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Truth Never Sleeps: Myths of the Omaha
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14606 |
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CULTURE
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5 / 1988 |
4,920 Words |
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Roger L. Welsch
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Mine is a modest library, but I would be lost without it, for it is my culture's memory. My books remind me of what other people in my culture have thought, learned, or experienced. My desk is actually not much more than a stand for my world processor; in it I store whatever thoughts or information I want to remember without having to shuffle through the "memory" of my books.
I have scraps of papers and notes stuck on the chassis of my computer, on the edge of my desk, and on the bulletin board near the door, to remind me of items I need to recall more immediately.
I make lists to jar my uncertain memory. I make a list of what I am supposed to do each day. When I leave the house I have another list with me, instructing me what I am to do, where I am to go, and the items I am supposed to pick up or leave at my appointed stops.
I usually make four or five lists for whatever it is that I have to do because I inevitably lose the first three or four. Then I wind up losing the one I take with me and I have to wrack my brains trying to remember what it was that I was supposed to do on my trip to town.
I love my literacy and cannot for a moment imagine being without it, but I sometimes wonder if my very use of my ability to read and write has not reduced me to a terrible dependency and thereby made me a victim of it. Writing is a skill that was once my servant; now it seems to have become my master.
Without writing, I am helpless.
When I was an undergraduate in an introductory anthropology class, I pitied the "primitive" tribes we studied because I imagined that their potential was severely limited by the fact that their cultural memory--history, literature, religion, belief, law, medicine, everything--could not be preserved in print but depended entirely on the fragile thread of individual memory. Unable to remember where I parked my car that morning, I tried to imagine what it would be like to hold my culture's entire intellectual inventory in my mind, without the mental crutch of a single list.
A decade later I spent a good deal of time among the Omaha Indians of Nebraska. My experiences within that society dramatically changed my understanding of the durability of culture transmitted and preserved in print and culture transmitted and preserved in oral circulation.
Music preserved in memory
The Omaha tribe is relatively small--about 4,500 members--but is still living on land it occupied at the time of the first substantial non-Indian incursion, about 1810. The Omaha reservation is made up of about 200 square miles on the west bank of the Missouri River, about sixty miles north of Omaha, Nebraska. While literacy within the tribe is very high and basic schooling universal, a good deal of traditional Omaha culture is still transmitted only by oral means, especially among the older members of the tribe.
Nowhere is the inherent strength of Omaha oral tradition and its impressive momentum clearer than within the tribe's musical heritage. Music has
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