When an oral culture is colonized and dominated by a written one

By Laura Burns

As a writer and storyteller, I often experience a tension between the different processes needed for writing and speaking; it is this space between written and spoken literature, and the ways in which it is navigated, that fascinated me when I first encountered Native American literature. I stumbled across Native authors during my undergraduate degree, and have been reading them ever since: writers including Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Silko, Paula Allen Gunn and Louise Erdrich. I was lucky enough to meet Vizenor recently in London; his eyes twinkled as he told me about ‘coyote’ – one manifestation of Vizenor’s favourite subject, the trickster – reminding me that it’s the aliveness of the written word that the true storyteller can evoke.

This ‘aliveness’ comes from the liveliness of Indigenous oral literatures that have been practised for thousands of years in ceremony, song, story and prayer. Oral culture suffered hugely with the arrival of written culture and the beginning of colonialism in North America. However, since the mid-20th Century, there’s been a growing field of written Native American literature that is testament to the survival of a people weaving their mythology into contemporary media, and so reclaiming Indigenous culture and identity.

Native American literature became widely acknowledged in 1968 when the Kiowa author N Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel House Made of Dawn. The seventies saw publications such as James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart (1974) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) gaining international acclaim. Native writers were demanding a long-overdue exploration of colonial history – its legacy of racism and patriarchy that had disrupted matriarchal societies and Indigenous ways of being and knowing the world. These writers were refusing to let US culture ignore its Native voices.

Although the writers came from diverse regions, languages and cultures, there were shared concerns across Native American literature. Most notable was a desire to maintain Native community, coupled with a belief that language and story came from the animate land. Estimates of the Native American population in 1492 range from a few million to more than 18 million; by 1900, the number was down to approximately 250,000, with small dots on the map marking Native territory. Given such a history and relationship to the land, it’s hardly surprising that many Native writers deal with the break-up of community and identity, and the loss of land and people. Silko’s Ceremony and Momaday’s House Made of Dawn are two of my favourite contemporary novels, both showing mixed-blood protagonists in broken-down, post-war Native communities. However, amid the trauma of loss there is a vitality, spirit and endurance, which draw strength from animism and mythology.

What struck me most when reading this literature was the way the spoken word was revered; the power of it bleeds into written literature. In Erdrich’s Tracks, Nanapush explains his talkativeness, saying “During the year of the sickness, when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story.” For Momaday, “there is no difference between the telling and that which is told.” To tell stories is to remake a sacred connection between place, memory, spirituality and the animate world; to tell stories is to survive.

This sentiment is at the core of Native American culture and therefore writing; it makes the words on the page spring out to meet you; the outside world you are reading from is changed by that very reading. It gives one a sense – as when being told a traditional story – of the voices behind that particular telling stretching back beyond the present, drawing from a shared ancestry and mythology. Common themes like creation mythology, trickster characters, heroes, and animal narratives emerge in mixed-genre literature such as Silko’s Storyteller. Silko weaves stories of the Keres Yellow Woman with personal narrative, rebuilding a communal identity that goes against an individualist one. This extends beyond the human community and into the material and animal world. As a result, Native literature is hugely ‘ecological’; by placing myth, animal and land at the centre of this communal identity, it challenges a human-centric worldview.

A writer who does this beautifully is Joy Harjo. Her “Deer Dancer” from In Mad Love and War reveals how the Indigenous relationship to time is cyclical, with place and ancestry reconstructing a communal identity, enabling her words to tread the line between despair and salvation: “The woman inside the woman who was to dance naked in the bar of misfits blew deer magic. Henry Jack, who could not survive a sober day, thought she was Buffalo Calf Woman come back, passed out, his head by the toilet.” When a strange woman enters the bar, she reveals both the loss and hope of the community: “She was the promise of feast we all knew was coming.” Just watching her, the community is once again able to identify with their sacred ancestral history: “She was no slouch, and neither were we, watching.” The last line reveals a sentiment reflected in Native American literature, that the power of words and story, dreaming and imagination, will keep a culture alive and re-imagining itself: “I wasn’t there. But I imagined her like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left.”

This re-imagining manifests itself in vibrant mixed-genre writing, using English language in a way that maintains a Native relationship with story, orality and place. For author Jeannette Armstrong:

Speaking to newcomers in their language is dangerous
for when I speak
history is a dreamer
empowering thought
from which I awaken the imaginings of the past

 

Armstrong sums up the incredible ability of Native American authors to express the dangers of losing language and culture, the pain of having been taken over by a dominant culture, whilst proving in the same breath that Native language and story are surviving, despite the coloniser. This is a literature that is both innovative and powerful, sharing with the world not only an important worldview, but a perspective on language and story that changes our experience of the written word.

