Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer: An Introduction
by Elaine Tietjen

Although Nora was our featured series speaker, a unique aspect of her visit was that she and her husband operated as a "team" in discussions and the reading. For over fifteen years, Richard, who was originally Nora's teacher, has been the "program director" of their two-person organization, handling paperwork and helping with translations while Nora works directly with elders to transcribe and translate their stories and speeches, and to write biographical sketches. Together they enact and embody the cross-cultural collaboration we in the seminar have attempted in this series. A good part of my delight in their visit came from the experience of their good-humored, affectionate, and balanced dialogues during the class visit, at the lunch discussion, and in the reading. While answering questions and telling stories, they often disagreed with, elaborated upon, or clarified each other's responses, and sometimes asked questions or prompted a specific anecdote from each other. During Nora's recitation of speeches in her reading, Richard acted the role of the Tlingit audience at a Ceremonial, responding with affirmative exclamations as she spoke. By the end of the day I felt as if I had glimpsed their conception of community in some tangible way.

Nora and Richard's partnership has produced remarkably accurate and extensive translations of Tlingit oral narratives and speeches, collected in two volumes: Haa Shuka, Our Ancestors and Haa Tuwunaaga, Ceremonial Speeches for Healing Our Spirit. Nora's pride in these works was obvious; she brought them to each of the day's functions and propped them up prominently for her audiences to see. The paperback books themselves seemed to be Tlingit art objects for her, similar to crests and carvings that embody the spirit of the artist who made them or the ancestor who wore them. She explained to us at lunch that in Tlingit House Groups (which are the basic political and social unit of a clan), the leader is the "steward" who takes care of the art pieces collectively owned by the House. Made, worn, or presented by ancestors or living relatives, these objects seem to serve as signifiers of community relatedness, representing in material form the complex intertwinings of relationships and responsibility in the community.

In a similar way, Nora seemed conscious of her role as a "steward" of the Tlingit language itself, as a conservator of the stories and speeches that are her heritage, through her contact with the people represented in the physical book objects. Her deep respect for the storytellers was revealed through anecdotes about the work of collecting stories. For instance, she had heard that George Davis was a great speaker and great storyteller, so she "finally went to see him" and "felt confident [she] could tape him." "He told me to sit down," she said, "him being older, I did. He talked to me for nine and a half hours! He really shaped me--I was out of shape when I went in there!"

This sense of community connection was revealed in another way at the lunch discussion. Nora started by "telling about" herself, which took the form of what she does and who she is. What she does is transcribe and translate stories, stories that are in part her own because they are the "history" she grew up with. She emphasized that she heard many of these stories as a child, and now she reads them to her grandchildren.

"Who she is" was presented in terms of her membership in various organizations, beginning with the non-profit Sealaska Foundation that sponsors her and Richard's work and is dedicated to preserving Tlingit traditions, songs, and dances. Along with all Tlingits and Haida born before 1971, she is also a registered shareholder in the profit-making Sealaska Regional Corporation. Third is a Tlingit and Haida social service organization; fourth, the Alaska Native Sisterhood, and finally, the Raven Moiety.

Nora's sense of identity seemed closely connected to community associations, much as the storytellers she recorded and translated always began their stories with a "narrative frame" that identified who their people are and the place they come from, as well as whose story they were about to relate. Nora's writing of the biographies wasn't easy, she said, because "elders are not supposed to talk much about themselves"--implying that the personal individual life is not as significant as the community history it emerges from.

Concepts of ownership and relationship are significant in Tlingit culture. Stories exist in multiple versions, and Nora and Richard have been leaders in the accurate recording of individual versions that give full credit to the particular storyteller. They contrasted this approach to editors who feel they must present an "authentic" version, and so amalgamate individual stories into one "generic," and thus, inaccurate, story. Material is often added or deleted to render the stories more "recognizeable" to English-speaking readers. Such popular versions do great disservice to the oral tradition that shapes and engenders these stories, since they do not present the real oral narrative events that constitute the oral tradition. Some of these books, for instance, equate Tlingit stories to Greek myths, as if to "legitimize" them, while simultaneously relegating them to the status of children's literature.

