Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa^†

For decades now, anthropologists have explored and begun to appreciate the importance of stories by understanding them as critically connected to the creation of social orders (e.g., Basso 1996 , Bhabha 1990) and the making of selves (Bruner 2002, Ochs and Capps 1996, 2001). This article centers on an especially valorized genre of traditional stories, called pééyu'u, in a language community in which the heritage language—Arizona Tewa—is also extraordinarily valued.² In a prior treatment of Arizona Tewa traditional narratives (Kroskrity 1985), I focused on a kind of “structural” growth of the narratives themselves as Tewa narrators engaged in text-building practices featuring the layered organization of lines, verses, and stanzas. But in this article, I complement the prior study by emphasizing other types of “growth,” some recognized, some misrecognized, by Arizona Tewa people in their own ideologies of storytelling, narrative practices, and the indexical orders (Silverstein 2003) in which pééyu'u are embedded. Such local notions associate Tewa storytelling practices with the growth and moral development of children, the fertility and growth of sustaining plants, and the growth and perpetuation of the Arizona Tewa community itself. In this article, I want to recognize the kind of authority that Tewa narrators attribute to these traditional narratives and examine attempts at what Bauman (2004:8) has termed “generic regimentation” of these highly esteemed narrative resources. In so doing I will attempt to relate local theories of intertextuality to beliefs and practices that both widen and narrow the intertextual gap associated with pééyu'u. Finally I will also examine the intertextual relations between participation in traditional storytelling and the language ideologies associated with the powerful discourse of “kiva speech” (tée hiili) that I have analyzed in greater detail in prior research (Kroskrity 1993, 1998). Though neither as powerful nor as regulated as “kiva speech,” the more mundane language of Tewa pééyu'u nevertheless receives considerable attention in some quarters of the Tewa community as a resource requiring regulation. This impacts the present study in a significant manner. Even though my article is not centrally about telling or structurally analyzing specific stories, my awareness of debates within the Tewa community suggests considerable internal variation about the representation of Tewa language texts to audiences outside of Tewa homes.³ As an outsider who has been privileged to study the language over the past three decades and who hopes to continue working with all sectors of the community toward the ends of language documentation and linguistic revitalization, I will attempt to minimize the number of Tewa examples and completely refrain from representing entire narratives or even large fragments in deference to those members who deem it inappropriate. Since my goal is more to reveal the cultural matrix and interdiscursivity in which traditional storytelling forms, practices, and ideologies are embedded, deferential restraint in the use of examples will not deter me from making the relevant observations about traditional storytelling that are my objective here.

The Arizona Tewa: Reproductions and Representations

Today the Arizona Tewa number around 700 individuals who reside on and near the Village of Tewa on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation. They are the descendents of those Southern Tewa (or Thanuuge'in T'owa) who moved, at the request of the Hopi, from pueblos they abandoned in the Rio Grande in the aftermath of the second Pueblo Revolt of 1696 (Dozier 1954, 1966). We know, from both historical documents and their own oral history, that their ancestors played a major role in the revolt and that they refused to resettle their pueblo, preferring instead to fight a guerilla war against the Spanish until the time of the Hopi invitation in 1700.

The contemporary Arizona Tewa have been studied most intensively by Edward Dozier (1954, 1966) and by me (Kroskrity 1993, 1998, 2000). They are an especially remarkable people for two reasons that are relevant here. One, they are the only group in a Pueblo diaspora of almost one hundred villages and pueblos that managed to relocate yet retain its heritage language. This persistence despite the likely fate of assimilation into the Hopi majority has won for the Arizona Tewa some notoriety in the literature on language endangerment. In works by both Dorian (1989) and Crystal (2000), for example, there is a tendency to depict the Arizona Tewa as especially persistent and to regard the way they use languages as a clue to the very nature of linguistic persistence.⁴ While it is gratifying to see my work on the Arizona Tewa be useful to other scholars particularly those with the noble goal of calling an alarm to immanent and widespread language death or promoting language revitalization, it is also a source of dismay for which I must take considerable responsibility. Perhaps my own representations of the Arizona Tewa have led others to view them primarily as paragons of persistence rather than to appreciate their actual linguistic struggles and the real work they do in managing their linguistic and cultural resources. For the Arizona Tewa, like so many contemporary speech communities surveyed and reviewed by Silverstein (1998a), have undergone great transformation within the past century. Economic incorporation, urban migration, relocation and the reservation-urban orbit (Hodge 1971), the wired and mediated world (Spitulnik 1998), the increasingly diverse ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1996) now available, and many other consequences of globalization have brought greater internal diversity to this community than ever before. A community which once unanimously declared that speaking Tewa was a determining attribute of Tewa identity has now had to confront the fact that the vast majority of its children are now growing up with English as the main language of the home and without the heritage language the community had successfully maintained postdiaspora for more than 300 years. A community which once uniformly rejected the possibility of schools as a site for Tewa language socialization because they viewed this as exclusively the domain of Tewa homes and their associated kinsmen, now debates—with expected generational and interclan variation and contestation—the cost-benefits of tempering its hard-line stance on native literacy programs and on schools as a site for Tewa instruction. I will return to this later. Certainly in comparison to many other Native American and other world indigenous languages, it would be inappropriate to view the Arizona Tewa language as severely endangered, but the community itself now does appear to recognize that there is a crisis as evidenced by the fact that most young people are not growing up speaking the language. Informal surveys conducted during the early period of my research (1973–1985) and my most recent research excursion in 2007 indicates that the perception of a crisis is quite well founded since the last thirty years have produced a decline in the number of homes in which young people were learning and actively speaking the language from 50 to 10 percent.⁵

