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Issue 16-3
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Volume 16, Number 3 |
June 2001 |
Oral Traditions and Rules of Evidence
by Glen Custred
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which mandates the transfer of Native American remains to an "affiliated" indigenous tribe, allows the use of several lines of evidence in establishing cultural affiliation. One of them is "folkloric and oral traditional evidence." This is entirely appropriate, given the nature of the problem and the fact that oral traditions, if appropriately weighed and carefully evaluated, can sometimes prove valuable in retrieving historical facts. But it is not only reasonable, it is imperative that any program for implementing NAGPRA specify protocols governing the rules of evidence pertaining to oral traditions.
This is by no means virgin territory, for scholars have long grappled with the problem of extracting historical fact from oral traditions. Historian and folklorist Richard Dorson tells of a contract he received in 1961 from the Indian Land Claims Commission of the Department of Justice to determine how much credence the government should place in arguments made by Indian claimants based entirely on oral tradition. In the course of his research, Dorson found that "a host of scholarly disciplines had fought bitter interdisciplinary battles" over the issue of the historical validity in oral traditions. Besides folklorists and mythologists, they included "archaeologists, anthropologists, classicists, geologists, historians of every hue, students of religions, Africanists, the medievalists, the Celticist."
Especially concerned with this issue are historians of Africa, who deal with a paucity of written sources from African societies but an abundance of oral traditions. Moreover, scholars in various fields have long been interested in how memory produces tradition and in how tradition is changed by oral transmission and by the nature of oral cultures.
It isn't possible here to summarize such a rich and vast literature, nor can we apply it to specific questions raised by cultural affiliation under NAGPRA. Instead, we will try to illustrate what this body of scholarship has to offer, suggest some rules of evidence that might emerge from it, and conclude with Kennewick Man as a case study to show why such rules are sorely needed.
Folklore and oral traditions
Perhaps the best place to start is by defining "folklore and oral tradition." Jan Brunwald defines folklore as "those materials in culture that circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the process of traditional performance and communication." Oral, as opposed to written material, and tradition, knowledge and skills handed down over the generations, are central to every definition of folklore. Note, however, the difference between oral tradition and oral history. Oral history refers to knowledge from experience or living memory that is transcribed and becomes part of the written record. Oral tradition is those narratives that are passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next and therefore become transformed over time.
Oral tradition, as the term is used in NAGPRA, usually refers to oral folklore, also described as oral literature, and is divided into genres defined by different forms and functions. Epics, ballads, and lyrics appear in verse and are usually sung. The epic relates great events of the past and the action of great personages. The ballad, shorter and more prosaic, tells a story. The lyric evokes a mood or a feeling. Prose narrative in oral literature is divided into tales, legends, and myth. Tales are highly structured, purely fictional narratives exemplified in European tradition by such stories as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella. Legends, on the other hand, are often told in less tightly structured narratives whose themes may also appear in other genres such as the ballad and the epic.
Unlike folktales, legends may bear some relationship to the truth; that is, they are believed to be true accounts of historical fact by at least some of those who relate them. Tales are the short stories of oral societies; legends are their history. Myths, on the other hand, are sacred narratives, believed to be true by those who relate them, that deal with the broader meaning of life, the cosmos and human morality. Every culture has its own classification of oral traditions; however, all cultures distinguish between those stories that are fiction and those that are true, roughly in the way defined by folklore scholars.
Scholars have been intrigued by strikingly similar themes, patterns, and narrative elements that recur in the folklore of unrelated societies around the world. Vladimir Propp and Levi-Strauss, among others, describe basic structures of folk narratives. Recurring narrative elements called motifs have been catalogued; useful in analyzing folktales, they are especially valuable in determining the historical validity of oral traditions.
Different kinds of evidence can be retrieved from different genres of oral traditions. Even folktales, regarded as pure fiction, can sometimes reveal information about past cultural or social aspects. Their reach into the past, however, is probably not much earlier than the latter part of the nineteenth century. The most fertile sources of retrievable historical facts, however, are narratives about the historical past, epics and legends, that people believe are true.
