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Reading the Fire engages America’s “first literatures,” traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.
PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroductionPart One1) Creations and Origins2) Coyote and Friends, an Experiment in Interpretive Bricolage3) The Poetry and Drama of Healing, the Iroquoian “Condolence Ritual” and the Navajo “Night Chant”Part Two4) From Mythic to Fictive in the Nez Perce Orpheus Myth5) “The Hunter Who Had an Elk for a Guardian Sprit” and the Ecological Imagination6) The Wife Who Goes out Like a Man, Comes Back as a hero: The art of two Oregon Indian narratives7) Uncursing the Misbegotten in a Tillamook Incest Story8) Genderic and Racial Appropriation in Victoria Howard’s “The Honorable Milt”Part Three9) Simon Fraser’s Canoe; or Capsizing into Myth10) Fish-Hawk and Other Heroes11) Retroactive Prophecy in Western Indian Narrative12) The Bible in Western Indian Mythology13) Ti-Jean and the Seven-headed Dragon, Instances of Native American Assimilation of European Folklore14) Francis La Flesche’s “The song of FLying Crow” and the Limits of Ethnography15) Tradition and Individual Talents in Modern Indian WritingNotesBibliographyIndex
"A gathering of brilliant essays by the most literarily sensitive of commentators on Native American myths and tales."