Traditional stories among the Arizona Tewa, as I will show, have long been culturally valorized as a key means of cultural maintenance and transmission, and it is no wonder that today, at a time of linguistic crisis, many Arizona Tewa plan a return to them as a cultural resource in the community's language renewal efforts. In this article, I will provide relevant historical background on the Arizona Tewa community and explore some key semiotic connections linking the Arizona Tewa language to various ethnic identities. I will then analyze Tewa ideologies of storytelling efficacy and aesthetics, exploring the way traditional Tewa narrators have chosen to create “authoritative” voices that “speak the past” while producing performances that are still innovatively designed for their “present” audiences. After examining the ways in which traditional narrative practices provide developing children with a domestic preadaptation to dominant language ideologies that are inscribed in the key site of te'e (kiva) practices, I return to the dilemmas confronted by community members who seem to share ideals of narrative performance but not the linguistic resources necessary to realize them.

The Arizona Tewa: Languages and Identities

Here I briefly review some of the many important connections between language and identity that provide a relevant background for examining the identity work that traditional stories perform. Since much of this has been presented in greater detail elsewhere (e.g., Kroskrity 1993, 1998, 2000) an abbreviated treatment shaped to the proportions of this article will suffice here. Convergent yet distinct perspectives are provided by “objectivist” and more “experience-near” (Geertz 1983) ways of understanding.⁶ In addition to historical observations made above, the objectivist perspective confirms a consistent cultural preference for “indigenous purism” resulting in a dispreference for loanwords from other languages and strong preference for extending native vocabulary to fill lexical gaps. Extremely minimal borrowing from Spanish (17 words) and Hopi (2 words) despite long periods of former or current multilingualism clearly displays the practice of indigenous purism (Kroskrity 1993).⁷ This promotion of indigenous linguistic resources and exclusion of foreign forms has often been regarded as identity-fostering, especially in resistance to a politically or socially dominant group (e.g. Henningsen 1989). But the Arizona Tewa practice of indigenous purism, especially in regard to their three centuries of contact with Hopi, is also critically revealing of how purism functions to mask change and erase cultural borrowing. An important example is how changes in Arizona Tewa kinship and social organization—changes necessitated by transitioning from a social system featuring patrilineal moieties (as in other Eastern Pueblos) to one centered on matrilineal clans (Hopi and other Western Pueblos)—were erased by extending native terms. The Arizona Tewa extended their word for “people” (t'owa) to add an additional sense “clan's people.” They used Tewa vocabulary to label these clans (e.g., tobacco, bear, sand, or corn) and become compatible with a Hopi system in which clans played such major roles as regulating marriage, allocating land use rights, and exercising ceremonial rights and duties. This pattern of apparent linguistic purism camouflaging cultural influence and convergence is also especially germane to storytelling. Arizona Tewa traditional stories, like those of the Hopi, display very high rates of using “hearsay” evidential particles—Tewa ba, Hopi yaw—in their traditional stories (Tewa pééyu'u, Hopi tutuwutsi) (Kroskrity 1993, 1997). Though the Tewa have clearly retained their own evidential particle, they now use it in a manner unlike other Tewa-speaking pueblos in the East who have the same word (Kroskrity 1997). In the Rio Grande Tewa languages, such particles are often used in the beginning of a story and infrequently throughout the narrative. But the Arizona Tewa use their ba in frequencies and functions that now closely approximate Hopi discourse conventions. In both languages, the respective evidential has assumed the form of a “genre signature” (Shaul 2002)—the pervasive structural marker that the storyteller is performing a traditional story. Though this example of discursive convergence suggests the powerful influence of Hopi discourse models, use of the indigenous evidential ba masks any evidence of that influence to contemporary Tewa speakers who quite expectably have no awareness of any alteration of discourse norms that they brought with them from New Mexico more than 300 years ago.