The process of oral transmission
Knowledge transmitted solely by word of mouth undergoes substantial changes in the course of a few generations because, as Marcel Detienne points out, each person "selects 'facts' and produces an account in terms of the way in which his social sphere organizes spoken memory." Memory, selection, and the cultural context of a body of oral tradition alter accounts of events over time. Moreover, a storyteller often embellishes and redacts for purely narrative purposes; thus aesthetic and dramatic motives also alter content.
To illustrate how oral transmission shapes content, we will examine three processes: omission, and thus the loss of information; addition through diffusion; and fusion of elements within a narrative, also called telescoping.
Omission of events or personages from a body of oral traditions can lead to loss of information from folk memory. Robert Lowie illustrates this point in the case of the Assiniboines of the Canadian Plains, who adopted the horse in the eighteenth century, only a century and a half before Lowie's study. Although the horse profoundly changed their way of life, their oral traditions do not mention its introduction. Nez Perce traditions, on the other hand, retain in folk memory the first appearance of the horse. Differing instances like these lead Lowie to object to the use of oral traditions in history. Jan Vansina, however, says that omissions of this kind can be explained by the cultural context of the oral traditions. The horse may not have appeared significant to the Assiniboine when it was introduced; therefore the event itself was not remembered. But after three generations they couldn't imagine a time without the horse, and they accounted for its origin not in legend but in a myth of Creation. The horse had a less transforming affect on the Nez Perce, which is why Vansina believes they retained its introduction in historical time.
Vansina gives another example of omission, in this case how a great event was lost while a minor one was retained. The oral traditions of the Kuba of the Congo retain the memory of the first white man to appear among them, but there is no mention of the second white man, who wrought vast changes in life in the Congo. The first white man, a merchant, was a novelty and thus retained in tradition. The ultimate importance of the second, however, was unknown at the time; thus he didn't become a part of folk memory. The consensus of the community about what is important or interesting therefore determines what will be retained or lost. It may be possible to account for the absence of an important historical fact in oral tradition without calling into question retained information that may truly reflect past events.
Diffusion of motifs or themes from one tradition to another, sometimes over long distances and across linguistic barriers, is another feature of oral tradition that may alter or distort the memory of past events. This process was explored in detail by earlier scholars. The way new elements are borrowed and absorbed depends on the influence of the source tradition, on the interests of the borrowers, and on the part the borrowed elements play in the preexisting tradition. For example, an image expressed in a motif may reinforce a theme in the borrowing culture, thus making it more concrete. Or an innovation may fill out an earlier traditional account, as in the case Vansina relates of the Kuba, who say their ancestors came to their present homeland by river. When traders, whom they encountered from the eighteenth century on, told them about the marvels of the sea, "it fleshed out the image of their points of origin" and was thus incorporated into their body of oral traditions.
Fusion of different elements into a single unit is another shaping process in oral tradition whereby multiple historical figures may be fused into a single hero, several battles fused into one battle, historic events fused with mythic themes. Omission, borrowing, and fusion regularly occur in oral tradition and can be taken into account if the researcher understands the cultural and historical context of transmission. Researchers can discard elements that do not reflect historical fact and earmark elements of questionable historic accuracy. Final validation, however, requires corroborating external evidence like written documents and archaeological and other kinds of data.
Oral traditions can actually be more credible than written accounts when contradictions occur in written records. Vansina cites as an example the Abenaki in Maine, whose oral traditions tell about events in 1759 during the French and Indian War. When their oral history was written down over a hundred years later and compared with French and English written versions of the same event, the oral tradition not only confirmed both written versions, it also resolved a contradiction between them.
But we can't expect to find the same degree of validity in myths as in legends, since the function of mythic lore is very different from that of other kinds of oral traditions.
