1In Clackamas Chinook Performance Art: Verse Form Interpretations (Victoria Howard), Catharine Mason has edited a selection of oral poems performed by Victoria Howard, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in western Oregon, who was born in 1865 and died in 1930. Howard’s performances were originally transcribed by Melville Jacobs during recording sessions in 1929-1930 in which he filled nineteen notebooks. As Mason points out in her endnotes, Jacobs translated the Clackamas texts into English with Howard’s help and included “various remarks concerning the performance as well as semantic and morphological interpretations of the Clackamas forms” (p. 166). Jacobs later published the notebooks as Clackamas Chinook Texts in 1958 and 1959. Catharine Mason has made a selection of the poems transcribed and later published by Jacobs in a perspective which she carefully explains in her introduction. Her selection and re-editing of the poems is founded on concerns that, while taking into account the contributions of Melville Jacobs and of Dell Hymes, also reveal a sensitivity to recent trends in the discussion and interpretation of oral poetry. The complex issues raised by the role of the ethnographer in the process of transcription and translation are fully integrated. In evoking the caution required in dealing with myth and sacred material, Mason points out that a simple respect for tradition does not suffice, since cultural traditions themselves are subject to change. She thus expresses her commitment to “an ongoing dialogical interpretive process” (p. xxiii). She insists on “the responsibility of editors and historians to reveal metatextual and contextual dynamics as well as historical details of textual configuration” (p. xxix). On the basis of the presence of “inserted narrative episodes” (p. xxxiii) in Jacobs’s transcriptions, Mason suggests that Howard’s awareness of the role played by “the technology of writing and translation” (p. xxxiii) had an impact on her own artistic strategy. She also argues for the potential advantages of applying “advanced literary analysis” (p. xxx) to Howard’s production as a way of highlighting the exceptional quality of her performances. She explains in some detail the contributions to literary analysis made by Jacobs and Hymes, insisting on the importance of Jacobs’s classification of the narratives into “literary genre categories” (p. xxviii) and Hymes’s concern with “verse structure as an essential device in the creation of deep-set meaning” (p. xxix). She builds her own approach to the literary analysis of Howard’s performances through an emphasis on the artist’s narrative skills and considers her focus on “female issues” as a reflection of her “unique voice” (p. xxxii). More importantly, she adds an explanation of personal choices that reveal her concern with combining an original approach, focused on Howard’s particular talents as a performer, with a desire to make the quality of Howard’s texts available to her own Grand Ronde community. There is also a palpable preoccupation with the necessity of respecting the nature and function of oral performance in the Native American community. Overall the desire to allow readers to grasp the originality of Howard’s talent without losing sight of the highly contextual functioning of oral poetry seems to be her major concern and the principle which has guided her editorial choices. By trying to imagine how Howard would have felt about the “arid muteness” (p. xx) of writing as opposed to an oral performance, Mason puts her finger on the most crucial aspect of the work of transcribing, translating and editing the oral literary heritage of Native Americans for the benefit of a variety of readers, some of them far removed from the context in which Victoria Howard lived and practiced her art.

2In her introduction Mason not only explains the basic principles which have guided her re-editing of Jacobs’s transcription. She also provides the reader with essential information concerning the texts themselves, which are presented first of all in Clackamas, followed by the English translation. She justifies changes made in Jacobs’s translations on the basis of her desire to convey “the uniqueness of Clackamas poetics and of Howard’s style” but without “embellishing” the original translations (p. xxv). In some cases this has involved eliminating the “awkwardness” (p. xxv) of Jacobs’s translations, but in other cases the adding of what could be seen as awkwardness was necessary in order to convey both the specificity of Howard’s style and the aspects of Clackamas language and rhetoric on which her style relied. The decision to place the object before the verb in certain cases in which the “object is given special weight” (p. xxv) corresponds to this preoccupation, whereas the choice to respect “English narrative norms as regards the use of verb inflection” reflects a desire to facilitate reading by “maintaining an even flow of narrated events” (p. xxvi).