While an objectivist approach may reveal the structural and usage patterns that disclose language ideologies of practice, only a more “experience-near” perspective allows us to view Arizona Tewa “beliefs and feelings” in the expression of their “discursive consciousness.” Evidence of this cultural awareness surfaces most prominently in the Tewa expression “Naa-im-bí hiili naa-im-bí woowac'i na-mu”“Our Language is our history.” Most Arizona Tewa know their language is related to languages spoken in such Eastern Pueblos as San Juan, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso. They also know that the comparative lack of Spanish lexical and phonological influence in their Tewa language distinguishes their language from those of other Tewa-speaking pueblos. The Rio Grande Tewa languages, for example, have words like konfesa (from Spanish confesion) “confession” and pinsipa (from Spanish principales) “political leaders” and sounds like /x/ and /f/, (Dozier 1951[1964]: 514) all of which are alien to Arizona Tewa and viewed by its native speakers as evidence of the linguistic impurity and cultural inferiority of the New Mexican Tewa pueblos. Tewa elder Albert Yava (1978:1) denigrates other Tewa languages in accord with the local language ideology of indigenous purism when he says, “in New Mexico the Tewa language has been corrupted by other Pueblo languages and Spanish.” Thus the combined ideologies of indigenous purism and language as historical product both contribute to an additional project of constructing the Arizona Tewa language as an icon of their ethnic identity.

Another local notion that weaves language, identity, and history together is the “linguistic curse” placed upon the Hopi by the ancestors of the Arizona Tewa. According to the folk history of the Tewa (and verified by some Hopi accounts), the ancestors of the Arizona Tewa responded to Hopi failure to live up to the terms of an agreement in which their military service to the Hopi would be repaid by granting land use rights and other concessions. An obligatory part of tribal initiation ceremonies, Arizona Tewa narratives of the events leading up to the curse depict the cruel and unfeeling treatment of victorious but starving Tewa warriors after they had vanquished Hopi enemies. In Dozier's translation, the clan chiefs of the Tewa respond with the following curse:

Apart from the continuing belief in the efficacy of this curse more than 300 years after it was originally uttered, the curse is especially remarkable for two reasons. One, it represents the Tewa as agents in the production of an asymmetrical bilingualism that would have been the expected outcome of their minority status. Two, it celebrates the maintenance of the Tewa language as a cultural victory, further laminating the language with significance as an enregistered emblem of ethnic identity (Agha 2007:235).

A final point of discussion regarding the intimate association of the Arizona Tewa language and its use as a means of expressing ethnic or tribal identity, might be described as “the cultivation of difference.” Some members will use their agricultural experience as a source of imagery to naturalize their language ideologies and linguistic practice and provide a cultural rationalization for such language ideologies as “compartmentalization,” indigenous purism, and even the iconization of specific languages to corresponding social identities. Like the Hopi, the Arizona Tewa plant many small fields consisting of a single color of corn (e.g., blue, red, yellow, etc.) in order to eliminate the hybridization and mixing of color that would occur if two colors of corn were planted in the same field. One senior consultant explained:

Clearly one can see how the Tewa find a common pattern in their agricultural practice and in the dispreference for loanwords mentioned above. But one of the consequences of culturally proscribing mixing is to keep each language in their linguistic repertoire as maximally distinct from one another as possible. Within this context of a deliberate cultivation of linguistic difference, and aided by a Tewa language ideology which sees language as a means of creating various social and personal identities (Kroskrity 1993:44–7, 193–212), code-switching between the languages of their linguistic repertoire often provides a means for signaling relevant social identities by selecting their iconized and otherwise indexed languages (Tewa, Hopi, and English). Since there is a cultural recognition of a multiplicity of identities and the role of languages as a means of expressing them, the “cultivation of difference” further enhances the consubstantial relationship of Tewa language and identity.

