And What about Those Cranberries?:
Oral Epistemology in Native American Narratives
by
Dr. James Ruppert
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Clause Levi-Strauss once brought up the notion that if one looked at the breadth of an
oral tradition that one could outline a system of philosophical thought and cultural beliefs, a
worldview if you will, but I want to point out that individual narratives can also give us a
panoptic insight into how oral narratives create signification and why they are so useful as
cultural pedagogy and epistemological construct. Traditional Native oral narratives promote a
way of thinking about the world, an epistemology of culturally moral subjects, dialogic
conversation, mediational evaluation, and independent decision making. To learn the stories, to
think about them, and to pass them on is to live with them, to allow them to influence how you
see the world.
Traditional Native oral narratives create a cultural consciousness that encourages
intellectual interrogation: an education system that asked one to think seriously about actions, to
question and weigh priorities among cultural values, to imagine effects and results -- what we
might call today a play of narrative meaning and signification intended to reinforce the use of a
comprehensive and complex set of cultural values. This interactive sense of knowledge is not
commonly associated with the Western approaches to the documentation of indigenous oral
narrative traditions.
Now I have an Athabaskan Raven story to tell:
Great Raven was living in a village, but the village was having a hard time. There
were no salmon coming up the river and when villagers went to investigate why, they
never came back. The people asked Great Raven if he would help them out and they
brought him some new clothes. He said, "GAHWK, I can't eat clothes. Bring me food."
The starving villagers collected every bit of food they had and Raven devoured it. The
next day he set out and on the way with his spirit power, he made two shiny spears out of
pitch, and they were the most magnificent spears anyone had ever seen. They even made
a beautiful ringing sound when they hit something. He found a dead fish and wiped it all
over his canoe, so that his canoe would smell of fish. Now it would look like the village
was busy harvesting fish [instead of starving]. Down river, he found the camp of the
Bear family. He noticed their weir stretched across the whole river, stopping all of the
fish from getting up river. He hailed the Bear Man saying, "Friend, you are making too
much work for us. Those people are working me to death. Let me help fix your weir"
(implying that there were many breaks in the weir). As he walked in the water, Raven
kicked holes in the weir and then pointed them out to the Bear Man. When the weir was
fixed, the Bear Man cautiously went back to his camp with Raven. Raven told the Man
and his Bear wife that Raven's wife said he looked just like their little baby Bear when he
was an infant, thereby implying he was related to the Bear Family and calling forth the
necessary hospitality. He convinced the Bear Man that since they were relatives they
should trade spears as a sign of friendship and cooperation. Though reluctant, Raven and
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Bear man traded spears. He seemed pleased with this magnificent possession. Raven
told the woman that her trading partner had sent her a new spear so she should also trade
with him. This she did. Then Raven went over to baby Bear and made a fuss over the
baby, claiming the love of a relative. He willed the baby to defecate on him and in the
commotion that ensued, he suddenly killed the baby. When the Bear Man grabbed the
shiny spear, Raven made it crumble into pitch fragments from which it was formed, and
Raven speared him. The wife grabbed her spear. It also turned into fragments, and
Raven killed her. Raven went and took down the wier. But he stayed in the Bear camp
all summer and into the Fall eating all the food the bears had cached and the bears. Then
Raven returned to the village after all the fish had been dried and stored, saying he had
been sick all summer. The bear's relatives in the village were angry with Raven when he
returned, because they knew what he had done to their relatives. Raven went into the
woods later and picked some cranberries. He went to the bear man's younger brother's
house and rubbed cranberries in his mouth. Catherine Attla notes that bears don't eat
cranberries ever since that time (Attla, 131).
Now I tell this to illustrate my comment that the story’s meanings center more on what
Barre Toelken has called "culturally moral subjects" than plot (Toelken, 86) . Some of my nonNative students complain that the story doesn't end where it should. After Raven kills the greedy
bears that should be the end, but obviously the story continues. Perhaps our Western literary
expectation of climax and structure doesn't function well here. For Western literature tradition,
plot structures literature, defines meaning. After the hero accomplishes his task and gets his
reward (in this case: food) the story should be over. But in this narrative, some other episodic
structure is in charge. And my non-Native students complain that when the story does end, it
ends wrong. If Raven does something good, why are his actions called into question? If he has
been greedy, why does he get away with it? They feel that how the story ends should tell us
what to think about the action; that is, what its meaning is. Why does the story continue after
Raven has accomplished his goal? And what do cranberries have to do with this?
The Western literary expectation of individual action structuring the narrative framework
leads some readers to think that plot elements tell us how to understand the meaning of event.
