Retelling Trickster in Naapi's Language

By Nimachia Howe

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language is an examination of Nitsitapiisinni (Blackfoot) origin stories about one of the most powerful and unpredictable of the early creators in Niitsitapii consciousness and chronology: Naapi. Through in-depth linguistic analysis, Nimachia Howe reinterprets the earliest references to Naapi, offering a more authentic understanding of his identity and of the meanings and functions of the stories in which he appears.
 
Naapi is commonly and inaccurately categorized by Western scholars as a trickster figure. Research on him is rife with misnomers and repeated misinterpretations, many resulting from untranslatable terms and concepts, comparisons with the binary tenets of “good” vs. “bad,” and efforts by Niitsitapii storytellers to protect the stories. The five stories included in their entirety in this volume present Naapi’s established models of reciprocity, connection, kinship, reincarnation, and offerings, shown in descriptions of, and predictions for, the balance between life and death, the rising and setting of planets, wind directions and forces, and the cyclical nature of animals, birds, plants, glaciers, and rivers.
 
Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language will be of interest to students and scholars of Native American studies, ethnography, folklore, environmental philosophy, and Indigenous language, literature, and religion.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781607329794

Book preview

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language

Nimachia Howe

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Louisville

© 2019 by Nimachia Howe

Published by Utah State University Press

An imprint of University Press of Colorado

245 Century Circle, Suite 202

Louisville, Colorado 80027

All rights reserved

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-977-0 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-978-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-979-4 (ebook)

https://doi.org/10.5876/9781607329794

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Howe, Nimachia, author.

Title: Retelling trickster in Naapi's language / Nimachia Howe.

Description: Louisville : University Press of Colorado, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019020711 | ISBN 9781607329770 (cloth) | ISBN 9781607329787 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781607329794 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Naapi (Trickster) | Siksika Indians—Folklore. | Indians of North America—Folklore. | Siksika language.

ification: LCC E99.S54 H69 2019 | DDC 398/.4508997352—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020711

Cover illustration © John Nieto, 1936–2018. Coyote. 48 × 60. Reproduced with permission.

For the Niitsítapiiksi,

and Allen

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

1. Who is Naapi? Sign as First Language

2. Naapi’s Name

3. Myth, Legend, and Naapi

4. A Different Conceptual Order

Appendix: Selected Naapi Stories

Person’s Face

Lone Woman

Lone Pine

Wheel Game

Sliding Place

Notes

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

Who is Naapi, the so-called Trickster of the Blackfoot People¹ of the Northwest Plains?

For almost two-and-a-half centuries, visitors to the Blackfoot homeland, which was traditionally in the Northwest Plains and currently still spans Alberta, Canada, and the US state of Montana, have heard about Naapi and his comparable characters in other Indigenous Peoples’ traditions. A diverse set of collectors gathered Naapi stories, an important genre that is part of a large array of stories outlined in the Blackfoot creation cycles. This study looks as some of the features and uses of Blackfoot language in Naapi story contexts as he connects the land to the People; Naapi predates the arrival of the People and, as a child of Sun and Moon, has an entire genre of stories devoted solely to his episodic creativity. Naapi stories explain how he established the landscape with help from Iihtsipáítapiiyo’pa, the one through whom we live,² and Á’pistotooki, the one who made us;³ universal energies coordinated with atmospheric and astral forces, often called spirits in English. All are considered Persons proper in Blackfoot because they are infused with creative power, the same power Naapi uses to shape and bring forth life to the homeland so People and other beings may live in it. People repeat the knowledge of this space and of the entire landscape where Naapi stories occur to mark out a home perfectly created for them.