Traditional Narratives and Tewa Identities

The capacity to speak Tewa is both a touchstone of Tewa identity and also a means of participation in the traditional narratives of the community. Those who do not speak Tewa can neither tell nor hear stories belonging to the pééyu'u genre. As in contemporary San Juan Pueblo (Martinez 2004), the Arizona Tewa still tell traditional narratives that can be classified as either sacred or mundane. Sacred narratives are closely associated with historical accounts and with ceremonial contexts. Such tellings are intended only for the ears of initiated kinsmen and religious sodality members. Unlike such esoteric narratives, pééyu'u are viewed as mundane yet firmly tied to the home, to domestic practices, to the socialization of children, and to the maintenance of valued moral and cosmic orders. The pééyu'u genre tends to presuppose children as focal, though not exclusive, audience members. As with other performance genres, pééyu'u presuppose and prescribe sets of roles and role relationships between participants (e.g., Hanks 1996). Thus, a minimal participant structure would include an adult storyteller and one or more children who must periodically vocalize their ongoing attention and ratify the extended turn of the storyteller. In actual practice, most storytelling sessions are embedded in larger kin gatherings, and two or more adults will rotate responsibility for storytelling to a collection of siblings, cousins, and occasional neighbors.

Proper performance in this genre is ideally reserved for Winter evenings, and usually the performers are adults, male or female, who perform for their immediate and extended families. Performances in the genre provide a domestic, “informal learning”-style, and developmentally early exposure to many of the key language ideologies embodied in the authoritative register known as “kiva speech” (te'e hiili) (Kroskrity 1998)—one that they will gain greater familiarity with as adolescents and young adults.

Performances in this storytelling genre are exclusively encoded in Arizona Tewa thus illustrating an ideological conformity to indigenous purism. Illustrating the ideology of “regulation by convention” the genre has a relatively formulaic beginning and ending and almost always contains a brief song associated with the story's protagonists. In addition these stories display the quintessential marker of tradition since narrators must use at least one evidential particle per clause. In most stories the evidential particle ba not only supplies the evidential information that this is hearsay, second hand, “so-they-say” information, but also functions as a discourse marker of the storyteller's persona as these particles—both the Arizona Tewa ba and their Hopi neighbors' yaw—occur multiple times per clause. I have argued elsewhere that this is the ego-effacing voice which aligns the storyteller with a traditional past, thus using linguistic practice to locate—or, in this case, to erase—the identity of the speaker (a third language ideology). And finally the ideology of compartmentalization—these stories are told in everyday Tewa with strict avoidance of vocabulary indexing other levels such as “kiva talk” or “slang.” Thus Tewa pééyu'u represent important resources for socializing Tewa children to cultural values emphasizing the traditional wisdom of the ancestors and the importance of collective rather than individual identities. Even though these narratives are targeted at uninitiated children so young that they have no actual experience with the ceremonial system, it is nevertheless especially noteworthy that many ideologies of Tewa storytelling converge with those of kiva speech (Kroskrity 1998) and preadapt the child to appreciate the aesthetics of an indexical order anchored in the exemplary ritual site (Silverstein 1998b) of Tewa religious and cultural authority.

Local Ideologies of Narrative Efficacy

Describing the form of the stories does not account for why they are perceived as useful and powerful. Tewa ideologies of narrative efficacy associate them with two distinct kinds of growth. My first awareness of one of these patterns came as quite a shock. I had been working for more than 5 years on Arizona Tewa stories with my key consultant Dewey Healing. Healing was an amazing man who composed new songs every year for Tewa social dances, told many traditional stories, and had served in the highest positions of tribal government both on First Mesa and as Tribal Council Chairman of the Hopi Tribe. Mr. Healing was certainly a practical man and one who freely expressed cynical remarks about certain notoriously ultraconservative Hopis whom he had confronted while tribal chair. Once, while we were taking a break after having checked, sentence by sentence, the transcriptional accuracy of a story we had earlier recorded, it dawned on me that despite our deep involvement in analyzing the stories I had not asked him a very basic question about his appreciation of them. I spontaneously remarked “You know after working on these stories with you for so many years, I think I am beginning to understand why they are so well-liked and popular, but I haven't asked you directly, what do you like about the stories?” Without missing a beat, Dewey made eye contact with me, looked off ever so briefly, and returned his gaze to me, saying, “I like the way they make the crops grow.” His facial expression was very serious—this was not one of his jokes. I was stunned, fumbled with the controls of my tape recorder, and only hours later managed some much-needed, follow-up questions. Yes, he really did believe that there was a causal connection between telling these stories and the success of his corn crop. Surely some of his beliefs surrounding the connection between storytelling and horticultural success will remain a mystery to me. But was this an example of the Pueblo penchant for intricate cosmic orders in which every thing and every action needed to be in its place? Winter was the prescribed time for telling stories and also for hunting and gaming. But, no! Storytelling, as I gathered from what Dewey told me, was indexically connected to more than hunting or gaming, and he guided me to see an analogy between telling stories to children and sprouting seeds into seedlings (a Winter kiva practice)—“it makes them grow right.”

