Edited by Catharine Mason, Clackamas Chinook Performance Art pairs performances with biographical, family, and historical content that reflects Victoria Howardʼs ancestry, personal and social life, education, and worldview.

From the Introduction: This book is . . . devoted to the first literature of North America, that of the American Indians, or Native Americans. The texts are from the North Pacific Coast, because that is where I am from, and those are the materials I know best. The purpose is general: All traditional American Indian verbal art requires attention of this kind if we are to comprehend what it is and says. There is linguistics in this book, and that will put some people off. ''Too technical," they will say. Perhaps such people would be amused to know that many linguists will not regard the work as linguistics. "Not theoretical," they will say, meaning not part of a certain school of grammar. And many folklorists and anthropologists are likely to say, "too linguistic" and "too literary" both, whereas professors of literature are likely to say, "anthropological" or "folklore," not "literature" at all. But there is no help for it. As with Beowulf and The Tale of Genji, the material requires some understanding of a way of life. Within that way of life, it has in part a role that in English can only be called that of "literature." Within that way of life, and now, I hope, within others, it offers some of the rewards and joys of literature. And if linguistics is the study of language, not grammar alone, then the study of these materials adds to what is known about language.

The works of Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939) continue to provide inspiration to all interested in the study of human language. Since most of his published works are relatively inaccessible, and valuable unpublished material has been found, the preparation of a complete edition of all his published and unpublished works was long overdue. The wide range of Sapir's scholarship as well as the amount of work necessary to put the unpublished manuscripts into publishable form pose unique challenges for the editors. Many scholars from a variety of fields as well as American Indian language specialists are providing significant assistance in the making of this multi-volume series.

Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Victoria Howard was born around 1865, a little more than ten years after the founding of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in western Oregon. Howardʼs maternal grandmother, Wagayuhlen Quiaquaty, was a successful and valued Clackamas shaman at Grand Ronde, and her maternal grandfather, Quiaquaty, was an elite Molalla chief. In the summer of 1929 the linguist Melville Jacobs, student of Franz Boas, requested to record Clackamas Chinook oral traditions with Howard, which she enthusiastically agreed to do. The result is an intricate and lively corpus of linguistic and ethnographic material, as well as rich performances of Clackamas literary heritage, as dictated by Howard and meticulously transcribed by Jacobs in his field notebooks. Ethnographical descriptions attest to the traditional lifestyle and environment in which Howard grew up, while fine details of cultural and historical events reveal the great consideration and devotion with which she recalled her past and that of her people. Catharine Mason has edited twenty-five of Howard's spoken-word performances into verse form entextualizations, along with the annotations provided by Jacobs in his publications of Howard's corpus in the late 1950s. Mason pairs performances with biographical, family, and historical content that reflects Howardʼs ancestry, personal and social life, education, and worldview. Mason's study reveals strong evidence of how the artist contemplated and internalized the complex meanings and everyday lessons of her literary heritage.

Reading the Fire engages America’s “first literatures,” traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays. Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.

In Now I Know Only So Far, sociolinguist and ethnopoetic scholar Dell Hymes examines the power and significance of Native North American literatures and how they can best be approached and appreciated. Such narratives, Hymes argues, are ways of making sense of the world. To truly comprehend the importance and durability of these narratives, one must investigate the ways of thinking expressed in these texts?the cultural sensibilities also deeply affected by storytellers? particular experiences and mastery of form. ø Included here are seminal overviews and reflections on the history and potential of the field of ethnopoetics. Native North American stories from areas ranging from the Northwest Coast to the Southwest take center stage in this book, which features careful scrutiny of different realizations and tellings of the same story or related stories. Such narratives are illuminated through a series of verse analyses in which patterned relations of lines throw into relief differences in emphasis, shape, and interpretation. A final group of essays sheds light on the often misunderstood and always controversial role of editing and interpreting texts. Now I Know Only So Far provides penetrating discussions and absorbing insights into stories and worlds, both traditional and new.