ABSTRACT
Narratives are undoubtedly part of a child’s experience of language. These Native American texts turn out to be subtle organizations of lines. The lines are organized in ways that make them formally poetry, and also a rhetoric of action; they embody an implicit schema for the organization of experience. The patterns may be more finely worked out sometimes in myths, but are also found in personal narratives. In the serious and scheduled occasions when children were (sometimes still are) the specific audience for myths, and those when children are simply present when myths or other narratives are told, it is not only that samples of language are being presented. Over and over again, at every level, an implicit organization of experience into satisfying patterns is conveyed and may be internalized.