While space does not permit me to further unpack this important cultural indexical connection here, I do want to observe that Healing's view is by no means idiosyncratic. In researching her Tewa Tales (1926) Elsie Clews Parsons (1926:7) noted:

Of course, Tewa narrators acknowledge the efficacy of storytelling not just on the plant kingdom but also on the socializing impact it has on raising their children. “We grow them,” my consultants would say while pointing to either their children or grandchildren, “with stories. Our food makes them strong but our stories make them complete/good (óyyó-‘an).”

This association with moral development is further revealed in two other ideological manifestations of varying degrees of explication. One was a folk definition of pééyu'u which I elicited as part of a dictionary project. When I asked an accomplished storyteller and song composer how he would define that term he gave the following use-oriented definition which can be translated as “When people tell traditional stories, they are showing something good but also revealing something bad.” These fundamental dualistic morality tales usually break down into positive models provided by the family-oriented, team-player, work-ethic endowed, and otherwise sociocentric characters like the Ant People, the Deer, and the Birds. These characters are usually depicted as teaching valuable skills to their young or engaging in group oriented work invariably associated with culturally appropriate work songs in contrast to the negative characters like Old Man Coyote or Coyote-Woman who are represented as the antithesis of Tewa values: egocentric, dislocated, arrogant, lacking in decorum, and, of course, impulsive. In other stories, positive models are often aligned with village chiefs as when they decide to use supernatural means to deal with the moral decay of their communities—the Pueblo counterparts to Sodom and Gomorrah—by using supernatural allies (like the god of the underworld Maasaw) or an army of mangled Zuni warriors brought back from the dead) in order to “scare” their communities “straight.”

A second manifestation of language ideologies that acknowledge the socializing role of stories appears in the culturally sanctioned rebuke of those who misbehave as “Didn't your grandmother ever tell you the stories?” The Arizona Tewa version of this rebuke is not as conventionalized and gender specialized as in other groups indigenous to the American Southwest, and Arizona Tewa speakers may insert other ascending generation kintypes into the grandmother slot. This may reflect a less gendered practice of storytelling among the Arizona Tewa, where such skills in traditional narrative performance appear to be very evenly distributed along gender lines rather than disproportionately performed by women. This flexibility is also, no doubt, a by-product of contemporary social change in which more households are nuclear families and the participation of grandparents in the lives of their grandchildren is not as constant as it once was. In sum, traditional stories continue to be viewed by Tewa people as important even powerful resources for creating and maintaining both social and the cosmic orders.

Local Ideologies of Narrative Performance

As in the acquisition of the nonesoteric registers of Arizona Tewa itself, Arizona Tewa people neither require nor receive any formal training. Storytellers simply “catch on” (maak'a-‘an) by hearing others tell the stories and gradually incorporating both the textual content and the ideals of narrative performance. While many people agree on who are especially adept narrators, they rarely complicate this evaluative discourse by abstracting the criteria that motivate these distinctions. My extended discussion with knowledgeable performers embedded within a long-term ethnographic preoccupation with this genre and its performance practices, did yield the following criteria.

1. The use of storytelling conventions pééyu'u tú(“story words”). Foremost among these conventions, and the most important grammatical/discourse resource for creating the voice of the traditional narrator is the evidential particle ba“so they say” about which I have written more extensively elsewhere (Kroskrity 1985, 1993). These stories display the quintessential marker of tradition since narrators must use at least one evidential particle per clause. Example (1) provides an extracted example from a recorded performance of “(Coyote and) Birds Story” that represents a typical sentence.

In most stories the evidential particle ba not only supplies the evidential information—the hearsay, secondhand, “so-they-say” information, but also functions as a discourse marker of the storyteller's persona as these particles—for both the Arizona Tewa ba and their Hopi neighbors' yaw occur between 2 and 3 times per clause (Kroskrity, 1997, Shaul 2002).⁸ Suffice it to say that use of ba in these narratives is both the paramount traditionalizing trope (Bauman 1992) and genre signature (Shaul 2000) of Arizona Tewa pééyu'u just as Hopi yaw is for Hopi tutuwutsi. I have also argued elsewhere that this usage helps narrators construct an ego-effacing voice which aligns the storyteller with a traditional past, thus using linguistic practice to formulate—or in this case erase—the identity of the speaker. Note that this linguistic construction of the authoritative voice of the traditional storyteller also preadapts young story listeners to a language ideology in which positional identities are discursively constructed.

