Surviving Through the Days: Translations of Native California Stories and Songs: A California Indian Reader

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Fairlee, Cathryn

Surviving Through the Days: Translations of Native California Stories and Songs: A California Indian Reader. Edited by Herbert W. Luthin. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xxi 639, acknowledgments, photographs, tables, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper)

Surviving Through the Days is an extensive resource. There are the promised stories and songs, but much more. Each story has an introduction that gives the history of the collecting situation and often includes biographical material on the narrator, collector and translator, and suggestions for further reading. Many of the stories are presented in ethnopoetic format to suggest the rhythm of oral delivery, preserving as much as possible the style of the original tellers. Physical and cultural settings are painted in as much detail as possible to help bring us into another world.

California Indians have a high degree of linguistic diversity and there is no uniform orthography. A small section in the book's introduction that deals with the overlapping and conflicting ways to pronounce the languages is somewhere between helpful and frustrating to the reader. Fortunately, many of the translators give linguistic help with individual stories, easier to absorb for the selection that immediately follows. Several examples of word-for-word translation and parallel translation into poetic English are very enlightening, as they show grammar and repetition of phrasing as part of a performer's style of telling or singing; these interlinear translations often help the reader imaginatively recreate narrators' thinking processes as well.

If the languages of California Indians are foreign to many Anglo readers, the Native American sense of narration is equally foreign. This explains why there are so many books of simplified Native American folktales in school libraries. Stories are shoehorned into the Aesop's Fables format for accessibility to the average student. Characters and plots are simplified to the point of blandness. The requisite European beginning, middle and end are imposed, good guys and bad guys are clearly defined, problems are solved, and the ending is as clear as an exclamation point. For those who have previously experienced Native American narrative only from this type of source, Surviving through the Days is a revelation. Here is complexity of character and motive; mystery; ribaldry; and no clear anything. As a professional storyteller who works with groups of all ages, I welcome this complexity and appreciate the detail given with each selection to help the outsider understand it. Too often, storytellers and other educators work only with simplified, dumbed-down representations of cultures unfamiliar to us. Our lack of knowledge results in passing on this false impression of boring simplicity.

It must be acknowledged that many audiences, if exposed to these stories as told in their original contexts, would react with "I don't get it." "Mad Bat," a story from the Maidu culture, is an "I don't get it" story. Bat is angry all the time and finally kills his sister-in-law because she does not give him acorn soup. He kills others. He is not a hero. But no one in the story is a hero. Bat speaks what the translator calls "word salad," as does a schizophrenic. He kills, and people are afraid of him, but they do nothing, but just keep on gambling, until a water ouzel, a small river bird, catches Bat in his net and Bat dies. Ouzel declares that bats can now do no harm, but only sleep in hollow trees during the day.

We are used to living in a culture that only gives us stories we "get" right away. But folklore from Native American and many ancient traditions gives us treasure whose value is evident only after it sinks into our bones. And then it is so much a part of us, we no longer are aware of it. As Pomo basketweaver-narrator Mabel McKay says in Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive, "Don't ask me what it means the story. Life will teach you about it the way it teaches you about life" (194).

The sources of these songs and stories are varied and they represent the California Indians to the degree that this is possible. All materials were collected after the ethnic catastrophe of the Gold Rush and are products of Indian informants in contact with non-Indian collectors. Some were collected by trained anthropologists, some by students on their first and only venture into the field. I doubt that the informants were in a position to dispute the translations or interpretations of the stories and songs. But it is all we have.

If a student of folklore or a storyteller does her homework and enjoys the unraveling of an unpredictable mystery, there are rewards in engaging in this book. Being able to hear some of these stories with the living color provided by the supplementary notes can give life back to a culture with which perhaps even most of its descendants may no longer be familiar. That is worth doing. Acquiring a taste for these stories is worth doing, but it takes time. Time was taken-seven years-in the gathering of resources for this book, to help us do just that. I hope others will read the selections aloud as I have, not just as relics of the past to dissect, but as living traditions with which listeners can have a relationship.