Indigenous Languages and the Promise of Archives by Adrianna Link;Abigail Shelton;Patrick Spero; & Abigail Shelton & Patrick Spero

Author:Adrianna Link;Abigail Shelton;Patrick Spero; & Abigail Shelton & Patrick Spero [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies, LAN025020 Language Arts & Disciplines / Library & Information Science / Archives & Special Libraries
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Morality Tales

Significantly, this use of the performative and interactive devices of Niimíipuu storytelling is also evident in two of the lessons that convey moral instruction: Himte’ke’s XXX, entitled Miséemt (Lying), and Himte’ke’s XXIX, entitled Toq’óox̣nin (Blind-in-one-eye). In Lesson XXIX the links between the written composition and oral narration are particularly striking. The lesson, which presents a story about a boy who defies his parents and secretly acquires a gun only to lose his eye when he fires it, opens with the line “A person blind in one eye said.”51 The lesson then proceeds as a story “told” by an older man about his younger self: “Then I brought the gun from the house, and then I loaded it almost completely full. Then I fired it. Boom!”52 The language is immediate and expressive. The “Boom,” or, in Nimipuutímt, t’óox!, evokes the sound a storyteller would make to mimic the sound of gunfire.

Additionally, both morality tales display elements of an Indigenous moral sensibility. In “Lying,” which was, like the story about the man and the lion, based on a previously published tale,53 the reader is invited not to simply condemn the boy who lies to his mother (as in the original), but rather to sympathize with or at least understand him when he thinks, “Let me pretend to be sick and then she will give me good medicine, that very good one she medicated me with only yesterday.”54 And in the story of “Blind-in-one-eye” the reader is similarly asked to understand the boy’s desire for the gun, as he was “exceedingly fond of playing with gunpowder.”55 In this respect the stories more closely resemble the stories of Niimíipuu culture, which tended to encourage sympathetic amusement at the failings of others and to acknowledge the difficulty of living a moral life, rather than the more didactic tales common to Euro-American primers of the period.56 It is also notable that the elderly narrator of “Blind-in-one-eye” concludes his story with the lines “Now, when I see children when they disobey I think, then I think in this way I made myself blind in one eye, and perhaps they will similarly make themselves miserable by being disobedient.”57 With this the moral “lesson” of the story is grounded in relationships between the narrator, the reader or listener, and the children. Although the more abstract principle—(“Don’t disobey your father and mother. No one ever became good through disobedience”)—concludes the lesson, as it would in a typical Protestant morality tale, the preceding statements are those of an older man who would like to convey his learned wisdom to a younger audience.58 The story as a whole also affirms the significance of a moral value—respect for one’s elders—that was important to the Niimíipuu. In all of these ways, the composition of this story suggests some attunement, on the part of the authors, to an Indigenous moral order.

Taken together these morality tales and animal stories reveal a different dynamic at work in the making of the primer, a dynamic shaped neither

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