American Tales : The richness of Native American literature revealed : COMING TO LIGHT: Contemporary Translations of the Native American Literatures of North America, <i> Edited by Brian Swann (Random House: $30; 848 pp.)</i>

The girl married a bear, not intentionally you know, but as we all understand life is complex and some things can’t be helped. The results were predictably tragic, testing and tearing apart everything she knew and loved. In the end, a bear herself now, she destroyed them all, her human family: “She couldn’t do a thing. . . . She killed them all off, even her mother.” One of more than 50 translated stories and songs in “Coming to Light,” Brian Swann’s anthology of Native American literature, “The Girl Who Married the Bear” is a story of remarkable and immediate power from the Canadian Yukon, reaching across cultural space to claw at our deepest sense of who and what and where we are. This story, translator Catherine McClellan explains in her introduction, “grips Yukon natives with all the power of a major literary work, evoking in them the same kind of intense responses as those experienced by Greeks hearing their great Attic dramas.”

After a few centuries in which Native American oral literatures have been ignored, dismissed as a colorful and primitive step up the ladder toward printed texts, or at best appropriated in garbled, context-free “translations,” somebody has finally done it right. Though not quite living up to its potential, Brian Swann’s “Coming to Light” is nonetheless an extraordinary book, a work that displays almost the full range of Native American literatures and does so with responsibility, authority, and brilliance. The “translation” of Native American “literatures” into English has a troubled history, having for centuries meant for the most part a kind of salvage operation in which Native cultures have been mined as a natural resource for white authors and publishers out to make a quick romantic buck before the Vanishing American vanished. These cultural prospectors then most often published their burgled wares in English in confusing, random fragments with no regard at all for performative context or cultural significance. The predictable result of such imperial condescension and exploitation can be found in Edward Said’s 1993 description in “Culture and Imperialism” of what this darling of multiculturalism absurdly calls, “that sad panorama produced by genocide and cultural amnesia which is beginning to be known as ‘native American literature.’ ”

In conjunction with the tremendous volume of contemporary writing being published by living Native American authors, Swann’s “Coming to Light” offers pretty persuasive evidence that, Said aside, Native American literature not only is one of the most exciting veins in contemporary American literature but also has a very long and very rich history. With only one significant misstep, Swann fulfills admirably his promise to provide “a sampling of the magnificence and diversity of the many different Native American cultures that have existed for thousands of years and continue to exist today, despite efforts to repress, suppress, and even extirpate them.” A widely acknowledged authority on Native American literatures and cultures, he has brought together here a truly stunning collection of traditional texts from nearly all parts of North America, dividing his entries by region: Alaska, Yukon, and the Subarctic; the North Pacific Coast; Great Basin and Plateau; the Eastern Woodlands; the Southwest and Southeast; and California. Among the contemporary translators included are a virtual who’s who of such respected authorities as Dell Hymes, Jarold Ramsey, Elaine Jahner, Barre Toelken, Dennis Tedlock, Paul Zolbrod, Keith Basso, William Shipley, and others. But even more impressive is Swann’s success in attracting Native storytellers and translators to his project, men and women who speak their native languages and who write within a unique consciousness of what “literature” means within the context of their specific tribal cultures. Among these are Catherine Attla, Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Leo Moses and Eliza Jones, several of Alaska’s best known Native storytellers; Calvin W. Fast Wolf from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; Timothy Benally, from the Navajo Nation; Felipe S. Molina, from Yoem Pueblo in Arizona.

In an introduction both succinct and superbly informative, Swann explains that “each translation is preceded by an introduction that places the work in its culture, gives it a context, explains what needs to be explained, and suggests ways to learn more. . . .” He is as good as his word here. Each translated text is indeed preceded by an essay that provides the essential cultural context missing from almost all previous translation anthologies. In her introduction to “The Girl Who Married the Bear,” for example, Catherine McClellan explains that in her own work with the Tagish people of the Yukon she “soon discovered that the Indians considered telling stories to be one of their most vital ways of expressing their identities and teaching their most deeply held values. . . .” McClellan points out that “oral societies do not value well-wrought language alone; performance also counts.” And we learn, as Elaine Jahner confesses, that the two brief Lakota stories she has translated for us “achieve their full, complex richness only within Lakota culture. . . . As is the case with all stories that live on in tradition, the circumstances that prompt a particular telling are as much a part of the story’s significance as the details of its plot.” Jahner then gives us the story of the story’s telling.

To quibble about a book as extraordinary as “Coming to Light” may seem a bit mean spirited, for Swann has given the world an invaluable resource here and deserves our collective recognition and gratitude. However, quibbling is the last refuge of the reviewer, and quibble I shall, for as splendid as Swann’s achievement is, it contains a glaring hole. Under the heading of “Southwest and Southeast” are to be found materials from the Yaqui, Zuni, Navajo, Western Apache, Hopi, Havasupai and Koasati, but where, a reader may wonder, are the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Caddo and so forth? Where is the “Southeast” half of this section of the anthology? Why are so many tribal cultures representing such a large portion of North America, and with such rich oral literatures, silenced here?

Swann makes a feeble gesture toward explaining away this strange omission. “An anthology omits more than it contains,” he confesses, adding that “there are inevitable gaps. For instance, while I worked hard to obtain translations from Cherokee, I was not successful. And there is only one representative from the Southeast.” The explanation falls flat at best, and one must conclude that despite his half-hearted protests to the contrary the editor simply did not work hard enough in this one area. The stories from these southeastern tribes are myriad, and the native writers and translators are numerous, though perhaps a little more effort on the editor’s part might have been required to find and persuade them. As a result of this failure, “Coming to Light” is finally a splendid and ground-breaking but unmistakably flawed anthology.