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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
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Date: 2010-09-20 06:35 am (UTC)...that you've been reading Iktomi stories?
:: and I'd never thought about it in those terms before. ::
May I ask what terms you were thinking about it in? (If you'd rather, privately is fine.) I've been puzzled by some of the reactions to the post.
Woo: in endnote 9, the "whereas" appears to set up "ethnic Americans" and "white Americans" as two different categories of Americans. No?
Considering her endnote 9 against her "no mythologies inherently their own" question, it seems to me that she just overlooked Native Americans altogether: Native Americans in America are certainly less displaced than white Americans from Britain, and she seems to be using the latter as her displacement yardstick.
I think Woo is making a special pleading for white Americans in asserting that they don't have to account for displacement within their mythology. While there's a certain something that comes with feeling able to assert (inaccurately, as you point out in the other post) that this one set of stories are shared by us all, there are also clear issues of displacement in the mythologies of white Americans. The mythologies that go with this land are not the mythologies of Britain, and British mythologies cannot be made to serve. (Referencing my own landscape: there are no British stories about Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. St. Helens, nor are there British stories about orcas. It is very obvious to me why one so often runs into the phrase, "There is an old Indian tale...")
That said, with respect to this statement from endnote 9(you'd think that was the only thing I read in the whole article), "for self-identified ethnic American groups, the chasm is more evident between their ethnic origin and Britain", I find Malinda Lo's Ash very interesting. Lesbians and East Asians in what is clearly Fantasy Britain, and present without explanation for how they got there: Fantasy Britain had always had lesbians and East Asians.