Nora and Richard have received pressure, even from parts of the Tlingit community, to publish stories closer to these "American English rewrites." "The bottom line is racism in literature," said Richard. "This is not the real thing." They are dedicated to recording oral literature accurately and to identifying the storytellers as individual artists working out of a community tradition. Nora recounted one popular perception among the Tlingit--that they must be making money off this work: "'Tell Stories and Make Big Bucks' was a workshop in one big tribal meeting," she said. The jealousy is misplaced for several reasons, she explained, the most important of which is that the stories "belong to all of us."

A Second Introduction

by Dennis Selder

"Neither do we overlook our dead. Let it turn to joy that is my wish. In this world we still . . . We will only imitate our ancestors."

--David Kadishan, Ceremonial Speech for the Removal of Grief, 1968. Transcribed and translated by Nora Marks Dauenhauer

Ceremonial speeches, of which this is an excerpt, are asked only of Tlingit elders in their late sixties and beyond, so skillful must the speaker be to properly honor those who have gone, and those who grieve for those who have gone. These speeches have brought comfort and health to Tlingits for hundreds of years, and now, through the diligent efforts of a small community of Native Alaskans and their associates, such speeches, as well as stories, poems, and songs are now being offered in the same tradition of generosity, gathered wisdom, and desire to offer comfort and healing for those of us who have come to join the Tlingits in their longhouses. Among this small community of transcribers, translators, and writers who have made the effort to seek the wider audience, two of the most remarkable are Nora Marks Dauenhauer and her husband, Richard Dauenhauer.

Students, myself included, of the Poetics and Politics class at the University of Arizona were privileged to speak with Nora and Richard about their efforts as transcribers, translators, and writers. In one respect at least, Nora shares a quality in common with all the writers we listened to and spoke with throughout the term: the "Western discourse" of power, law, and the rights of land and property were no match for Nora's own genuine speech, her gentle humor, and sense of responsibility, which has now, through her ever-widening sense of kinship, been extended to all of us.

Nora is a Tlingit from Southeast Alaska. As a child she spoke only Tlingit, ate (among other things) seal meat, went shopping with her parents but in a boat rather than a car. She raised four kids while working long hours in a salmon cannery, and when they had grown, she began building her bridge to Western culture. After completing requirements for university entry, she received training as a linguist, anthropologist, and folklorist. She met Richard, her husband, who had traveled north as a graduate student with a job offer. The two of them began to collaborate. Nora's kinship, which has been intact from the start, forms an essential aesthetic element in her art, as it does for Tlingit in general, so perhaps her awareness of community and her vision of a written Tlingit literature which others can share who do not speak the language is a natural outgrowth of her cultural roots growing to include us as they had her own family.

Much of the work of Nora and Richard is a response to simplified representations of Tlingit art which others who were not Tlingit themselves had produced. The Dauenhauers have found the same damaging oversimplification of Tlingit art has affected pernicious social policies aimed at the Tlingits as well. For example, the resistance school administrators have shown in allowing Tlingit stories and language to be shared with Tlingit and white students in schools can only point to the sad lack of imagination that only the shallowest representations of a culture could allow. Nora addresses these political problems in her poems and when she talks about her home. Similarly, though perhaps not as obvious to us, Nora identifies well-intentioned yet misguided social policies that do not adequately account for the Tlingit way of life, such as their right to hunt whales and seals.

After the Dauenhauers "came here from all kinds of directions" to quote Ofelia Zepeda who introduced them to Tucson in the evening poetry reading (this was literally true - they had had a crazy flight here, with numerous plane connections), and after speaking for well over an hour to our class, and again for well over an hour at the Native American graduate center, the three of us went shopping. Nora chose a black Tucson T-shirt with a long-horn skull on the front for Dick, and some thin polyester socks more comfortable than wool for Tucson. We laughed ironically about the rain, which they had hoped to escape (it had been raining since August in Juneau) but they were pleased that at least the raindrops hitting them were warm. The two of them were obviously enjoying each other in spite of the hectic schedule and constant demands on their energy.

That same energy -- strong medicine -- held through the evening performance, through readings of the demanding Ceremonial Speeches, pitched in a high sonorous tone, and the emotionally exhausting depictions of the harsh political realities of being Tlingit in Alaska. And Nora ended with no less than a drama in which Raven, up to his old tricks, fools a King Salmon into offering himself up for a feast and then his fellow birds into inadvertently preparing his own private feast. I won't deny there is something of the Raven in Nora -- after all, that is her clan. But it seemed that that evening, the feast had been ours, and her trick was to make it seem as if the salmon didn't know what it was doing as it foolishly jumped up onto the beach.