Naapi also connects Peoples’ land to life values. In Naapi stories, his actions also inform and shape Peoples’ values, humor, creativity, ethics, morals, codes, and potential futures with which People can identify and can claim. Naapi’s interactions with other living Beings include a multiplicity of actions with a range of Beings, such as birds, bears, winds, waters, spirits, rocks, seeds, mountains, and berries, to name but a few. He is the mediator among Peoples, plants, animals, and the elemental forces of creation, the accounts of which are told in story. When and where these stories occur is of paramount importance because in each, he creates spaces for all forms of living Beings in situ and thus connects original Peoples to the beginnings of time, as it is re-created over time in a place; this is the definition of the homeland. Hereto is the source of why many Indigenous languages identify humans as original People; it is an expression to distinguish us from all the rest of the surrounding life forms and not to mean the People in an ethnocentric sense, for the emphasis should be on the People instead as a distinguishing fact. All other forms of life are alive and thus share with People intelligence and will, so stars, winds, and thunder, for instance, speak to People, and Naapi is an important go-between as these forces reach out to communicate with us. Blackfoot and other Algonquian/Algonkian languages use oral tradition styles, devices, and speech acts that demonstrate a human interest in, and a desire to receive and comprehend, these messages.

This study of Naapi stories is an effort to decode some of these methods or systems, guided by a few questions. How, or do, Naapi stories and the ways Blackfoot use language about Naapi express core values that emerge from these land-based experiences? What do Indigenous Plains Peoples’ and Algonquian/Algonkian Peoples’ stories have in common with the homeland? How is the traditional Indigenous land ethic taught with Naapi stories? What, if any, relevance does Naapi’s name have in this? How are universal energies of creativity, adaptation, and change, accounted for, if they are? This study reviews storytelling occasions and also questions extra-linguistic material. It combines some story analyses with a consideration of the metaphysical aspects of Naapi, as reported and expressed in the Blackfoot language. Naapi story analysis is an extensive subject that deserves its own book, so only a few examples are explored in this discussion. Statements put forth about Naapi stories are nonetheless drawn from a much larger body of Naapi stories and are thematically and linguistically consistent with them. As such, this study is organized around themes that introduce readers to the physical and metaphysical dimensions of Naapi and considers how these dimensions are expressed in the Blackfoot terms and expressions used to illustrate his essential multidimensional changeability (e.g., Naapi’s many names).

To address change factors in the written record, this book also examines the ways Blackfoot and other Algonquian/Algonkian languages are described in very early accounts. Journals by missionaries, trappers, commissioners, traders, vacationing tourists, and the like document some of the earliest collections of Naapi stories, beginning with Peter Fidler in 1792 and continuing to the present. Almost a century after these initial collections were accumulated, linguists began to study vocabulary lists and Naapi story compilations, with some of the earliest being several works by the linguist C. C. Uhlenbeck (1866–1951), whose work after 1900 includes several published collections that amassed multiple stories. For the remainder of the past two centuries, there has been, generally speaking, a separation between linguists’ work (e.g., structural anthropology)—specializing in diagrams, grammatical breakdowns, and descriptions into classificatory systems and categories, such as works by Donald Frantz (e.g., Blackfoot Grammar, 2017)—and writers who focus on Naapi or Trickster and their Algonquian/Algonkian–related stories (e.g., Grinnell’s Old Man Stories, in Blackfeet Indian Stories [1926]). Uhlenbeck and J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong (1886–1964) excepted, story collections are rarely linked to linguistic analyses, and language studies likewise limit references to the stories to excerpts or separate statements only and do not analyze entire stories, much less multiple stories. As such, attempts to answer questions about who Naapi is rely on generally abstracted linguistic approaches or on interpretations and tellings of individual Naapi Trickster stories, with little cross-conversation. Many of these efforts lack detail or large overviews of how Naapi earned his Trickster title, since it takes the body of them together to see how he changed through time, so that is my focus.

As a result of this separation, limited research exists on assumptions made about the ultimate meanings of Trickster and other aspects of the Blackfoot and other Algonquian/Algonkian languages. Separations between discreet linguistic analyses and verbatim stories repeated without any accompanying comments, criticisms, or analysis of Trickster in holistic ways result in a lack information about how overall sociocultural or sociolinguistic priorities are expressed with Naapi stories as their vehicle. Naapi stories are teaching stories and are constructed to advance values, but by what applications or rules? Have strategies been overlooked by collectors and commenters because (1) literary critiques interpret them as myths and legends, a somewhat dismissive categorization that discourages the view that they merit analyses as stories that pertain to the real world; and (2) linguistic studies have been predominantly concerned with grammatical organization and systematic classification and with assessing, assigning, and comparing these stories to their linguistic family counterparts. These studies have, respectively, contributed greatly to the understanding of Algonquian/Algonkian relatives.

