworld, 161. Coward mainly avoids the issues around texts by using the categories of the “written word” and “spoken” or “oral word” along with “performance scripture”; See also Goody, Jack. (2000). The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 127-128. Goody uses the term “utterances” to avoid the issues concerning orality and textuality and their comparison and contrast, delimiting orality to pre-textual foundational roles with no cognitive worth to his religious studies endeavour.
[lxix] Badertscher, John M., Gordon Harland, & Roland E. Miller. (1993). Religious Studies in Manitoba and Saskatchewan: A State-of-the-Art Review (The Study of Religion in Canada; 4). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 83.
[lxxi] Arnal, William E. (2000). “Definition,” Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. By Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon. London: Cassell, 14.
[lxxii] This notion of academic identity formation as an “act of imagination” comes from Indigenous theory, specifically that of Momaday, N. Scott. (1999). The Names: A Memoir. Tucson: Sun Tracks, University of Arizona, iii.
[lxxiii] This is a writing genre within the publishing industry, similar to the use of “historical fiction” with its use of historical settings in service to fictional plotlines, but “creative non-fiction” emphasizing the characters and plotline as being experienced or historically researched, but specific details of dialogue and relationship specifics are creatively filled in to support a more narrative format. This writing genre entered around the same time that storytelling was recognized within the art and culture industry as a performance art medium.
[lxxvi] Rather than using RLST terminology that tends to focus on the players and objects rather than the processes that encompass the relationships in research, I am using terminology that have been used by Elders within my own nēhiyaw lineage traditions.
[lxxvii] Calliou, Brian. (2004). “Methodology for Recording Oral Histories in the Aboriginal Community,” Native Studies Review, 15:1, 91.
[lxxxi] This is called “Informative Reception” by Miriam Levering, 13.
[lxxxvii] Williams, Alan. (2004). “ New Approaches to the Problem of Translation in the Study of Religion,” New Approaches to the Study of Religion,V2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches, Peter Antes & et al, eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 13.
[lxxxix] J. Z. Smith 1982, 48 explains how complicated lists are catalogs and not canons since they remain open; a catalog does not have a closed system to the listed accepted data, whereas a canon does. To Smith, a catalog is open and a canon is closed, all revolving around a notion of closure.
[xc] See Bastian, Dawn E. & Judy K. Mitchell. (2004). Handbook of Native American Mythology. Santa Barbara, Ca: ABC-Clio. With no distinction between myth, legend, and folktales, Bastian and Mitchell set these Native American stories within the geographical context of North America, particularly those of the United States. With a chapter on mythic viewpoint that sets the time and historical construct of mythological associations, the bulk of this book is a collection of alphabetized narratives following the constructs of “Deities, Themes, and Concepts.” Unfortunately, Inuit and other circumpolar peoples are not classified on their own, neither are First Nations’ peoples, but as ‘Native American.’ Every organizational aspect of this book is built around and for the curiosity that EuroAmericans hold for AmerIndians, the Indigenous peoples in the United States.
[xci] J.Z. Smith 2004, 230 explores the boundaries of various components of otherness, starting with the primary emic/etic, insider/outsider distinction he calls “in/out.”
[xciv] Ibid, 227 in his quote from Red Jacket of the Seneca Nation.
[xcv] This statement is in reference to the large marketing strategy that creates the commodification of Indigenous cultural products, orchestrated by an Eurocultural market and laboured by Indigenous workers, through the pan-indianization of specific cultural images, such as dream catchers, medicine wheel teachings and workshops and the like.
[xcviii] Ibid, 16-17.
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