The Audience of Oral Performance in Narrative Translation: Coyote Stories in Simon Ortiz’s A Good Journey

Coyote Stories in Simon Ortiz’s A Good Journey
Daniel L. Hocutt
Dr. Robert Nelson
9 December 1996
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I searched for information on Simon Ortiz and came away from the search disappointed; for
all his Native American work in American literary circles, the general reading public will find more
complete information about Simon Ortiz in his short fiction, poetry, interviews, and friends’
stories than in biography.1 He lives in the stories of his friends and in the stories of his Acoma
tradition, not in static, numbing biography. This may be the best introduction to the poet: he lives
in the stories and he would have it no other way. Perhaps he will live in this story.
In this essay I will illustrate and trace Simon Ortiz’s love for and belief in the power of
language as a development of his deeply rooted appreciation for the Acoma oral tradition and its
significance to the life and survival of his people and customs. I will then focus on the Native
American oral tradition and on its role in passing on vital themes of survival and continuance to
Native American people. The focus will then shift to the audience of oral tradition and its necessity
to any Native American oral performance, demonstrating at last Ortiz’s inclusion of an implied
inter-textual audience in written translations of six Coyote stories in A Good Journey based upon
Kathleen Manley’s theory of audience creation.
Simon Ortiz was born into the Acoma tribe and traditions in 1941 in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. He attended the BIA school at McCarty’s through grade six when he enrolled in St.
Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe. Here he began to keep a diary, and here began his love
affair with books, a corollary to his already developed love of language and its power. He grew to
appreciate American and British poets like Blake, Sandburg, Dickinson, Frost, and Eliot while in
high school, purposing to “write with literature as such in mind”2 (Wiget 7).
1 See Leslie Marmon Silko’s videotaped readings in Larry Evers (producer) and Denny Carr (director), Running on the Edge of the Rainbow: Laguna Stories and Poems with Leslie Marmon Silko in the series Words and Places 6 (Clearwater Publishing Co., 1978) and Patricia Clark Smith’s “Coyote Ortiz: Canis latrans latrans in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz” for a sample of the stories Ortiz’s friends tell about him. 2 Wiget repeats this from Ortiz’s essay “Always the Stories” in Bo Scholer’s Coyote Was Here. Though difficult to find, this collection of essays (somewhat deceptively subtitled “Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization”) provides an excellent “in their own words” look at several modern-day storytellers, notably Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Wendy Rose, Anna Lee Walters, Paula Gunn Allen, and Joseph Bruchac. Although interviews of these writers can easily be found (see Coltelli’s Winged Words and Bruchac’s Survival this Way), more forums such as this collection would be useful to provide writers an opportunity to weave their own stories into essays and explanations.
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Though Ortiz seemed to know early that he wanted to be a writer, he seemed reluctant to
settle on being “just” a writer. After graduating from high school, he worked for a year in the
uranium mines near Grants, New Mexico (on and near Acoma and Laguna reservations), then
entered college in an attempt to pursue a career as a chemist. After a short time he enlisted in the
Army, admitting in “Always the Stories” that he did so “. . . to know things, feel, hear, to be
touched by a varied life” (62). Modeling the behavior of literary figures and authors led directly to
a destructive habit; he entered Ft. Lyons—Colorado’s Veteran’s Administration hospital—to be
treated for severe alcoholism which resulted from idealizing and mimicking the drinking patterns of
such idolized authors as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. After his successful treatment he returned to
the University of New Mexico where he completed his formal education and began to consider
himself seriously as a writer, inspired by other Native American writers like Momaday, Welch,
and Silko (Wiget 8). Since then he has written prolifically including collections of poetry, short
stories, children’s stories, and various critical essays.
Ortiz developed early his theory of language and writing which has remained with him to
this day. The story is told in his family that he did not speak until the age of four, when he was
taken to his grandfather who, with an ordinary brass house key and spoken words, unlocked his
language; Ortiz uses these words to describe what his grandfather said.
