American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We are in constant rapport with an intelligence in which all experiences remote and proximate, “trivial” and “important,” are held like waving reeds in the sensitive transparency of a brook. —Edward Sapir, Left-Handed, Son of Old Man Hat Much has been written from ethnographic, linguistic, and ethnopoetic perspectives concerning Native American oral poetry. Far less, however, has been written from these perspectives concerning written or “orthographic” poetry. For example, many literary critics describe Native American written poetry as inspired by oral tradition (namely storytelling). This seems a vacuous claim unless one can set out the features of the oral genre (tradition) and the written form, and establish a baseline for comparative purposes. It is not enough to claim that poetry is storytelling based on oral tradition; rather, we should have more specific criteria. The aim of this article is to examine a set or genre of Navajo poetry as an emergent literary tradition, employing linguistic and tropic devices that create poetic identities. I will focus on a set of poems concerning Coyote that have links to oral tradition and will investigate how each poem connects with and diverts from that tradition. I will also investigate the codes or languages used in these poems and the language ideologies that motivate such decisions as which language, which mode of expression is appropriate. In an important article Edward Spicer discusses the notion of hidden states. He points out that the hidden states are not in fact hiding but rather have been erased from the consciousness of the dominant nation-state. He uses the example of Irish literature to show how this works. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, it was widely assumed that there was no such thing as Gaelic literature. This assumption, however, ignored or denied centuries of Gaelic literature (the Bible, for example, was translated into Gaelic before it appeared in English).