ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 speaks to precolonial narrative traditions in Native literature and the ways in which Native peoples both recorded and passed on those traditions from generation to generation. This chapter seeks to complicate the typical binary construction that forms a rhetorical firewall between modern perceptions of oral and literate cultures—a perception that often stands in as a kind of shorthand for the cognitive divide that positions Native cultures as “savage” and western culture as “civilized.”