Nana, you will grow up to have a good useful life. You will learn many things and help teach many things. There is a whole world around us in which we all live. Speech is an important part of knowing that world. You have a tongue and mouth with which to speak. It is up to you to use them for the benefit of yourself and all things. You will be healthy in your growing, and you will now speak in order to fulfill yourself. You will speak (Ortiz 1984, 58).
Ortiz reports that, according to his sister, he began to speak soon after. This story provides a clear
analogy to Ortiz’s listening-based theory of language. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac, Ortiz
repeats the importance of listening in developing his artistic voice. “Listening to people, to wind,
whatever is murmuring, has been an important part of how I perceive and how I learn” (214). He
considers listening to be the way one learns language; listening in order to “be involved with the
whole process and experience . . . of language” (216). He recalls particularly listening to stories:
“My life was always stories. I call then stories even though they may have just been talking about
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somebody—gossip, anecdotes, jokes” (217-8). Listening provided Ortiz with a feel for
language—not simply for the words, but for the total experience of language3—and with a
powerful ability to create with language, just as the stories of his childhood “created” his Acoma
childhood. In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Ortiz illustrates the creative power he believes
language to have.4
. . . by language we create knowledge. Our language is the way we create the world. And I don’t mean just spoken language or heard language, but language as the oral tradition, in all its aspects, qualities, and dimensions . . . ; man exists because of language, consciousness comes about through language, or the world comes about through language. Life—language. Language is life, then (107-8).
Ortiz’s concept of language is intertwined with his identity as an Acoma. He considers his
narrative artistic voice a perpetuation of the “traditional force” of the tribe’s oral traditions (Manley
and Rea 366). He uses Coyote to represent that perpetuation as part of “a tradition of literature of
resistance, of struggling against what will overcome you, that is, Western colonialism” (Coltelli
106). Ortiz’s life attests to his own survival, and his own survival attests to the survival of his
Acoma clan-tribe in word and in truth—in short, Ortiz is survivor Coyote: “But one of his
[Coyote’s] right names, surely, is Simon Ortiz” (Smith 209).
One of Ortiz’s earlier works is A Good Journey, published originally in 1977. As Ortiz
admits of his early poetry, this volume speaks of what he knew from the Acoma tradition “living in
this experience called America” (Coltelli 116). Not surprisingly, this volume also draws its style
and content from the Acoma oral tradition; as much as any other work to date, A Good Journey
self-consciously embodies narrative versions of oral poetry and story. Ortiz makes this clear in the
preface while reiterating his theory of the narrative dynamism of language.
There is a certain power that is compelling in the narrative of a storyteller simply because the spoken word is so immediate and intimate. It was the desire to translate
3 Kenneth Lincoln writes, “For Simon Ortiz, then, language completes itself in the process of listening-and- speaking, not just in each word as product” (85). Later in the same essay he quotes Ortiz on the process of Indian language: “ ‘Indeed the song was the road from the outside of himself to inside—which is perception—and from inside of himself to outside—which is expression’ ” (Ortiz, Simon. “Song Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception.” Sun Tracks 3 (Spring 1977: 9-12). 12. Rpt. in Lincoln 89.) 4 Leslie Silko says of this creative power, “I also do not limit storytelling to simply old stories, but to again go back to the original view of creation, which sees that it is all part of a whole; . . . in the beginning Tseitsinako, Thought Woman, thought of all these things, and all of these things are held together as one holds many things together in a single thought” (56).
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that power into printed words that led me to write A Good Journey. I wanted to show that the narrative style and technique of oral tradition could be expressed as written narrative and that it would have the same participatory force and validity as words spoken and listened to. At the same time I wanted to have the poetry show that energy that language is, the way that the energy is used and transformed into vision, and the way this vision becomes knowledge which engenders and affirms the substance and motion of one’s life5 (Ortiz 1977, 96 italics mine).
