New Voices for Old Words: Algonquian Oral Literatures

by David J. Costa (Editor)

Overview

New Voices for Old Words is a collection of previously unpublished Algonquian oral traditions featuring historical narratives, traditional stories, and legends that were gathered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection presents them here in their original languages with new English-language translations. Accompanying essays explain the importance of the original texts and their relationships to the early researchers who gathered and, in some cases, actively influenced these texts.

 
Covering the northeast United States, eastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Great Plains, the Algonquian languages represented in New Voices for Old Words include Gros Ventre, Peoria, Arapaho, Meskwaki, Munsee-Delaware, Potawatomi, and Sauk. All of these languages are either endangered or have lost their last speakers; for several of them no Native text has ever been published. This volume presents case studies in examining and applying such principles as ethnopoetics to the analysis of traditional texts in several languages of the Algic language family. These studies show how much valuable linguistic and folkloric information can be recovered from older texts, much of it information that is no longer obtainable from living sources. The result is a groundbreaking exploration of Algonquian oral traditions that are given a new voice for a new generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803265486
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Series:	Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians
Pages:	558
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

David J. Costa is the program director of the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center at Miami University. He is the author of The Miami-Illinois Language (Nebraska, 2003).

Table of Contents

Contributors

Foreword

Introduction

DAVID J. COSTA

 

Editing a Gros Ventre (White Clay) text

TERRY BROCKIE AND ANDREW COWELL

Gros Ventre text:

The Gros Ventres Go to War

 

Redacting Premodern Texts without Speakers: the Peoria Story of

Wiihsakacaakwa

DAVID J. COSTA

Peoria text:

Wiihsakacaakwa Aalhsoohkaakani (Wiihsakacaakwa Story)

 

Editing and Using Arapaho-Language Manuscript Sources: A

Comparative Perspective

ANDREW COWELL

Arapaho texts:

A Name-Changing Prayer

Nihʼoo3oo and His Friend the Beaver Catcher: Diving

through the Ice

 

Highlighting Rhetorical Structure through Syntactic Analysis: An

Illustrated Meskwaki Text by Alfred Kiyana

AMY DAHLSTROM

Meskwaki text:

A Man Who Fasted Long Ago

 

Three Nineteenth-Century Munsee Texts: Archaisms, Dialect

Variation, and Problems of Textual Criticism

IVES GODDARD

Munsee texts:

A Youth and His Uncle

Moshkim

Origin Myth

On Editing Bill Leaf’s Meskwaki Texts

LUCY THOMASON

Meskwaki text:

Bill Leaf’s Story of Red-Leggins

 

Challenges of Editing and Presenting the Corpus of Potawatomi

Stories Told by Jim and Alice Spear to Charles Hockett

LAURA WELCHER

Potawatomi text:

Jejakos Gigabé (Crane Boy)

 

The Words of Black Hawk: Restoring a Long-Ignored Bilingual

GORDON WHITTAKER

Sauk text:

The Nekanawîni (‘My Words’) of Mahkatêwimeshikêhkêhkwa

Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book offers a significant contribution to tribal pedagogy."—Paul Zolbrod, Tribal Colllege

From the Publisher

"This book offers a significant contribution to tribal pedagogy."—Paul Zolbrod, Tribal Colllege

Tribal Colllege - Paul Zolbrod

“These carefully edited texts, in eight Algonquian languages no longer widely spoken, show how premodern records can be made accessible to readers interested in the traditional narratives and linguistic styles of an earlier time. They provide models for future philological studies as well as reliable data on some little-known languages.”—David H. Pentland, professor of Algonquian studies at the University of Manitoba  

David H. Pentland