Emil Afraid-Of-Hawk's style (A Personal Impression)

[Clive Bloomfield]

Hello Tom, You're quite right, of course. One should make no  
assumptions, about the "mental world" of other people, especially  
across cultures. Apologies to any Native American people here for  
perhaps sounding patronising, or dismissive. I could have put it a  
whole lot better. Indeed, maybe Mr. Afraid-Of-Hawk was just such a  
highly educated man, of great literary sophistication, as was that  
wonderful Donne-quoting Otoe gentleman you mention. That must have  
been really something!  My point was to suggest that Emil Afraid-Of- 
Hawk was a remarkable writer, & in that sense, not average - and that  
his TEXT is an extraordinary use of Lakota, and perhaps reflects a  
person with an out of the ordinary mind & background. Mea culpa. Clive.
On 03/07/2006, at 12:33 AM, Tom Leonard wrote:

> I am not familiar with the text to which you are referring but I'd  
> like to
> suggest that "the cultural context & background of a Lakhota native  
> speaker
> of the 1940's, and (their) 'mental world' " might be a whole lot  
> different
> than we might think. By the 1940's many Indian people, many of whom  
> were
> fluent speakers of their own languages, had exposure to European  
> texts and
> were voracious readers.
>
> I once attended an Otoe wake service where an old man (I believe it  
> was
> Truman Dailey, if  I remember correctly) arose to give a speech.  
> During his
> speech the old man repeated John Donne's famous Meditation XVII  
> ("No man is
> an island, entire of itself......and therefore never send to know  
> for whom
> the bell tolls. It tolls for thee") nearly word-for-word, the  
> entire verse
> from memory. The only difference was he didn't say "Europe is the  
> less"; he
> said "our land" instead of  "Europe". Even more remarkable, he then  
> repeated
> it in Otoe (!), all without a script or prompt.
>
> I asked a few Ponca elders that I was sitting with about their  
> reaction to
> his speech. Their reaction was something like "Oh! Did that come  
> out of a
> book? You know that guy spends a lot of time reading. He went to the
> university. It sure was pretty though." I asked about the Otoe  
> translation
> and they said "He just repeated himself - said the same thing -  
> sure was
> pretty." It was, without question, one of the more remarkable and  
> moving
> speeches I've ever heard.