My approach in this book is to integrate these studies and to interpret Naapi’s character as primarily an expression of the environment, which is universal, although its local development is context-dependent. Naapi stories use language to alternate Naapi’s constantly fluctuating Trickster persona; from one moment to another he changes, a characteristic he shares with other Indigenous Peoples’ Tricksters. His recognizable trademark is his many energetic forms, and the countless variations on his name struggle to keep up with his identities. Trickster story language and its multiple manifestations of Naapi can be used as a method for analyzing Naapi stories. This poses the question about whose language to use to speak about the reality Naapi describes. Whose reality is being prioritized when language doesn’t want to behave, either because for centuries the Trickster genre itself has been neglected as a source of truth, as an accurate descriptor of ultimate reality, or because in Indigenous languages Tricksters do not adhere to or fit neatly into easily identifiable conceptual linguistic categories?

This book began as I prepared Naapi stories for a presentation that required an introduction to concepts of space and time, including the notably identifiable space known as the Blackfoot homeland. Naapi’s creator energies are involved in the cycles of the planets and seasons—the largest orders of things—and yet supersede time as we know it because he lived before it and will continue after it. Many pertinent questions arose. How, or does, the language account for these features? One thing Algonquian/Algonkian languages, including Blackfoot, do is constantly adjust descriptions of action (which are often classed as nouns). A feature of Naapi’s name, the final syllable, which usually connotes animate gender grammatically, has also changed status over the centuries. Why? The term Trickster is English, so what is the meaning of Naapi and his Algonquian/Algonkian counterparts before translations? How are references to Naapi and his Algonquian/Algonkian relatives distinct from or similar to those to other Algonquian/Algonkian or Plains Peoples’ Tricksters? To other Indigenous Peoples’ Tricksters? What can we learn about the implications for grammatical meaning and participation from the ways Naapi language is used regarding Trickster specifically? Do Blackfoot, Algonquian/Algonkian, and Plains Peoples’ grammars reflect any priorities, ethics, or sociocultural or humanistic concerns, for instance, of their speakers by the ways they use language (maybe only) to describe Trickster energy, in story and more generally? What are some meta-linguistic understandings about Trickster energy not captured by studies that continue to cover Plains Peoples’ and Algonquian/Algonkian Trickster stories and that do not investigate whether speakers adjust expressions (i.e., language) to more clearly show intent? How are speakers’ intentions influenced by language (e.g., grammatical) choices made to accommodate/approximate meaning?

A key consideration and motivation behind these research questions is a focus on non-verbal signs as a form of communication used by all living Beings that humans can interpret and imitate. Sign are the basis of non-human forms of communication systems that Indigenous Peoples expanded upon and developed as Plains Sign Language (PSL). This study also asks how PSL understands and informs Plains Peoples about Trickster and how it contributes to the analysis of Naapi stories as a source for understanding meaning and context of spoken forms of Indigenous languages, especially the early Naapi stories; for Indigenous Peoples, collections of all Trickster stories collected among Algonquian/Algonkian and Plains Peoples were translated directly from sign, not speech. PSL has its own idiomatic expressions, shorthand, variations in lexicon, and other features that are comparable to spoken modes of communication, even including specific expressions.⁴ Most notably, PSL accounts for and attaches meaning to direction and placement. Speakers represent utterances that occupy a spot or locations in a spatial relationship vis-à-vis the cardinal directions. These types of physical, non-verbal orientations are functionally significant pointers, aimed toward intended meaning in this communication system, so they deserve consideration in any treatment that aims to discover the intentions behind the language of stories originally told in this medium. Language and literature studies can contribute mutual sharing of insights and interconnected analyses, since signed interactions use the language that speakers of Algonquian/Algonkian and Plains Peoples’ languages claim was given to them by nature. PSL was a lingua franca when the misinterpretations about Naapi and other Indigenous Peoples’ Tricksters began.