Most Europeans think it’s absurd what’s happening every day in the European Parliament (EP).  All MEPs know English, but they all pretend they do not know English!  They are instructed by their home countries to use their mother tongue for propaganda purposes and in order to employ native translators.  Sounding the EP chamber with a native language shows vanity, stupidity, and squander of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

 

English-only is a political movement for the use of English as the only official language in USA and EU.  We are all Anglos now, and we all have adopted the culture of Anglosphere. The language we speak influences not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. Bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups are affected by the language in which they take a test probing their biases and predilections. Charlemagne said that to speak another language is to possess another soul. Language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well.    

Multilingualism is a euphemism for babelism, and multiculturalism is a euphemism for weird Anglophobia! In the melting pot, different cultures, races, and ethnicities are brewed into a stew. In the salad bowl, the ingredients combine into a salad but retain their distinct identity. In multiculturalism, the salad bowl notion has been conventional wisdom. Eurokleptocrats babelize and Angloscare Fourthreichians, aka Europeans, because Anglophiles tend to be libertarians. English in the linguafranca of planet Earth. We all live in Anglosphere now. It's high time to establish English as the only official language of Fourth Reich(EU) and USA.

The ties that bind the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in different ways other nations that share some of the values of the Anglosphere are deeper and more abiding than the bonds between any other countries. The relationship between the nations of Anglosphere is founded not just on a shared language, but also on shared history, on shared values, and upon shared ideals. Together they have withstood the forces of evil and tyranny in whatever form they found them, and they have discharged their common duty to the human race.

Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become one society. Americans and Fourthreichians want an amendment that says the English language shall be the official language. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) presumes that English-workplace policies are discriminatory, and thus illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For over twenty years, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has aggressively targeted and punished employers who adopt English-language workplace rules.   

Today in segregated classrooms, bilingual education keeps immigrant children from learning English, by teaching them in foreign languages. And millions of people cannot find good-paying jobs, because they lack the ability to speak English with customers, coworkers or employers. Opponents of making English the official language charge that it is anti-immigrant, or that it is merely symbolic and therefore unnecessary. These charges are false. Learning to speak English empowers immigrants. By more than 2-1 immigrants themselves say US and Fourth Reich should expect new immigrants to learn English and by a 9-1 margin immigrants believe learning English is essential to succeed in USA and Fourth Reich.   

Having English as the official language of USA and Fourth Reich simply means that for the government to act officially, it must communicate in English. It means the language of record is the English language, and that no one has a right to demand government services in any other language. Official English would also reinforce the historic message to new immigrants, that we expect them to learn English as the first step in their assimilation, and that we are committed to ensuring that all Americans and Fourthreichians share in the economic, social, and political benefits of having a common language.

Russian MPs declare the Russian language needs legal protection from the conquering march of English words. A stupid bill before the State Duma seeks to ban all words borrowed from other languages and fine those who dare to use them in public.

The stupid bill targets words that came into Russian from English after the late 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They specifically mention the Russian words that ended up as dealer, boutique, manager, single, OK, and wow!

The stupid MPs suggest Russians use – sometimes archaic –substitutions or face a penalty. Ordinary linguistic offenders would have to pay a hundred euro fine, while organizations would have to fork out two thousand euros and more severe penalties.

The stupid bill aims to freeze the Russian language. But the Russian language undergoes evolution, with some words becoming archaic and phasing out of use and others being born and gaining popularity.

Over the centuries Russians borrowed thousands of words from Mongol conquerors, Greek priests, French and Italian artists, German engineers, and Anglosphere. Yet in many generations there were those morons vocally calling on preserving the traditional language and protecting it from foreign influence.

 

The stupid sponsors of the stupid bill are comfortable with the Graecoroman words of the past and want to root out only the English newcomers, especially those which have substitutes in Russian. So the bill would apparently spare the Graecoroman words democratic, liberal, and party used in the political sense. The same goes for the word Rossiya, Russia, which is of Greek origin, first mentioned in Greek documents.

Venitis Law of Style: Your soul needs to resonate with mighty words and unique acts that express your style and destiny. Your government cannot dictate your language, your words, and your culture. Resonate now and sing your song!

Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com, @Venitis