This document discusses key aspects of Native American oral narratives and literature. It notes that Native American cultures had various symbolic ways of communicating ideas through materials like codices, winter counts, and wampum belts before European invasion. It emphasizes that oral literature is best understood as an oral performance tradition relying on cultural knowledge rather than written texts. The document also explains Native American perspectives on nature as sacred and everything in nature having a spiritual power in a reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment. Finally, it provides examples of common Native American story types like origin stories and trickster tales.

1. Native American Oral Narrative

2. Indigenous Literature
Four things we need to be mindful of:
1) Difference in cultural values and worldviews
2) Dynamics of possession, appropriation, and
translation
3) Historical definitions of literature (written and
oral)
4) Native American’s relationship to Nature and
symbolic thinking

4. Perspective
✤ Who has the right to possess?
✤ Who writes history and from
what perspective?
✤ Where, what, and who are the
“New World”?
✤ What does history look like
from the perspective of those
who aren’t writing it?

5. Native American Literature
• Before European invasion,
Native Americans
communicated ideas and
beliefs through….
• symbols, ideograms,
and other
representations
• on range of materials
and writing surfaces

6. Mayan Codices

7. Hand-colored Aztec Codex

8. A Dakota Winter Count

9. Wampum Belts

10. Anishinaabe Birchback Scroll

12. • “Oral literature is less a tradition of texts than
a tradition of performances”
• Performances often required knowledge of
locations, events, signs, and elements of their
mythology
• Performances involve rituals, symbols,
locations, voices, gestures
Mode of Presentation

13. Native American relationship to Nature
• Nature is Sacred
• Everything in Nature has a
spirit of its own and is part of
the Great Spirit
• Everything in Nature has a
physical and spiritual power/
energy that affects us
• Reciprocal relationship (we
need nature, nature needs us)
• Nature communicates
symbolically

14. Native American Stories
•Three most popular:
•Origin and
Emergence Stories
•Culture Hero Stories
•Trickster and
Transformer Tales

15. The Iroquois
Creation Story

16. Turtle Island

18. Rival Twins

19. Creation of the Whites (Yuchi)
A story about two different philosophies
of being, two different ways of seeing,
knowing, and encountering the world

20. Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe (Lakota)

22. Coyote Steals Fire (Klamath)

23. The Figure of the Trickster