SOURCE: Vangen, Kate Shanley. “The Devil's Domain: Leslie Silko's ‘Storyteller’.” In Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization, edited by Bo Schöler, pp. 116-23. Aarhus, Denmark: Sedkos, 1984.

In the following essay, Vangen contends that in “Storyteller” Silko utilizes a new discursive system, which implicitly illustrates how the old colonialist culture's discursive system “closes off the people's stories.”

In his article entitled ‘The Translation Dilemma’, Jeffrey F. Huntsman raises a crucial question regarding the translation and study of Native American literatures: what do we stand to gain and/or lose by making ‘pretty judgments’?

[O]utsiders can make too much of a given phrasing because they fail to understand fully the force—or lack of force—the phrase may have for its ordinary users. To cite a set of trivial but effective examples: If we compare French j'ai faim (lit. ‘I have hunger...