“All's well that ends well.” Instead, the story is addressing a series of "culturally moral subjects"
that use the plot as a mechanism for arrangement, emphasis, and perspective. Raven's greed is
paralleled to the bear's greed, but actions on spiritual or human/animal planes are not always
equal. Raven's function is to enable explorations of values and to transform the world. Plot
serves to highlight the interplay of idea-positions; as such they evolve and develop specific
cultural conversations.
Let’s look for a moment at how Raven accomplishes his task. First of all, Raven
is not motivated by material goods. He will only journey forth when the food supply, which was
dangerously low, is now almost depleted. Since he knows all, he is ready for the Bears. He
creates a highly desirable material object to help him. He employs trickery when he pretends
that he has been working hard preparing fish. Athabaskan society has a strong work ethic that
Raven will pretend to practice. When he arrives at the bear’s camp, he offers to help Bear fix his
weir. Cooperation and mutual assistance are expected cultural values. Raven’s appearance of
hard work and helpful attitude convince Bear that Raven is in earnest. Once Raven implies his
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kinship relationship, the Bears are now bound by familial bonds. One of the strong interpersonal
bonds of Athabaskan society is hunting partnerships. The trading of spears now brings a third
level of culturally approved morality into play. As well as hunting partnership, trading
partnerships are essential to building intra-village bonds. When Raven says that Bear Woman’s
trading partner has sent her a spear, she has to accept. His betrayal and killing of the greedy
Bears comes because they have accepted, valued and acted upon many of the tenets of
Athabaskan life. Raven appeals to family, social networks, tradition and the love of beautiful
material objects to achieve him purpose, testing those things that have real value in life. He acts
with the swift logic of kk'adonts'idnee (the Distant Time stories).
Raven’s actions touch on a variety of culturally moral subjects, but each one must be
evaluated, thought about, prioritized and validated. When Raven appeals to kinship, he
reinforces how important that is, as he does with trading and hunting partnerships. Hard work
and cooperation are references as well. Important values are acknowledged, but at the same time
they are questioned. When should you deny the claims of a relative or a partner? When are they
not true and therefore not knowledge? When should you not extend hospitality? It is an
accepted cultural values that one should not be gullible, that one should learn from experience as
well as spiritual insight, and that an individual should be self-reliant. The response in the listener
is a dynamic evaluation of the contexting of cultural values. Imagine meaning here as a
discourse field, not fixed, not eternal but dialogic, competing, evaluative. The narrative doesn’t
tell us how to act within a worldview, but how to frame the questions we have to answer and
what might be the results -- what might constitute the true and the meaningful. The culturally
moral subjects shift as the values modify and enlarge upon each other. There is always
questioning, discussion and evaluation because such negotiation is at the heart of signification in
oral narratives. Indeed, the sense of dynamic interaction of cultural values and competing
epistemological expectations informs all Athabascan narratives and other oral traditions I have
studied.
If epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, oral narratives like this one
suggest that we know from tradition, from experience, and from the words of others. However,
such knowledge exists in dynamic interaction. The listener’s job is to renegotiate the priorities
of competing values. It is ideological work to find out what is true and real. But only such work
can lead to knowledge and appropriate action in the physical world.
But back to our story. What about Raven’s return to the village and those cranberries?
He lies about his inability to work all summer and lets the villagers store up food that he and they
will need for the winter. They must accept that what Raven gives, he can take away. All
journeys must have a return and an accounting to relatives and villagers. Where a Western plotoriented story ends after the hero’s actions find some completion, this story emphasizes cultural
realities and values. Ultimately all individual actions impact the community and create the
nature of reality. And the cranberries are a final act of defining the nature of Raven, his power
and his liminal standpoint. Bears, as we learn, avoid cranberries, and such a reality can be seen
in the world around us. The bear brother must learn to accept that which he cannot control, as
must the humans in Raven’s village. But most importantly, balance has been restored. The plot
has just brought us to the final culturally moral subject. No action goes without a response in the
spiritual or physical world. The plot’s connections to values and signification is existential in
that the plot elements take on meaningful existence only as they indicate the direction of the
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culturally moral subjects that have a continuing existence in discourse and worldview. For
many students, understanding something about Native oral literature may hinge on the difference
between Western and Native literary conventions. Psychological understandings of behavior
will do little to help one grasp why Raven or the Bears act and what the meaning of their actions
is. And Western literary conventions tend to push these narratives into the genre of fables or
fairy tales. Without a usable sense of genre, attempts at understanding meaning get off to the
wrong start. Oral epistemology orients the listener toward meaning that resides in the discourse
community and plot only acts to excite a paradigm of values that must be commented upon,
questioned and responded to. Episodic structures lend themselves to narratives that center on
culturally moral subjects and not linear progressive narratives of consequence.
