KEEPING SLUG WOMAN ALIVE: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts

by Greg Sarris

This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just "what things seem to be." Throughout, he How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down?

Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multivalence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory.

Sarris's perspective is son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay―a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basketweaver and medicine woman―and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.

Genres: Native American, Anthropology, Research, Theory, Literary Criticism, History

222 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 1993

About the author

Gregory Michael Sarris is the Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the Graton Rancheria Endowed Chair in Creative Writing and Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, where he teaches classes in Native American Literature, American Literature, and Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each essay in this book likely warrants a review of its own, but in failing to do that I will offer my thoughts of it as a whole:
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Nothing one reads or listens to exists in a vacuum; the author, the transmitter, the transcriber, and the recipient (if each exists) all have unique perspectives which will flavor the understanding of a given text. Even the circumstances in which the text is delivered will change the way that it is understood. In order to truly understand a text (or at least a specific reading of a text), one must firmly know each perspective.

Yet Sarris advocates that readers not fall into the trap that so many anthropologists, folklorists, linguists, and the scholars of their many adjacent fields succumb to: the wish to remove those unique perspectives. Instead he suggests that readers acknowledge them as enriching parts of a more holistic understanding. That each perspective must be understood not so they can be excised towards a more "fundamental" or "original" text, but so that they can be incorporated into a better awareness of that specific reading. (Though, as a footnote, he also advocates for the continued usage of the products of these entrapped scholars - that we can learn more through discussing them than by throwing them out altogether.)

Above all else, Sarris wants the reader to remember that every time they read an Indian Text they are an active participant in a cross-cultural dialogue. That it is their job, then, to embrace the uncomfortable betweenness which this dialogue creates and to let it continuously challenge their reading of the text.
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Write a dense book, get a dense response.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

an engaging collection of essays on oral culture, textual interpretation, and native american identity. sarris writes clear, interesting prose and tells good stories. as someone who is fascinated by framing, editorial authority, native culture, and education, i found this book thought-provoking.

[Sheila Rocha · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word is empowered by the intent.