“The Voices of the Haida Glow in this Book”: Aboriginal Orality and Contemporary Canadian Literature

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Abstract

Occasionally, a specific case begs close attention because it is a dramatic but representative sample of a larger phenomenon. Robert Bringhurst’s recent ‘translations’ of Haida oral narratives are such a case, providing a specific historical and geographical context from which to develop a deeper understanding of translation-transcriptions of Aboriginal oral stories into the medium and forms of Euro-Canadian literature. A poet much respected in literary circles, Bringhurst published his books without substantial consultation with the Haida nation. Members of the Haida nation, including Guujaaw, the president of the Council of the Haida Nation, accused Bringhurst of appropriation.

         The proposed book is about both the Bringhurst translations and the Haida objections, and the language ideologies that fed the controversy. I trace 1990s Canadian debates on cultural theft and appropriation of voice, as well as other discourses about language, identity, and cultural and other property rights that informed the Haida objections. But I also use the extensive background material and notes that Bringhurst wrote accompanying his translations, as well as his other writings, to trace his views on translation-transcription and the nature of literature, Aboriginal orature, and myth. Supplementary material includes other translations of the same Haida material as well as writings in ethnopoetics, structural mythology, and postcolonial appropriation and  translation theory (see partial bibliography)

         The book is aimed as much as possible at general readers, which include Aboriginal readers and non-Aboriginal readers, academics and non-academics. It describes the objections to Bringhurst’s Story As Sharp As a Knife (the first book in the trilogy) and gives a contemporary history of the 1990s appropriation debate and First Nations cultural activism in Canada. Then it describes the text of the translations through these objections, focusing on Bringhurst’s philosophy of poetry and book design, as well as his version of the practice of ethnopoetics. The aim is to enable a dialogue between academic and popular views of literature, between new and established academic disciplines (Aboriginal studies and English literature), and between Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian assumptions about community, property, literacy, and verbal art. Here, I use verbal art as an umbrella term to refer to the European high literary, written tradition as well as to the Aboriginal oral and written tradition.

         The book will include a clear deconstruction of an orality/literacy paradigm that is deeply embedded in all of Canadian society, although refracted differently from different cultural positions. The colonial role of literacy and literacy education fuels this paradigm, especially as linked to the residential school experience; but its roots in a nineteenth-century belief in the oral as pre-historic and essential and the written as ambivalently civilized carry through in many Canadian contexts. Even if ‘imaginary’ in an empirical sense, this binary shapes the responses of all Canadians, both Aboriginal and non-, to Aboriginal matters in judicial, educational, and aesthetic contexts. It is hoped that an open-minded exploration of this problematic in the Bringhurst case, in a clear, accessible manner, will promote understanding and push forward the fifteen-year-old public discussion of cultural appropriation.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

1.
Introduction

2.
Chapter One: The Cultural Appropriation Debate of the 1990s: A Retrospect
Chapter Two: Haida Gwaii: Environmental and Cultural Activism
Chapter Three: First Nations Cultural Politics

3.
Chapter Four: Comparing Translations: A Close Reading
Chapter Five: Writing the Oral: From Speech to Writing
Chapter Six: Making a Story into a Book: Design Statements About the Matter

4.
Chapter Seven: Transcription-Translations: Aboriginal Verbal Art and Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature

5.
Conclusion

Chapter Outline


This is a study of what happens when an Aboriginal oral narrative is turned into a written text. It is about

The book uses Robert Bringhurst’s recent translations of Haida oral narratives as a case in point. This gives the investigation  a specific, though complex, historical and geographical location. The theoretical context is post-colonial / decolonizing.

Introduction: In 1999, Bringhurst published a translation of some Haida narratives in A Story as Sharp as a Knife. They had been told in 1900-1901 by a Haida storyteller to an American ethnologist, John Swanton, who transcribed them in phonetic alphabet and then published an English translation. Eighty years later, Bringhurst consulted the original transcription and re-translated some of the texts; that is, he worked out the Haida language through the phonemic representation and created another translation. His book was published by Douglas & McIntyre, a national trade publishing house, which positioned it as a general interest book on classical Haida culture.

