{"id":2366,"date":"2016-11-05T15:43:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T05:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=2366"},"modified":"2016-11-05T15:43:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-05T05:43:00","slug":"the-wishing-bone-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/?p=2366","title":{"rendered":"The Wishing Bone Cycle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wishbone\"<\/a>Recently, I posted my personal mixtape of fairytale and folklore selections<\/a>: an eccentric list of fairy tales, folktales and other works, inspired (in the collating) by the eccentric collecting and publishing strategies of Andrew Lang.\u00a0The list includes the poem\/song below, which was included in\u00a0The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians. <\/em>Norman was named the co-winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by the Academy of American Poets, splitting the prize with Galway Kinnell. Then, and now, he split his winnings and royalties with the Cree community.\u00a0My copy of this classic (first published in 1972) is well worn, you might even say rumpled,\u00a0the spine just about worn away. The book is a selection of narratives ‘gathered and translated’ by Howard A Norman.<\/p>\n

Howard was the child of Russian-Polish Jewish refugees who met in Jewish orphanage, and spent his life translating and publishing works from Canadian Indigenous people, as well as writing and publishing his own short fiction and novels.\u00a0The Wishing Bone Cycle\u00a0<\/em>was his first publication, and is based on a process he\u00a0continues to hone to this day. According to Norman, the narrative poems in this book were gathered by him during storytelling sessions with two Cree storytellers, Jacob Nibenegenesabe and Samuel Makidemewabe.<\/p>\n

In his ‘notes’, Norman writes that “[t]hese narratives were heard and translated between 1967 and 1973 in the area of the Belanger and Cobham rivers” (p. 175). Norman also asserts that often “after a single performance or exhange of stories in Cree communities” much discussion would ensure about the practice of storytelling. One of his sources, William Smith Smith, he says, told him:<\/p>\n

The best story teller is one who lets you live if the weather is bad and you are hungry. I’ll talk about this more. One man I knew long ago. He told me stories. He watched animals. He heard about animals and talked about them. Out of the talk came something. Once he sat down with me and said: ‘This story has something about ice fishing in it. You should know this thing. Maybe it won’t be easy to hear, inside the story, but it’s there. Too easy to find you might think it was too easy to do.’ Well, then he told me the story. Sure enough, there was an important thing in it about ice fishing. I heard it and remembered it. Later, I asked myself: What if a wind blew all the other people away and I was alone? Could I catch fish under the ice just going by what I learned in that story? And a little of what I saw done during ice fishing season? I said to myself: Yes! Then I knew he told a good story. Also, it made me laugh\u00a0<\/em>(pp.172-173).<\/p>\n

At least two scholars of Indian languages have since published articles asserting that\u00a0The Wishing Bone Cycle\u00a0<\/em>is a fake. In April 1989, John Nichols from the University of Manitoba published an article (‘The Wishing Bone Cycle’: a Cree ‘Ossian’?) in the International Journal of American Linguistics (vol. 55, no 2). He argued that Norman’s translations were ‘fakes’ that demonstrated the author’s lack of familiarity with the Cree language of Norman’s purported sources.<\/p>\n

Robert Brightman, from University of Wisconsin, also published a critical article (Tricksters and Ethnopoetics) in the same issue of the same journal, using\u00a0Wishing Bone Cycle\u00a0<\/em>as the basis for an article in which he argued, in part, that Norman’s text raised “a number of questions regarding the authenticity both of the texts and the poetic characteristics represented in Norman’s translations” (p. 179) and that “Whatever their literary merits, versifications based on English translations of American Indian texts provide no insights into the poetic structures of the originals as oral performances” (p. 179). He also argued that much of Norman’s material had been lifted from an earlier translation\/transcription by Leonard Bloomfield of stories told to him by Maggie Achenam. Brightman’s argument was that Norman had merely rendered Bloomfield’s prose translations into poetic form.<\/p>\n