2. Use of archaic words (héyé tú) both in the dialog of characters and in the narrative itself. Since most narratives in this genre are set in a vaguely distant past this is a sort of authenticating move that establishes an older time period. The use of archaic expressions in everyday speech is very rare and judged as unusual but is not viewed as a violation of register consistency as in the case of uttering words that are indexed to the kiva speech (te'e hiili). The effect of Old Man Coyote saying “Némáhá” (“marvelous”), in (2) below, when he sees a mother bird teaching her baby birds their flying songs is thus more like an English speaker using words like “hark” or “forsooth” rather than a style switch between slang, everyday, and ceremonial registers.

3. Use of stylized facial expression (cee-po) especially in the dramatic imitation of story characters. Narrators differ dramatically in terms of how they use conventional or more innovative facial expressions. In several tellings of a story about how the Ants squeezed Old Man Coyote to death by making him participate in an ordeal involving a rope tied progressively tighter around his waist, most narrators opened their eyes more widely, as if surprised, while more innovative narrators also opened their mouths and produced a feigned cry of pain.

4. Use of prosodic and paralinguistic effects by narrators to imitate the voices (tú) of story characters. Imitating voices of story characters was typical of those narrators judged as more skilled. Old Man Coyote, for example, would often be portrayed in a deeper, more gruff voice than other characters. These distinctive voices would permit dialogue between characters without the need for a full identification of the speaker after each utterance.

5. Use of thematic songs (khaw'). For many narrators and audience members, songs are often viewed as important even criterial attributes of the genre pééyu'u. Audience members were quite explicit about the importance of a narrator having a strong, clear voice and displaying control of the tune. In all three of the stories that have been published to date, these songs are a conspicuous feature (Kroskrity 1985, Kroskrity and Healing 1978, 1981).

6. “Carrying it hither” (-maadi-ma'a) which can be paraphrased as situating the narrative for the present audience—the practice of recontextualizing story scripts to the needs and capacities of actual audiences. Bakhtin (1986:63) once observed that “not all genres appear to be equally conducive to reflecting the individuality of the speaker (or writer)” and here it is appropriate to extend this observation by suggesting that not all genres may be equally conducive to the interactive demands of recontextualizing (Bauman and Briggs 1990:72) a story text in performance to a unique audience. Tewa narrators of pééyu'u appear to be torn between the apparent conflict of values that both stipulate highly conventional language, gesture, and song—on the one hand—yet demand that narrators somehow “carry hither” their stories, somehow recipient-design a traditional product. Arizona Tewa narrators must cope with the performer's paradox of working almost equally arduously to recontextualize these stories to the perceived needs and interests of their audiences and to erase any evidence of their innovative work. Elsewhere (Kroskrity 1993) I have discussed how Tewa narrators effectively use two main devices to achieve these ends. One is episode editing and elaboration. Subplots and tangential stories can be discarded, diminished, or developed as narrators see fit. Two, all textual innovations can be traditionalized (Bauman 1992) by appropriate use of ba and adopting the ego effacing perspective of the “traditional narrator.”

Traditional Narratives and “the Authoritative Word”

Since Tewa traditional stories are presented as “authoritative” based on their connection to tradition, they invite comparison to Bakhtin's notion of “the authoritative word.” Though a humble genre of domestic storytelling might seem a far cry from the religious dogma and the scientific truths that Bakhtin presented as his prototypes, I can conclude by reflecting on the appropriateness of his multifaceted notion of the authoritative word as a means of better understanding the Tewa genre and its performance goals. Bakhtin (1981: 342) writes:

This aspect of the authoritative word strongly suggests its value for us in understanding Arizona Tewa narrators and the manner in which they derive a special authority by connecting to the prior discourses of their valorized ancestors. So fused with authority are these mere folktales that even the most worldly and cynical Tewa villagers still find their explanations for landmarks, biological givens, and cultural practices more than “partially true.” But Bakhtin (1981:343) also further develops his notion when he says, “It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us; rather it demands our unconditional allegiance. Therefore authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants of it.” Thinking omnivorously about authoritative discourse, Bakhtin attempts to locate and to understand the authority that underlies such diverse speech forms as ritual prayers and scientific formulae. But here is precisely where the applicability to Tewa storytellers breaks down. Though they recognize the need for authority-conferring connections, they know their stories are not the fixed-text prayers of ritual performance. They know that speaking the past into the present requires the agility to connect both with ancestral discourses and with the needs and interests of their children and grandchildren. They need to “carry” their stories “here.”

Tewa storytelling ideologies thus prescribe a narrow but significant generic intertextual gap by recognizing the emergent aspects of storytelling performance and the need for recontextualizing story scripts in accord with the particulars (e.g., setting, participants, ends) of actual performance. Though these ideologies make a concession to the emergent properties of performance, they otherwise do valorize a particular regime of calibration that demands that individual performances closely conform to the genre's dominant emphasis on speaking the past.