The book was received in very different ways. Most of the mainstream and literary critical press gave it rave reviews. I state at the outset that I share this positive response. The words are a well-developed and powerful expression of an intriguing aesthetic. The book is beautifully designed by Bringhurst himself, who is a typographer and book designer as well as a poet. However, some members of the Haida nation objected to the book, including Guujaaw, the president of the Council of the Haida Nation. The Haida objectors said it was a reworking of material that is precious and central to their culture into aesthetic forms that Europeans could understand: it was, in other words, an appropriation.

This Haida response is the motivation for the book. At what point is the transcription of Aboriginal oral narratives an appropriation? Since this is a moving point on a continuum between different institutional, individual, and cultural political interests, my focus is in both the Bringhurst trilogy of translations (two more volumes followed in 2000 and 2001) and the Haida objections, and in the ways in which the texts and their reception were shaped by the language ideologies of both the poet and the objectors.

Chapter One is a review of the written and recorded debates on cultural appropriation and appropriation of voice that took place in Canada in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties. These were not always in the context of  Aboriginal cultural production: one of the most famous in Canada was the African-Canadian objection to the staging of Showboat in North York as an expression of racism. These debates in Canada intersected with an emerging awareness of the dynamics of race, culture, and power prompted by rapidly increasing immigration and the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. My account of this debate is contextualized by postcolonial theoretical work on appropriation (e.g., Said).

At about the same time an Aboriginal cultural and political renaissance was gathering steam. Chapter Two looks at the political history of Haida Gwaii, focusing especially on the environmental activism and cultural activism of Haidas in the last three decades.

Chapter Three is a very general overview of the cultural politics of Aboriginal groups in Canada in the same period, exploring the viewpoint of the Haida objectors to the Bringhurst translation in the context of larger Aboriginal Canadian politics.

Chapter Four brings the Bringhurst text into focus with a close reading of the opening lines of a narrative he has titled “Standing Traveller.” It is compared with another translated version -- of the same ethnological material -- by John Enrico, which Enrico has titled “Noble One Standing in a Moving Canoe.” Both passages are compared against the original transcription published by Swanton, using dictionaries and word lists prepared by Swanton, Enrico, and Bringhurst. Enrico is a field linguist who translated the narrative with very different assumptions about the nature of language, of books, of orality, and of the role of a translator. When the Bringhurst translation came out, Guujaw indicated that the Enrico translation was the correct one (“This Box”). My reading uncovers differing constructions of orality, accuracy, truth, interpretation, and language by these two linguist-translators, one working within a scientific linguistic paradigm, the other within the literary-linguistic tradition of ethnopoetics (especially Hymes). Why is the Enrico version preferred by some of the Haida objectors?

Chapters Five and Six focus on the material and cultural differences between oral and written verbal art because it is the change in medium that most noticeably underlies the change in perception and experience of the “same” text.  I explore the modes of Bringhurst’s written work, or the material systems of meaning in which it takes part. An examination of the modes of Bringhurst’s texts goes  some way towards illuminating the different viewpoints of the participants in this text: the Haida narratives were told, and continue to be seen, as part of an oral tradition, whereas Bringhurst’s experience of verbal art is rooted in European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern scribal traditions.
 
Chapter Five begins with a focus on the intersection between speech and writing that is the concern of many people writing on Aboriginal literature today -- principally because, as King writes, “Native literature … has become written, while at the same time remaining oral.” (185) He suggests a typology of Aboriginal literature that includes the “interfusional,” which fuses speech and writing in distinct ways. “[W]hile there are contemporary examples that suggest the nature of interfusional literature – some of the translations of Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes work… – the only complete example we have of interfusional literature is Harry Robinson’s Write It on Your Heart.” (186) King spends some time analyzing Robinson’s text as an “oral syntax that defeats readers’ efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read the stories out loud.” (186)  How was Robinson’s oral syntax created on the page by his transcriber, Wickwire? What is the syntax of speech really like, taking into account the socio-political aspect of dialect? When a written text is perceived as an accurate transcription of speech, what aspects of that speech have been captured? How might this be similar to or differ from the results and/or projects of Hymes and Bringhurst in their translations of Aboriginal oral narratives?