Archaic myth, as it is sometimes called, is the living myth of oral societies such as those found in America at the time of European contact. This kind of myth deals not with historic time but with the distant past. It addresses the questions of how things became accomplished, how they came to be. Mythic narratives frequently include bizarre elements--monsters, figures that are both animal and human at the same time, shape-shifters, magical transformations, and incestuous relationships. Nonetheless, they are believed to be true accounts by those who relate them, "a reality of a wholly different order from nature," as Mircea Elide puts it. Myth often has a moral dimension; it explains in moral terms why things happened, how the landscape was configured, why plants and animals are the way they are. The significance of myth lies in the cultural and psychological realm, not in historical fact.
Since myths, like all folk narratives, reflect the experiences and societies of those who tell them, such great events as migrations and invasions may be telescoped in time in the shift from the historic to the mythic past. Borrowing may occur when ideas spread from one religion to another, filling in or reinforcing earlier narratives or introducing new elements into the mythic narrative. The most striking change comes about when a myth is created to reinforce a new religious movement. The Ghost Dance is an example of a revitalization movement that originated in one North American tribe and spread in various forms to other tribes. Although the roots of a myth may lie in the distant past, some of its elements may be of more recent origin.
Rules of evidence and oral traditions
All oral traditions have their limitations, says Vansina, meaning they have varying degrees of reliability. Before attempting to retrieve historical information from an oral tradition, we must first define rules of historical evidence, a task to which Vansina applied himself in the two books he wrote on history and oral traditions. "The rules of evidence form a body, a logical train of thought," he cautions. "One cannot apply some and neglect others. They are of a single whole."
Rules of historical evidence must perform as a minimum these functions:
Validate sources. This involves ascertaining the relationship of
the collector to his informants and the collector's competence and
knowledge of the native culture.
Define the kinds of shaping processes at work in oral
transmission and how they can be identified.
Examine all variations of the tradition within the relevant
geographic area and within the folk community.
Identify widespread themes and motifs (to detect fusion of
historical fact with recurrent folk patterns) and cultural contacts and
revitalization movements (to identify new myths or diffused elements that
may be of more recent origin).
These are only a few of the standards we must demand of protocols for determining cultural affiliation under the provisions of NAGPRA. The need for rigorous standards is evident in the government's handling of the case of Kennewick Man.
The case of Kennewick Man
The Department of Interior has attempted to establish the cultural affiliation of the 9,300-year-old remains of Kennewick Man with a coalition of local tribes. Since there are gaps in the archaeological and mortuary records, affiliation cannot be established by physical evidence. The government has based their case on the geographic proximity of contemporary tribes and the site where the ancient remains were discovered, and on linguistic evidence and oral tradition.
The linguistic evidence is thin and inconclusive and based in part on controversial assumptions.
The evidence from oral traditions is equally unconvincing. Recorded myths were examined in search of ancestors of the contemporary tribes that lived in the area 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Although there are no migration motifs in the body of myth, there are references to earlier inhabitants, the "Stick People," and to invaders. Note that absence of a migration motif does not disallow the possibility that extant tribes migrated into the region they now inhabit; moreover, the mention of outsiders and former inhabitants suggests pre-contact population movement in that area. Oral traditions, like the physical evidence, fail to establish probable continuity.
The entire Plateau, like many other native regions, was the scene of revitalization movements in the nineteenth century, some associated with the Ghost Dance. Christian ideas and later Christian missionaries also played an important part in shaping the cultural changes taking place at that time. In evaluating myth for its possible antiquity, the historical context should be taken into account when sifting folk narrative for elements that may be of more recent origin. This wasn't done in the case of Kennewick Man. The mention in the mythic narratives of natural catastrophes such as floods and volcanic eruptions, especially periods of cold weather, was emphasized. The conclusion was drawn that references to extreme cold verified the presence of living people in the Plateau at the time of the Ice Age. But the geology of the region yields prima facie proof that great temperature fluctuations have occurred since then. Concluding that a population inhabited a region in antiquity merely because their oral traditions mention cold weather is pure speculation. This aspect of their oral traditions should be ruled inadmissible as evidence.
Legitimate rules of evidence reveal that oral traditions give no verifiable proof whatever about when the Plateau tribes first inhabited the area. In order to eliminate faulty evidence in future NAGPRA litigation, scholars and jurists must define incontestable protocols for evaluating oral traditions.
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