The arguments against Norman’s works and process don’t seem to have gained much attention or traction, and his works are still widely published. These days, Norman tends to stick to writing original fiction. The following is a single story from the Trickster narrative, Wishing Bone Cycle, from which the book takes its title. According to Norman, Jacob Nibenegenesabe was the ‘inventor and initiator of these particular narrative poems’ (p. 3). In the stories in this cycle, the first-person narrator has found the wishbone of a snow goose, which functions as a powerful ‘wishing bone’: the wishbone has the power to metamorphose any object into another, or, as the coat story suggests, to invest inanimate objects with lively personalities.<\/p>\n

\"Swampy<\/a>
Swampy Cree people at Shoal River, Manitoba, 1889. Image courtesy Library & Archives Canada, PA050874.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1.<\/p>\n

I try to make wishes right
\nbut sometimes it doesn’t work.
\nOnce, I wished a tree upside down
\nand its branches
\nwere where the roots should have been!
\nThe squirrels had to ask the moles
\n“How do we get down there
\nto get home?”
\nOne time it happened that way.
\nThen there was the time, I remember now,
\nI wished a man upside down
\nand his feet were where his hands
\nshould have been!
\nIn the morning his shoes
\nhad to ask the bires
\n“How do we fly up there
\nto get home?”
\nOne time it happened that way.<\/p>\n

2.
\nThere was an old woman I wished up.
\nShe was the wife
\nof an old pond.
\nYou could watch her swim in her husband
\nif you were
\nin the hiding bushes.
\nShe spoke to him by the way she swam
\ngently.
\nOne time in their lives there was no rain
\nand the sun began making the pond smaller.
\nSoon the sun took the whole pond!
\nFor many nights the old woman slept
\nnear the hole where her husband once lived.
\nThen, one night, a storm came
\nbut in the morning there still was no water
\nin her husband’s old house.
\nSo she set out on a journey to find her husband
\nand followed the puddles on the ground
\nwhich were the storm’s footprints.
\nShe followed them for many mile.
\nFinally she came upon her husband
\nsitting in a hole. But he was in the wrong hole!
\nSo the old woman brought her husband home
\nlittle by little in her hands.
\nYou could have seen him come home
\nif you were
\nin the hiding bushes.<\/p>\n

3.
\nOnce I wished up a coat
\nwearing a man inside.
\nThe man was sleeping
\nand when he woke
\nthe coat was on him!
\nThis was in summer, so many asked him
\n“Why do you have that coat on?”
\n“It has me in it!”
\nhe would answer.
\nHe tried to take it off
\nbut I wished his memory shivering with cold
\nso it wouldn’t want to remember
\nhow to take a coat off.
\nThat way it would stay warm.
\nI congratulated myself on thinking of that.
\nThen his friends came,
\nput coats on,
\nand slowly showed him how they took coats off.
\nEven that didn’t work.
\nThings were getting interesting.
\nThen his friends
\ntried to confuse the coat
\ninto thinking it was a man.
\n“Good morning,” they said to it,
\n“Did you get
\nyour share of fish?”
\nand other things too.
\nSome even invited the coat to gossip.
\nIt got to be late summer
\nand someone said to the coat
\n“It is getting colder.
\nYou better go out
\nand find a coat to wear.”
\nThe coat agreed!<\/p>\n

Ha! I was too busy laughing
\nto stop that dumb coat
\nfrom leaving the man it wore
\ninside.
\nI didn’t care.
\nI went following the coat.
\nThings were getting interesting.<\/p>\n

(pp. 33-34)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I posted my personal mixtape of fairytale and folklore selections: an eccentric list of fairy tales, folktales and other works, inspired (in the collating) by the eccentric collecting and publishing strategies of Andrew Lang.\u00a0The list includes the poem\/song below, which was included in\u00a0The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians. Norman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2379,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[984,193,179,167],"tags":[1479,1473,1482,1483,1481,1480,1471],"class_list":["post-2366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-wild","category-on-reading","category-on-translation","category-on-writing","tag-howard-a-norman","tag-jacob-nibenegenesabe","tag-john-a-nichols","tag-robert-brightman","tag-samuel-makidemewabe","tag-swampy-cree","tag-the-wishing-bone-cycle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LH1G-Ca","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/wishing_bone.jpg?fit=500%2C425&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2366"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2382,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2366\/revisions\/2382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.perilousadventures.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}