Embedded within this text are interspersed six Coyote stories in which the book’s origins in oral
tradition are revealed. These stories come directly from the Acoma tradition and, since Coyote
survives in each, actually begin to explain the nature of that oral tradition’s survival and constant
motion. As Ortiz states, Coyote’s survival in the stories is the survival of the people and of the
stories, “Indian culture is dynamic culture; it’s not a static culture” (Bruchac 222).
The purpose of this paper is to examine the aspect of audience in oral tradition as Ortiz has
included it in A Good Journey. Audience in oral tradition plays a leading role in the performance;
oral performance can hardly exist without an audience. Because a primary function of story in
Acoma and other Native American cultures is passing traditions from generation to generation7
(i.e. Coyote’s survival as metaphor to methods for the people’s survival), oral tradition requires
and necessitates audience. After having illustrated Ortiz’s strong ties to Acoma oral tradition, his
strong sense of the creative power contained in the spoken and written word, and his self-
conscious attempt to translate the style and technique of oral tradition into written narrative form, it
seems natural and necessary that a strong sense of audience exist in the Coyote stories found in A
Good Journey. I believe that three types of audience can be found in these Coyote stories (which
5 All quotations from the book A Good Journey are from the Sun Tracks series edition printed by the University of Arizona Press. 6 Ortiz numbers the pages in this volume from the title page onward, though the first visible page number is 15. By doing so, Ortiz includes the title page (page 1), publishing information (2), dedication (3), table of contents (5-7), preface (9), an excerpt from an unidentified interview (11), chapter title “Telling” (13), and an illustration (14) in the narrative; the “journey” of the work includes not only the poems, but the naming and context of the poems. In Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Leslie Marmon Silko employs a similar method of inclusion using page numbers, so that the healing “ceremony” includes more than the traditional prose of the novel story; it also includes pretexts, sunrise, and even blank space on the pages. I’m not aware of any current formal study of this phenomenon, but I believe that the subject deserves further consideration. 7 The concept of passing traditions from generation to generation through story is well-established among Native American writers and storytellers. The extent to which stories pass on culture and tradition sparks heated debate, particularly as stories move from secular toward religious in nature. For a disturbing and frightening account of the more religious side to this debate, see Barry Toelken, “Life and Death in Navajo Coyote Tales” (Recovering the Word 388-401).
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represent a specific oral tradition): the author’s intended audience, the reading audience, and the
implied audience required of all oral performances. This implied audience is embedded within the
narrative text itself, existing only when the stories are told.
Ortiz begins A Good Journey with an excerpt from an unidentified interview in which he
responds to the questions “Who do you write for?” and “Who do you write for besides yourself?”
Ortiz introduces a troubling ambiguity about his intended and reading audience that can also be
found in later published interviews.
Why do you write? Who do you write for? Because Indians always tell a story.8 The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says. The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way. Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.
Who do you write for besides yourself? For my children, for my wife, for my mother and my father and my grandparents and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home (11).
Ortiz seems to answer the question vaguely, but one point remains clear—Ortiz intends that these
stories will provide context and explanations to the next generations and that they will tie and unify
the family with the land and the tribe.9
In later interviews that discuss both this book specifically and his work as a whole, Ortiz
presents several seemingly contradictory answers to the question, “For whom do you write?” In
“Always the Stories” he identifies the audience as the reader who feels the participatory force and
direct impact of an oral performance in his writing (66). In his interview with Joseph Bruchac he
claims that he writes for “everyone,” then claims to direct his writing to specific people based upon
“certain information on certain issues,” particularly to those “who are sensitive about these areas
[certain conditions and circumstances].” Just a few sentences later, Ortiz specifies his audience
8 Walter Ong provides an “etic” hint to the reason for this that corresponds with Ortiz’s “emic” reason. Referring to the difficulties modern literature-based scholars have had in developing a conception of orality, Ong makes this acute observation: “When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all tat exists of its is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (11). When oral stories contain cultural traditions, it is easy to understand why Ortiz says that “Indians always tell a story.” 9 For a discussion of the influence of the oral tradition on generations in another Native tribe (the Otoes), see Anna Lee Walters, Talking Indian, “Part One: Oral Tradition.”