This book is a result of several years of considering options for methods of analyses of early Trickster stories because at their core they are about place, and they belong to increasingly displaced Indigenous Peoples the world over, who traditionally retain a connection to place through story. These place- and space-specific storytelling traditions are stories/story personas who detail specifics of the natural surroundings as Trickster stories do, and also describe how (various) Peoples have inherited them. Amid academic and cultural traditions that exclude or excise the import of these stories, how do we scholars, describers of the places that birth unique Peoples in them, account for these stories? Indigenous Peoples’ ties to land involve myriad collaborators and creators, all of whom contribute to the sense of who the People are, which is defined in great part by where they are. The Blackfoot connection to Naapi is reaffirmed in part through telling Naapi stories, which are invariably tied to the places in which they occurred and recur. As long as Trickster stories are told, they affirm entire Peoples’ long-standing orientations vis-à-vis the landscape and thus of knowing what it is to be Blackfoot. This is also true for the other Algonquian/Algonkian languages’ legacies, as well as for other Plains Peoples’ Trickster stories. These Trickster-land-Peoples ties supersede linguistic family groupings because while they encompass them, unique geographic placements by neighbors with dissimilar language families but who share similar ecosystems and environmental conditions, for instance, allow additional data/experiences to inform story forms and values. Since these are accounted for in the universal energies expressed in Naapi and other Trickster oral traditions, emphasis on location in space is an appropriate place to begin a study of Trickster language.

Other factors contributed to the difficulty of this study. Many Naapi stories have been edited out of the traditional series because they were deemed offensive and subsequently banned. Of those that remain, some have been published repeatedly, whereas others have been deleted from collections with such vigor that they have become obsolete in oral accounts and are nearly nonexistent in written documents. This situation has resulted in a dearth of details, which severely diminishes potential for analyses. To compensate for this, I include explanatory material gathered from multidisciplinary sources to complement stories that are available to conduct analyses of the Blackfoot language and interpretations of the character(s) who interact with Naapi. Some of these sources include artists’ memoirs; police, agent, commissioner, and army reports; journals of fur trappers, mountaineers, missionaries, and explorers; meteorological and land surveys; and interviews with or records of Blackfoot elders’ stories over the past two centuries. I have also consulted with fluent Blackfoot speakers and ceremonialists on this topic.

I was teaching and conducting research for my doctoral dissertation on Blackfoot star stories in Canada when I was invited by Harry Stabs Down of the Kainaa (Many Chiefs) Band (i.e., Blood) of the Blackfoot to share my ideas about the future of place-based research, a project the Blackfoot People see as relevant because of its ties to Blackfoot language and cultural maintenance. The different communities of Indigenous language speakers mentioned in this study conduct these types of studies in their own ways, and my goal is to contribute to these efforts. The Naapi stories in the appendix of this book represent a small sampling of the possible stories that could be used as examples of how the People identify with a place. Apart from a few conference presentations, however, I have not published any work on Naapi stories. I have nonetheless taught about these stories as a professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Blackfeet Community College back home on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. Sharing this research with the community has been a joy. I have expanded the topic over several years, so this book draws from a large body of research.

Many people have supported this work and helped my thinking. I want to thank Robert A. LeVine and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco for supporting me through the dissertation phase of my graduate studies on Blackfoot star stories, which is when the inspiration for this work began. Through the many phases of this manuscript, the following people have been immensely helpful: Omi (Naomi) Crawford, Kevin Crawford, James Hatley, Narcisse Blood, Frank Weasel Head, Martin Heavy Head, Pam Heavy Head, Lorna Crowshoe, Reggie Crowshoe, Rose Crowshoe, Peter Weasel Moccasin, Frederick (Rick) Tailfeathers, Mike Swims Under, Alice B. Kehoe, Darryl Kipp, Rod D. Bullshoe, Allan Pard, Irene Diamond, Joe Eagle Child, Martin Frey, Tracy Newkirk, Robert W. Traver, Alfred Arteaga, Mae Tallow, Edward Kennedy, Martin Frey, Dwight Jennings, Neil Eisenberg, Leon Rattler, Arthur Westwolf, David Kaufman, Jeffrey E. Davis, Lakhota Hasie Frasier, Conrad Knudsen, Mae Tallow, Earl Old Person, Alberto Pimentel, Alfred Arteaga, Molly Kicking Woman, George Kicking Woman, Michael Brooks, Chevi Baby, Valiant Norman, and Ovide W. Mercredi. I thank Eleanor Bernal, Dody Riggs, Manuel Hernández, Joan Kocsis, Joyce H. Hernández, and A. Tau Hernández for editorial assistance, and Darrin Pratt and all the staff at the University Press of Colorado. The interpretations presented in this book are mine, as are any mistakes or misinterpretations.

