American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION My goal in this paper is to present some of the rhetorical-poetic devices employed by Samuel E. Kenoi, a Chiricahua Apache, who told eight Coyote narratives in his Native language to Harry Hoijer in the early 1930s. This paper adds to the growing body of literature analyzing Native American discourse as highly structured. Such structures include shared, culturally constituted, rhetorical-poetic devices, individual strategies, and the emergent nature of real-time narration. In Section 1, I present a brief biographical sketch of Sam Kenoi and describe his contact with Harry Hoijer. In 2, I discuss Kenoi’s use of a Chiricahua Apache narrative enclitic, -ná'a ‘so they say,’ as a line signaling device. In 3, I present examples of Kenoi’s use of an initial particle, nágo ‘then,’ as an ethnopoetic device that signals changes in actors, actions, time, and locations-thereby marking stanzas. In Section 4, I present information on various additional rhetorical-poetic devices, paying attention to quoted speech, numerical patterns centered on twos and fours, and formulaic devices that anchor these narratives to other Coyote narratives. In Section 5, I identify features of Kenoi’s narratives that have wider application to Chiricahua verbal art and I make some comparative statements regarding other Southern Athapaskan languages. In 6, I provide a set of concluding remarks where I take up the implications of this narrative as a dialogic interaction between social actors (Kenoi and Hoijer) and as a part of a larger discursive tradition in an anterior here and now (the Mescalero Reservation circa 1930).