Introduction
Abstract
NATIVE LITERATURES If literature in any culture, aside from variables of form, is "language charged with meaning," as laid down by Ezra Pound in the ABC of Reading: Where do we find Native American literatures? How do we hear and see and record them? How do we bring them back alive from far places? How do we translate them, in word and spirit, across cultures? How do we witness older oral traditions informing newer writings? How do we place these transitions among myths and symbolic forms universal to art? These questions surfaced in our 1980 American Indian Translation issue, Word Senders, Volume 4, Numbers 1-2. The essays here by Dell Hymes on translation, Richard Keeling on field work, James Ruppert on contemporary poets, and Patrick Hubbard on Trickster 's comic survival respond in kind, from folklore and linguistics to anthropology and ethno-musicology, from literary criticism and poetic form to comparative mythology and aesthetic theory. The issue also features poems by Paula Gunn Allen from Laguna Pueblo, whose Shadow Country will appear this spring as the fifth volume of poetry in our Native American Series, with William Oandasan's A Branch of California Redwood, Barney Bush's My Horse And a Jukebox, J. Ivaloo Volborth's Thunder-Root, and Norman Russell's indian thoughts now in print. Whether in the old days or currently, among ethnologists or the tribal elders, two questions resonate on the horizon of these discussions: Who are the Indians of America? Who are their literary artists? "Indians," or Native Americans, are indigenous peoples to this country, some at least 40,000 years native. Once 4 to 8 million strong, perhaps a sixth in Mendocino and Sonoma counties in northern California, these peoples were reduced to less than 250,000 by 1900. The rough outlines of this history are commonly known, if ignored; the survivals and continuations of native cultures are little known, less understood. Presently there are over 400 distinct tribes with one and a half million peoples speaking over 200 languages, the most rapidly growing and diverse ethnic peoples in America.