I am also grateful for the opportunity to conduct much of the fieldwork and research that was made possible by grants and fellowships that supported this work, especially from Harvard University Women’s Studies in Religion Program, the Fulbright Scholar Program, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Rockefeller Foundation Ecological Conversations: Gender, the Sacred, and Geography, the Smithsonian Institution Native American Awards Program, a Mellon Foundation Grant, and a University of California Committee on Research Enabling Grant. The archivists and staff at each of the locations where I carried out the fellowships and conducted research provided invaluable and much-appreciated assistance. The same is true of the assistance I received during my research at Yale University Beinecke Library and Archives and at Yale University Sterling Memorial Library Manuscript and Archives, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives in the National Museum of Natural History, the Glenbow Museum Archives, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Montana State University Library Special Collections and Archives, and Ball State University Archives and Special Collections. Finally, teaching my seminar on Naapi stories at Blackfeet Community College, Browning, Montana, offered yet another opportunity to reflect on Naapi’s language.

Chapter 1

Who Is Naapi?

Sign as First Language

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language is an in-depth study of the language of the story cycle of Naapi, who has many names and is most commonly known as Old Man, a Trickster in Blackfoot oral literature.¹ This study expands on a land-based genre of stories to discuss how they use the land and environment as a teacher, with Naapi interpreted as myriad expressions of nature’s forces. This chapter introduces some of the ways Naapi stories effect language use by the many ways his energy is expressed and stems from the acknowledgment that particular aspects of Naapi’s identity are not restricted to his story activities but extend beyond the storied context to describe their source in his actions/personality, breath, expressions, songs, and signs. Naapi’s power is partially attributed to the ways the Blackfoot language refers to him and speaks to or with him. Traditional Indigenous Trickster literatures throughout the world are built around characters fundamental to the creation of a particular People, and entire story sequences are built around the creative activity of this entity. Not all Tricksters are the same, nor is the term itself Indigenous. In common with other Algonquian/Algonkian language traditions, Naapi’s is a creator of the Blackfoot, and he thus lays the groundwork for other Blackfoot story genres, all of which constitute the body of oral literature that makes the Blackfoot a distinctive People. Trickster stories share in common with other Indigenous communities the universal energy that manifests differently across linguistic similarities and geological or geographical differences.

Translated directly from the Blackfoot language, sometimes from Plains Sign Language, and drawing additional data from Algonquin studies, this book is a critical collection of Blackfoot language studies analyses complemented with multidisciplinary contributions focused on Blackfoot and Algonquian/Algonkian language and translations. It includes published and unpublished works in an effort to conduct research within a richer context than has previously been attempted for a focused study of how the Blackfoot use language to represent Indigenous understandings of Naapi’s role as an energy source and creator. The combination of sources and research questions may provide a model for viable comparisons across Algonquian/Algonkian and Plains Peoples’ oral literature traditions.

Commonalities with Other Tricksters

Naapi stories outline Blackfoot ecology, cosmology, and philosophy, or what Indigenous Peoples call a way of life. Blackfoot language use conveys critical information about Blackfoot views on all life forms and about how People can live properly with them. This is evident when comparing Naapi’s characteristics, adventures, and escapades to those of other Tricksters: Nanabozho (Ojibwa), Wisakedjak (Cree, Algonquin), Iktomi (Lakota), Kokopelli