Book Review: The Native American Oral Tradition: Voices of the Spirit and Soul by Lois J. Einhorn

Authors

Randall A. Lake, University of Southern California

Date of this Version

May 2002

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.

Abstract

This excellent, albeit imperfect, book reexamines indigenous North American oral traditions as alternatives to mainstream Western discourses. Neither a literary anthology of Native myths nor an oral history of storytellers, it treats these traditions as persuasive messages addressed to audiences. Einhorn, rhetoric professor at Binghamton University, combines "transtextual" analysis of metaphor and symbol with "contextual" considerations of time, place, and cultural assumptions in an ambitious study of indigenous rhetoric spanning myriad speakers, nations, regions, and periods.