For while ideologies of generic performance and intertextuality are widely recognized throughout the community, they are more selectively interpreted and enforced. As Richard Bauman (2004:8) has observed concerning the politics of generic regimentation:

Though Bauman is remarking on a more general pattern, his remarks can be readily and profitably applied to the Arizona Tewa community. Those who speak against widening the intertextual gap, who voice opposition to the use of Tewa stories in schools, and who oppose the making of written Tewa texts are indeed mostly those who are closely tied to the established authority and order of ceremonial leaders. Their pragmatic and metapragmatic calibration is primarily of a type identified by Silverstein (1993:53) as “nomic” where “such forms constitute mechanisms for AUTHORIZATION [emphasis in the original] of a particular event, grounding its event-status in the authority of some non-experienced realm” such as mythic, sacred, and ceremonial orders.⁹ Not surprisingly those most associated with the upper echelon of the ceremonial hierarchies are most vocal about narrowing the intertextual gap and imposing the usual canons of kiva speech (te'e hiili) in attempts to authorize some performances and delegitimate others. Though they rationalize their actions not as acts of suppression but as a means of maintaining traditional standards, some community members can only interpret the stance of these “made people” (paa t'owa) as intolerant and unsympathetic to the needs of those who struggle to maintain contact with tradition.¹⁰ This group includes a large group of college-age young adults as well as the vast majority of younger children who have had few opportunities to learn their heritage language. Also included in this tradition-marginal group are a significant number of middle-aged adults and their families who have spent considerable time away from their First Mesa “homes” due to the need to gain higher or specialized education or the need to find off-reservation employment. Their removal from the community often means a disruption in their kinship and social networks that deny them access to those cultural domains in which the Tewa oral tradition still prevails. Though youngsters can experience tribal initiation even if their heritage language fluency is weak, entry into all other valued ceremonial associations is still denied them through gate-keeping practices that require greater fluency in Tewa. Even for those who have no ambition insofar as attaining higher ceremonial stations, there is often a desire to know Tewa as a heritage language. Though most are aware that older members of the community regard Tewa fluency as a marker of legitimate membership, almost all nonspeakers or those of severely limited fluency say their desire to know their heritage language has personal meaning to them as a means of understanding and affirming their cultural identity. As one young man put it, “If I cannot speak Tewa, how can I think like my folks, and their folks—like our ancestors.” A young woman said, “How do you fit in here if you cannot speak Tewa. It is very limiting like I am in a corral or something. Without Tewa, I cannot even connect to some members of my own family and clan.” Clearly this linguistically disenfranchised group has an opposing view to that of the traditional elite regarding Tewa. The disenfranchised strongly favors bringing the heritage language into the schools and adult education classes, the creation of Tewa story textbooks, and the creation of bilingual texts and performances in Tewa and English. But such innovation, creativity, and hybridity—no matter how useful or necessary it might appear to be in order to unify the Tewa community—is overtly rejected by the elders who see this sort of concession as “watering down” the heritage language and culture. They say, “We have been doing it this way for hundreds, even thousands of years. Why should we change things for this generation? They need to change themselves and their ways.” Though such words can be interpreted as a harsh, Native version of “blaming the victim,” the apparent intent of traditional leaders is not punitive as much as it is the rigorous maintenance of community values. What is neglected in such a metadiscursive stance is the role of parenting generations in not actively promoting Tewa as a language of the home—the in-progress language shift is misrecognized not as a failure of parents and community but rather as a failure of the children (cf Kulick 1992).

Storytelling for Those Who Can Not Tell Them in Tewa

Today the Arizona Tewa face a serious dilemma. The intracultural diversity of their communities, especially along generational lines, has produced a basic division between those who “have” the Tewa narrative tradition and those who do not. Caught in the middle are those who attempt to mediate by telling the stories in English. Example (3) below is transcribed from a recording of a narrator who must tell his story in English—neither he nor his family members are sufficiently fluent in Tewa to permit him to exclusively use the heritage language. But despite his obvious disjuncture of telling “traditional” narratives in a non-traditional language, note the attempts to “traditionalize” the introduction to this narrative.

Though this narrator tells the story of “How the Walpi Chief and Maasaw Saved his Village” in English, he clearly has some idea that the performance should include a formulaic introduction (“once upon a time” on the model of ‘owεεheeyámba) and some translation equivalent for the evidential particle ba. This is most certainly a performance by a narrator who is able to reproduce some Tewa discursive traditions in an English language narrative. But such performances are especially controversial for while they are clearly informed by an awareness of Tewa narrative tradition, many Tewas will reject such narratives as utterly inauthentic and even inappropriate because, in its English form, it violates such ideological tenets as indigenous purism and strict compartmentalization.