3The twenty-five texts and their accompanying translations are divided into three sections: Personal Landscapes, Historical Landscapes, and Cultural Landscapes. Mason justifies this organization on the basis of her research into Howard’s life and work and the insights that it has provided her concerning the artist’s priorities and their relation to the cultural and historical context. The inclusion, for instance, of texts involving shamanism in the section on “Personal Landscapes” can be explained by the number of shamans in the artist’s family. In the same way, Howard’s sensitivity to the “degrading impact of white culture on Native life” (p. xxiii) justifies the grouping of the poems in the section “Cultural Landscapes” in a way that highlights Howard’s sensitivity to the different ways in which this question could be treated artistically.

4Each text is preceded by a short introduction and is accompanied by endnotes which situate the poem by its place in Jacobs’s notes and published editions. The notes also draw attention to specific characteristics of Jacobs’s transcription and explain changes that Mason has made in the English translation. In the first poem, for instance, about the bird heard at dawn, she explains her use of the present participle “hearing” by the desire to express the element of repetition involved in the actions of listening and rising, which are linked. In reference to the poem “I Lived with my Mother’s Mother,” her justification for retaining Jacobs’s translation of “Kinwa lxluwida” as the laconic “in vain strangers” (p. 169, note 6) helps one to grasp the nature of the interaction between the poetical and linguistic dimensions of the original text.

5There are a number of different ways of reading Victoria Howard’s poems in Clackamas and English and the explanations that are provided to facilitate an understanding of the editor’s objectives. I personally found myself attracted to the Clackamas text in spite of my total lack of knowledge of the language because of the obvious relation between the functioning of the language and the poetics involved, an aspect which Mason highlights in convincing ways. I couldn’t help noticing the prominence of the word “Aga” and wondering how it functions in the original language, a function that I’m not sure is entirely covered by its translation and repetition as “now.” Mason explains the use of this word in her notes to the poem “Captives Escape Snake Indians” (p. 185, note 3). She points out that it can correspond to several different words and that its frequent use “maintains a tension in the flow of the narrative.” It is not surprising to see that words of this type, which establish logical, spatial or temporal connections, are the most complex to translate. One can easily imagine their importance in oral performance, where they constitute the essential connection between the speaker and the listener.

6The effectiveness of Mason’s rereading of Howard’s poems can perhaps best be felt in the presentation of the long narrative poem “Wasusgani and Wacinu” which describes, among other themes, the first contacts with Euro-Americans. The explanatory notes that accompany the poem are essential to an understanding of the narrative, told in large part by Howard’s mother-in-law Wasusgani and including inserts that were not part of the main narrative but were provided by Howard “in the translation sessions” (p. 189, note 3). The notes provide information concerning the narrative and historical context, but also point out important stylistic features that help the reader grasp the emotional power of the poem, which tells a story “soundly embedded in the oral tradition of early Grand Ronde” (p. 194, note 48). The poem displays stylistic features that highlight the ways in which the oral narrative, through its concision, patterning and images, dramatizes the trauma of cultural deprivation and displacement that accompanied the arrival of the Euro-Americans.

7Mason’s meticulous and well-documented presentation of this selection of poems from Victoria Howard’s repertoire can be useful to a variety of readers with varying degrees of familiarity with the subject of Native American oral poetry and the work of the artist. It offers specialists in the area the possibility of gaining new insights into the verbal artistry of Victoria Howard, based on a careful reassessment of the work of Melville Jacobs. However, it also gives readers less familiar with the subject access to a corpus presented in a way that illustrates the artistry involved in Howard’s skillful balancing of individual and collective perspectives. Mason, in her scholarly and critical choices, is arguing for a broader definition of the audience of oral poetry from the past. One of the audiences she would like to reach is “members of Grand Ronde and other Native communities of the American Northwest” whom she hopes “will come to appreciate the value of a scholarly approach without being put off by its technical abstractions” (p. xxxvii). In a world increasingly dominated by the “technical abstractions” to which Catharine Mason refers, this is a refreshing reminder of the need to view research in terms of a public extending beyond the community of university scholars.