Because plot is concerned with a structure of events that imply causal signification, one
might ask how the nature of event differs in oral narratives. While this leads us into a broad
field that others have explored more fully, let me just say that event in episodic structures exists
to engage the terms of the culturally moral subjects that the narrative evokes. Events in plot are
bounded by a sense of completion that hinges on structure or its ability to enlist previous
thematic elements and advance them in a manner consistent with already evoked plot events.
Episodic narrative events address a discourse outside the narrative structure and engage them to
bring in new competing values that resonate with previous subjects.
One might think that because my comments center on a Raven story that this analysis
might be limited to a trickster epistemology or “trickster discourse” as Vizenor suggests, and of
course, to some extent it is, but I have further examples. There is an Athabaskan story about a
girl who is setting her snares. For a few days, the snares which once were productive turn up
empty. She decides to watch the snares and finds that another line that looks like a fishing line is
coming down from the sky and grabbing her rabbits just as they are about to be snared.
Somewhat upset, she pulls the line and hears what sounds like a splash up in the sky. Then all is
silence. A few days later when she is tending her snares, she hears voices in the sky. They seems
to be looking for someone. She follows the voices and is transported into the sky world. There
the relatives of a lost fisherman are looking for any trace of him. The girl goes back to her house
and finds an old piece of a canoe and brings it back to the sky people. She tells them that this a
piece of the lost fisherman’s boat. The sky people thank her profusely and give her a gift. They
can now rest assured that their loved one has drowned and can now hold a memorial potlatch to
nourish and console his soul. As the story ends, everyone is happy. However, I can also tell you
a few stories that warn people of the evil of lying, an epistemological and social sin in a society
where all vital information is oral. Yet this story implies it is acceptable to lie in certain
situations. The body of Athabaskan oral narratives gives us both idea-positions. One might
wonder, without a clear cut moral ethic, how can one know which is the appropriate action.
Obviously we have to trust what people say and also not believe everything. Again the culturally
moral subjects must be weighed, one has to evaluate information by entering a discourse about
what one knows to be true. Are actions on different spiritual planes equivalent? Does
communion with the dead and the reinforcing of the bonds between the living and the dead
change what can be considered true knowledge? Can one create favorable actions based on
knowledge that is untrue?
One might ask why I call this paradigm an epistemology and not a worldview or
pedagogical approach. Epistemology is about how we know what we know. It might manifest
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itself in the questions about the validity of dream knowledge, or if we can believe something
only if others confirm it. However, here we have a narrative structure, a model of signification
that is open-ended, that suggests that the final act of transferring the signification from the story
into an individual’s knowledge and agency is up to the individual. The story sets up the agenda,
the competing ideological structures if you will. Hayden White suggests that narrative discourse
arrays itself as a model of consciousness. Here consciousness, in its effort to create signification,
marshals the possible understandings and knowledge in a dynamic paradigm, and the listener is
required to understand the nature of narrative truth as being always in negotiation and mediation.
In an oral epistemology, signification is never one-dimensional nor exhaustive. Because
listeners enter into a ongoing discourse about values and meaning that is embedded in the
narrative, their insights are validated in a conversation that goes back to Distant-Time and
forward into oral contemporary communities. In an examination of the nature of Indigenous
knowledge, Marie Battiste and James Youngblood Henderson assert:
In Indigenous ways of knowing, the self exists within a world that is subject to flux. The
purpose of these ways of knowing is to reunify the world or at least to reconcile the world
to itself. Uniting these ways of knowing is necessary, as each can contribute to human
development and each requires its own appropriate expression. Indigenous ways of
knowing hold as the source of all teachings caring and feeling that survive the tensions of
listening for the truth and that allow truth to touch our lives. Indigenous knowledge is the
way of living within contexts of flux, paradox, tension, respecting the pull of dualism and
reconciling opposing forces. In the realms of flux and paradox, “truthing” is a practice
that enables a person to know the spirit in every relationship (42).
In oral epistemology one knows to be true that which is tested, that which is understood
to stand in the dynamic confluence of discourse, but also that which the listener must actively
engage to make the final act of signification in truthing. It seems clear to me that exploring such
epistemological questions is critical in creating a deep understanding of Native oral narratives,
but I believe that exploring such questions gives us new ways to think about Western literary
criticism and contemporary Native American Literature.
Works Cited
Attla, Catherine. “Bibaats’a K’inohoollit Yilneeyee: The Baby Who, According to His Aunt,
Resembled His Uncle.” Bakk’aatugh Ts’uhuniy: Stories We Live By. Fairbanks: Yukon
Koyukuk School District and Alaska Native Language Center, 1989. 115-132.
Battiste, Marie and James Youngblood Henderson. Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and
Heritage: A Global Challenge. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2000.
Toelken, Barre, and Tacheeni Scott. "Poetic Retranslation and the 'Pretty Languages of
Yellowman." In Traditional American Indian Literatures: Texts and Interpretations, ed.
Karl Kroeber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
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