What, to echo Walter Benjamin, is the task of the translator in interpreting an Indigenous myth? This essay tries to identify the stakes, and it argues that they are high. The author faced thorny issues of translation and colonial violence during decades of working with an Indigenous population, often called ‘the Warao’, in a rainforest in eastern Venezuela.
The Americanist tradition, classically advanced by Franz Boas, placed the ethnographic collection and translation of myths and other Indigenous narratives at the heart of anthropology, linguistics and folkloristics. The reputations of such figures as Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Melville Jacobs, Dell Hymes, and Dennis Tedlock were made, in part, by collecting, translating and interpreting Native American myths and using them as key intellectual infrastructures for launching frameworks for generalizing about language, culture, world view, and psychological dispositions. This work was hardly confined to North America. Perhaps most famously, Claude Lévi-Strauss published a four-volume set, Mythologiques, on the mythology of South and North America (1969). For Lévi-Strauss, myths were the key sources in revealing the fundamental logic of individual cultures, a basic Amerindian cultural pattern, and the structure of the human mind. This scholarly tradition has been recently brought back into the limelight through what has been called ‘the ontological turn’, specifically in work by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola. Viveiros de Castro (2004) suggested that “Amerindian cosmologies” picture the relationship between humans and non-humans through “perspectivism”: persons, animals, and objects are defined relationally by how they “apprehend reality from distinct points of view” (p. 481).
The last few decades have witnessed important critiques by Indigenous scholars of scholarly practices of collection, translation and interpretation. Cherokee scholar Chris Teuton (2012) adopts a generally charitable view of white scholars’ research on Native American narrative, using the work of Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in presenting a collection and interpretation of Cherokee stories from Cherokee perspectives. At the same time, he places his research within American Indian Studies and his own relationship to the Cherokee community, prompting a shift toward designating Cherokee readers as his primary audience. Rather than offering white audiences privileged access to Indigenous worlds, Teuton suggests that they become attuned to what the narratives can teach them about Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization and self-determination. Cutcha Risling Baldy (2015), of Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk descent, accuses white scholars of using simplistic ways of translating Indigenous narratives that inflict colonial violence by erasing Indigenous understandings and distorting the ontological status of mythological characters. Gerald Vizenor (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) suggests that white scholars have fundamentally misconstrued the nature of Native American narratives by taking them as direct reflections of cultural beliefs and world views. Translations and interpretations offered by white scholars erased “the creative irony” of stories (Vizenor, 2019, p. 4), thereby missing that they are the origins of concepts of “native liberty, natural motion, and survivance” (Vizenor, 2019, p. 95).
As an engaged scholar, Delta Amacuro residents asked the author in 1985 to study their language and cultural forms to help with designing bilingual education programmes and culturally appropriate forms of health care. For nearly four decades, translation has been central to his role there. Briggs was asked to translate petitions to provide access to health, education, and other resources, and end labour and ecological abuse. He translated for an Indigenous woman falsely accused of infanticide. Working with a Venezuelan public health physician, Clara Mantini-Briggs, he spent much time translating for health education efforts, particularly in outbreaks of cholera and rabies (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs, 2003, 2016). Delta residents deemed myths (dehe nobo) crucial. Remarkable leader and educator Librado Moraleda characterized myths as essential for decolonizing schools (Escalante and Moraleda, 1992). Rather than eliciting myths, the author made recordings when performances were taking place during ceremonies, when master storytellers were teaching neophytes, casual exchanges in daily life, and nights when master myth tellers treated their communities to elaborate performances.
The preceding account of this translation practice is problematic. It focuses too squarely on intralingual and interlingual dimensions and projects the reduction of performances to texts. It thus misses Susan Gal (2015)’s insight that translation “points usefully to a whole family of semiotic processes” (p. 224). Moreover, it places the author in the extractive modality critiqued by Indigenous scholars. The dialogically-based process hopefully avoided the mistranslation of the names and ontological status of characters. It brought Indigenous perspectives–those of the narrators and others–centrally into translations and interpretations. Nevertheless, it does not go far enough in grappling with Teuton’s, Risling Baldy’s and Vizenor’s call to place research on narrative into the broader context of Indigenous people’s demands for sovereignty, decolonization, self-determination, liberty, and survivance. It notably fails to confront the profound legacy of colonialism in the translation and interpretation of myth and the call to position it as a crucial component of ways in which reclaiming land and confronting oppression enter into decolonial agendas (Tuck and Yang, 2012).
Renowned healer, storyteller and political leader Santiago Rivera performed the myth of “The emergence of the non-Indigenous people”, framing it as not only addressed to the author but as being about him. The performance included an ironic section about how Indigenous people came to be poor and non-Indigenous people wealthy, interpreted by a missionary as evidence of “the inferiority complex of Indigenous peoples” (Barral, 1960, p. 340). Rivera brilliantly deepened the challenges offered by Risling Baldy, Teuton and Vizenor, posing fundamental questions for translating Indigenous myths, questioning who gets to determine what constitutes a myth, and what a decolonial translation entails by tying the myth’s action to struggles to confront non-Indigenous exploitation of Indigenous lands, coastal water, labour and women’s sexuality. Just as the performance challenged the author to participate in Indigenous struggles, it raised questions for the rich mythic analyses and decolonial ambitions of ontological turn scholars Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, extending questions posed by Descola’s Araweté interlocutors.
The full article of this synopsis can be found here.
