Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1983
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 53-54.
Abstract
After sixty years the Smithsonian Institution has finally published James R. Murie's work on Pawnee ceremonies in a handsome set of two volumes, impeccably edited by Douglas R. Parks. Murie, part Pawnee and somewhat trained in the techniques of anthropological investigation, began serious study of his own tribe in the 1890s and completed it in 1921 shortly before his death. Through much of his career he worked with white anthropologists such as Alice Fletcher, George Grinnell, Owen Dorsey, and Clark Wissler, some of whom gave him scant credit for his assistance in their research and publications. These volumes were begun in collaboration with Wissler but completed with Murie working virtually alone. Because the Smithsonian was short of money at that time, their publication was indefinitely postponed. From 1929 to 1931 Gene Weltfish revised Murie's linguistic transcriptions to make them conform with Franz Boas's notions of phonetic transcription. In 1936 the Smithsonian again seemed ready to publish the material, but it ultimately remained for Douglas Parks to get the job done.
Parks has adopted a conservative editing procedure. He has improved the style of the material, particularly in the second volume, for which Murie had little help from Wissler. Explanatory notes have been added throughout and a few "glaring inaccuracies" have been corrected. Parks's most extensive editing is of Murie's transcriptions of the ceremonial songs in Pawnee (which Weltfish had also revised). Parks, who has an excellent command of Pawnee, has authoritatively set the material in a style compatible with contemporary phonemic theory. He has also retranslated the ceremonial songs into simple English. New introductions, a full bibliography, and a sympathetic biography of Murie have been added.
This work is valuable for Great Plains literary scholarship in that it provides a good translation of Pawnee ceremonial "dramas" and songs, which are as fine and powerful in their way as ancient Greek dramas. Such was the opinion of Hartley Burr Alexander, a notable classicist, whose own translations of Pawnee ceremonies are phrased in rather pompous Victorian diction. On the other hand, Alice Fletcher's efforts are based on a rather wild theory of how Pawnee verse ought to be put into English. More recent translations have treated the Pawnee ceremonial dramas as if they had been written by imagists who, having found a good image, put a bad ceremony around it. Yet the power of Pawnee ceremonial poetry or drama lies in the structure of the whole work: ceremonial action, iterative metaphor, and dance-all played out against a coherent and sacred theory of the universe. One hopes that Parks's literal translations will attract skilled poets capable of capturing in English the poetic qualities of the Pawnee materials. Such an achievement would not only help us to understand a distinctive form of verse, but also render accessible a way of treating the Plains landscape and life that is now lost to most of us.
Parks's work is also potentially useful for iconological and iconographical studies of Plains Indian culture. Scholars such as Erwin Panofsky and Rosamund Tuve revolutionized the study of medieval and renaissance European literature and art by making the idioms of those periods penetrable to modern readers. Their approach could be equally useful in the study of Plains Indian art forms.
Comments
Copyright 1983 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln