Stories from Quechan oral literature
(eBook)

English

"In deference to traditional views, biographies of contributors who are no longer living (including narrators and one translator) have been withheld from this page. Biographical information which has been released by the relevant families may be found in the book".--Publisher's website.

Available through Open Book Publishers.

Statement of responsibility on front cover: Narrated by Rosita Carr, John Comet, Jessie Webb Escalante, Mary Kelly Escalant, Joesfa Hartt, Tom Kelly and Anonymous ; linguistic work by A.M. Halpern and Amy Miller.

The stories are presented here in a bilingual format, with the original Quechan on the even-numbered pages and a line-matched English translation on the facing (odd-numbered) pages.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Open access resource providing free access.

"The Quechan are a Yuman people who have traditionally lived along the lower part of the Colorado River in California and Arizona. They are well known as warriors, artists, and traders, and they also have a rich oral tradition. The stories in this volume were told by tribal elders in the 1970s and early 1980s. The eleven narratives in this volume take place at the beginning of time and introduce the reader to a variety of traditional characters, including the infamous Coyote and also Kwayúu the giant, Old Lady Sanyuuxáv and her twin sons, and the Man Who Bothered Ants. This book makes a long-awaited contribution to the oral literature and mythology of the American Southwest, and its format and organization are of special interest. Narratives are presented in the original language and in the storytellers' own words. A prosodically-motivated broken-line format captures the rhetorical structure and local organization of the oral delivery and calls attention to stylistic devices such as repetition and syntactic parallelism. Facing-page English translation provides a key to the original Quechan for the benefit of language learners. The stories are organized into "story complexes", that is, clusters of narratives with overlapping topics, characters, and events, told from diverse perspectives. In presenting not just stories but story complexes, this volume captures the art of storytelling and illuminates the complexity and interconnectedness of an important body of oral literature. Stories from Quechan Oral Literature provides invaluable reading for anyone interested in Native American cultural heritage and oral traditions more generally."--Publisher's website.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Some rights are reserved. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). For more detailed information consult the publisher's website.

In Quechan and English.