Robinson/Wickwire is certainly an important transcription of Aboriginal verbal art, and comparing Bringhurst’s texts to theirs clarifies the nature of each in terms of function and form. Though both Hymes and Bringhurst, as poets with a good ear and translators with a respect for the original, try to capture the sound of the original oral narratives in writing, they are ultimately more interested in the structure of the narratives they translate; and therefore their written versions, in which narrative structure is indicated through the visual resources of the page, sometimes work with and sometimes work against the project of capturing sound on paper. Furthermore, in his translation Bringhurst is elaborating his theory that the Haida storyteller he translates is working from a “noetics” (prosody of thought) rather than a “poetics” (prosody of sound). The chapter considers how the resources of thought and sound connect and work with or against each other in each of three texts by Robinson/Wickwire, Skaay/Bringhurst, and Hymes. The constellation of thought, sound, and printed page are affected by the cultural assumptions of each transcriber.

Chapter Six considers how Bringhurst’s aesthetic of book design and type design affect the meaning of his written text. When Bringhurst re-translated the  Haida narratives he not only produced a written text but also a book as his translation. The design of the book reflects his assumptions as a translator – a translator of cultural meanings as well as words. For example, to transpose the meaning “literary” from a primary oral culture into a book culture, Bringhurst may have felt compelled to produce certain type of object-book. The design of the type, the decisions made as to illustrations, and the use of side notes, footnotes and appendices are all expressive within the European manuscript, printing and scholarly tradition. The design of the book “says” something about the verbal art of the Haida within this tradition. Are these design statements correct, from the point of view of the Haida? Are they supportive of the contemporary cultural political projects of Haida Gwaii? Finally, this chapter considers what role the economics of trade publishing and copyright play in the remarks of the Haida objectors, and how this relates to current theories and trends in the areas of book history and print culture.

Chapter Seven: The case of Bringhurst and the Haida is only one of many complex and compelling events of transcription-translation of Aboriginal verbal art in Canada. The last chapter broadens the focus to other transcription-translation of Aboriginal texts into different European cultural institutions that are deeply imbricated in print culture, such as folklore studies and education. What happens in the move from orality to print -- and the book -- when these moves support central Euro-cultural institutions? Considering further cases sheds light on how literature as a social institution shaped both Bringhurst’s translation decisions and his type design and book design decisions. However, the nature of literature as a social institution also shaped the negative responses of the Haida objectors (to the institution of literature as well as to the text itself).

In the seventh chapter, then, I probe particular transformations / transductions / abductions of the surviving or already-transcribed orature of Aboriginal cultures, focusing on the institutional politics that are involved in these transformations, combined with the cultural politics of print and book history. For example, the book has been an icon of literacy both in Europe and its colonies; the combined power of these symbols of European domination (literacy; the book) affected Rasmussen’s transcription-translation of Aua’s Inuit performance in the early twentieth century. Gingell, in turn, has analysed the effect that the functions of a literary education has had on the text when it was later included in a late-twentieth-century anthology of Aboriginal literature (Moses and Goldie). Another key text is Clutesi’s transcription of Tse-shaht narratives in Son of Raven, Son of Deer, which were written and read as a part of the European folklore studies tradition in the 1970’s and also marketed as children’s literature. These transcriptions tell us much about the ways in which the institutions of a print culture shape the cultural and semiotic politics of the relationship between Aboriginal nations and the Canadian nation-state in the late twentieth-century.
[Chapter Seven may turn into two chapters]
 
Chapter Eight: The concluding chapter considers the implications of answers to questions in Chapters Three through Seven. However, it also brings me as a participant-observer into the book. From my position as a Euro-Canadian academic and consumer of books taken by the look, feel, and “sound” of Bringhurst’s poetry and design work, I am compelled to ask: how can a text that I find attractive, especially in regard to its seeming integrity and care for origins, be a bad translation and a cultural theft? From this follow other questions, such as

This last entails the question, what is really “in” the text? The point of this book is not to sell Bringhurst’s work, nor to champion the cause of the objectors, but to close the gap between, on the one hand, the understandings and responses of the objectors, and on the other hand, the understandings of Bringhurst and my responses to the written text. To hold these in balance I will juxtapose the Haida objections against my examination of several elements “in” the text:

What do I find attractive about these two approaches to Aboriginal myth? What might Haida objectors find migsuided / insulting?

Why do I think this is innovative and astoundingly original poetry? Do Bringhurst’s poetics answer the objections of the Haida or are they irrelevant? If so, why?

What is Bringhurst accomplishing here, both unconsciously (in the light of Haida objections) and consciously (in the light of his stated theories of design and meaning-making)? Can these theories help explain the Haida objections?

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