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even further to Indian and non-Indian people, then particularly to Indian people, and finally to
himself (225). In Manley and Rea’s “An Interview with Simon Ortiz” he presents his audience and
storyteller in A Good Journey by saying, “I wanted to create a sense of a person sitting in a room
or walking along a road on the journey of his life, telling stories, or the stories being their own
power from the storytelling tradition,” aiming his writing to cultures and peoples with strong,
thriving oral traditions (373). Finally, Ortiz identifies critics as specific readers, hoping for critical
readers who will understand the people and the land discussed in the work (Coltelli 115).
Simon Ortiz’s intended and reading audiences extend from himself to his family to Native
Americans to literary critics to non-Indian people to everyone. In a broad sense the translated oral
tradition must include all of these people; Ortiz feels his American-ness and his Acoma nature
working together, illustrated by writing in English and in Acoma language, and must include all of
these people in his audience. The book, and his work in general, provides “a good journey” to
each individual reader. Each reader, each member of his intended audience, derives an experience
from the poems; each experience differs based upon the heritage and traditions of the reader. As
Silko suggests, “the storytelling always includes the audience and the listeners and, in fact, a great
deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener, and the storyteller’s role is to draw the story
out of the listeners” (57). In this sense the writing survives, different from one reader, from one
audience member to the next. Perhaps this is the power of the oral tradition that Ortiz successfully
translates into written narrative.
As Ortiz includes these Coyote stories in this book—Coyote stories which are certainly a
part of Acoma oral tradition—I cannot help but imagine that he has specific tellings of these stories
in mind. These tellings have audiences—maybe he is part of the audience, maybe he is telling the
stories—and that audience must necessarily find its way into the narrative translations of these
stories. It is on this audience, the implied audience, that I intend to focus. And it is this
audience—the audience of the actual oral performance, the audience implied by the author—that is
so vital to the success of the performance and to the success of the narrative translation.
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Considerable critical focus has been recently placed on adequately translating oral
performances into written form. Most of the research has been performed by ethnographers,
unsatisfied with the previous attempts of non-Indian ethnographers and anthropologists to do so.
Seminal articles on this topic include Tedlock’s “On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative” and
Dundes’ “Texture, Text, and Context.” Tedlock suggests in many revisions of this essay10 that the
proper transcription of Native American oral performance must include the storyteller’s “style,”
such as inflection, volume and pitch changes, gestures, and other elements that make a storytelling
event memorable and unique from a written or read narrative. Tedlock has developed a method by
which these characteristics of a storyteller’s “style” can be written.11 Dundes does not provide the
ethnographer or anthropologist a specific method for transcribing oral performance. He focuses on
three characteristics that every oral performance must necessarily contain—texture, text, and
context—and reminds folklorists, scholars, scientists, and students that these three elements must
somehow be incorporated into any study of oral performance. Dundes defines each element as
follows. Texture is “the language, the specific phonemes and morphemes employed.” In the oral
tradition, textural features are linguistic features. Most often, the texture of an oral performance
cannot be translated completely nor accurately (254). Text is “a version or a single telling of the
tale, a recitation of a proverb, a singing of a song.” Text is to be considered separate from texture,
and can be translated (255). It is the text of a performance that Tedlock finds has been so poorly
translated in the past (Tedlock, 39). The context of a the oral tradition, according to Dundes, is
“the specific social situation in which that particular item is actually employed,” which is not to be
confused with the function of the performance (256).
Both Tedlock and Dundes insist that the translation of a performance or story be as accurate
as possible in content, style, and experience. In other words, both wish to recreate the story as the…