Conclusions

An attempt to produce an experience-near understanding of the Arizona Tewa genre of pééyu'u has lead inevitably to local ideologies of the genre and its performance. Such ideologies lead in turn to the linkage of poetics and politics in the form of generic regimentation. In other intertextual explorations I have attempted to suggest what might be termed a dual influence of kiva speech on pééyu'u text building and performance practices. Since the storytellers of pééyu'u are adults who have become conversant to the norms of kiva speech through their own tribal initiations and ceremonial participation, they are guided by the traditional ways of speaking that are indexed to ceremonial efficacy, political (and moral) authority, and the tangible construction of Tewa tribal identity (Kroskrity 2000). Under this influence, the intertextual convergence of storytelling on the model of kiva speech is quite pervasive even though many narrators and audience members acknowledge that traditional stories are not examples of the “authoritative word” and must instead be shaped by the needs and interests of a human novice audience rather than in accord with the dictates of supernatural and/or cosmic forces.

In addition to contestation regarding appropriate and authentic languages for traditional narratives, there is also the debate about appropriate and authentic sites for performing these stories. Perhaps expectedly the two sides in this debate correspond to those who tell traditional stories in Tewa and those who do not. Those who do still contend that Tewa homes are the only sites where Tewa narratives should be spoken or heard. This group has consistently opposed the use of Tewa stories in school settings. But those who do not enjoy narrative access in their homes—usually the younger, the less rooted—are more likely to voice the suggestion, and occasionally the demand, that schools must now be used as a means of continuing this tradition and as a place where the Tewa language and its storytelling traditions must be taught. In a statement about performance variation that is useful here, Bauman (2004:10) observes:

Though Bauman is noting general patterns, his remarks allow us to better understand diverse perspectives as applied to the Arizona Tewa case where a conflict exists between those traditional leaders, representing “correctness” and “authority,” on the one hand, and those community members, as victims of massive language shift, who have unprecedented linguistic and discursive exigencies.

This is an ongoing struggle within the community, and it is an extremely consequential one. There is indeed little consolation in seeing the community unified regarding the potency of traditional stories when it appears hopelessly divided on legitimating or delegitimating nontraditional sites and languages of transmission. Given the valorized linkage for the Arizona Tewa of cultural reproduction and narrative performance, it is no wonder that traditional storytelling has emerged as a site of ideological contestation. In this struggle, clan elders can readily turn to the discourse of kiva speech (te'e hiili) for a culturally prescribed means of narrowing the generic intertextual gap associated with traditional stories, and thereby limit the creativity and flexibility that would be necessary to be more inclusive. Such a metadiscursive move has the potential to effectively deny access to storytelling to the vast majority of younger members of the speech community. Though few elders want to be responsible for the death of the Tewa language or the destruction of Tewa culture, they rationalize their stance as a non-negotiable demand that those who have “failed “to acquire the language and its oral tradition need to better conform to cultural ideals. Though cultural reproduction and transformation are typically linked in theoretical discussions of sociocultural change (e.g., Giddens 1984:170, Kulick 1992), the relationship of these processes has become further intensified in actual Tewa language ideological struggles. It is possible to argue that the community cannot reproduce itself without considerable transformation aimed at inclusion of those now outside the inner discursive circle.

And here it is important to note two very different stances that are available to Tewa people and associated with the respective discourses of kiva speech and storytelling. Kiva speech so values tradition and indigenous purism that its norms demand replication of past ceremonial forms. Those guided by this model may opt to abandon the Tewa language and its discursive traditions in much the same way ceremonialists have abandoned actual ceremonies where there was insufficient knowledge transmitted to ensure their faithful reproduction.¹¹ Those guided by storytelling ideals—especially the need to “carry it here”—enjoy a more flexible and adaptive model. Within this stance inclusion could be more easily rationalized as the necessary steps dutiful performers must take to reach their audiences. Though storytelling is highly regarded by virtually all in the community, there are now certainly fewer accomplished storytellers than there are experienced ceremonial practitioners.¹²

So what can we make of this ideological struggle over stories? One can hail this either as a forceful expression of Tewa language ideologies such as indigenous purism and compartmentalization, or deride it as a bitter ideological struggle over inclusion and exclusion within an increasingly diverse Tewa community. Like the traditional narratives themselves, these contending views may thus be interpreted as illustrating something “good” and something “bad” in this story of how stories should be told.