Indigenous North American story

Three writers from three nations. Thomas King is Cherokee and Greek, Canadian by residence, with a career teaching and writing from inside Indigenous literary study. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a plant scientist. Leslie Marmon Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo and took the pueblo's storytelling practice into the novel. Reading these three voices together teaches what a short page about "Indigenous North American story" cannot teach on its own: there is no such single tradition, each tradition belongs to a specific nation with a specific land, and the writers who carry the work lead with their nation.

Each of them asks a different healing question. King asks what stories a settler-colonial society tells about Indigenous people and what stories Indigenous people tell about themselves when the first set stops being the only audible one. Kimmerer asks what a reciprocal relationship with a living landscape sounds like in the register of a scientist and story-carrier. Silko asks how a life returns to a timeline longer than one lifetime when the short timeline has come apart.

These three writers do not claim to represent hundreds of nations. Each names the nation she or he writes from, and the naming is the work.

Voices from inside the tradition

Thomas King (Cherokee and Greek), The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (2003). The CBC Massey Lectures of 2003, published in book form by House of Anansi Press in Canada and University of Minnesota Press in the US. Five lectures on what stories do to their listeners and to the society that listens. The opening and recurring sentence, "The truth about stories is that that's all we are," has become a reference point for Indigenous literary theory in North America.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation), Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013). A botanist in her academic life, a carrier of Potawatomi teachings in her family life, Kimmerer braids both across the book. The title essay on sweetgrass is a useful door for a reader who wants to know what a reciprocal, living-landscape register sounds like written by a scientist trained to measure.

Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Ceremony (1977) and Storyteller (1981). Ceremony is the post-war novel about a returning veteran, pueblo ritual, and the impossibility of healing a private injury without a communal one. Storyteller mixes autobiographical prose, photographs, and traditional Laguna material; it is the closest Silko comes to showing how she learned the form.

External context: several major North American university presses publish Indigenous scholars writing from inside their nations. University of Arizona Press, University of Minnesota Press, and University of Nebraska Press catalogues are worth reading at the author level, nation by nation. Reading at the anthology level strips the nation.

What stays with the technique

An anthology that calls itself Native American Myths and Legends is itself the problem. The title tells a reader that hundreds of nations share one story-body and one storytelling technique. Hundreds of nations do not share one body or one technique. Cherokee, Laguna Pueblo, and Potawatomi storytelling are three different practices. The practice for a reader outside the tradition starts with finding the nation, then finding a voice from inside the nation.

The language a writer borrows from matters. "Storytelling" is a portable word. "Ceremony" carries its context with it. A writer outside the tradition who names a piece of craft as ceremony is borrowing a word that carries, in Indigenous languages and in their English equivalents, a specific religious and communal commitment. Use the word, and the commitment comes with it. Use the word as decoration, and the commitment goes missing along with the care the commitment protects.