SOURCE: Nelson, Robert M. “He Said/She Said: Writing Oral Tradition in John Gunn's ‘Ko-pot Ka-nat’ and Leslie Silko's Storyteller.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 5, no. 1 (spring 1993): 31-50.

In the following essay, Nelson contrasts the use of the Laguna oral tradition in Storyteller, Ceremony, and John Gunn's Schat-chen.

The preceding story text is the second of twenty-two “Traditions and Narratives of the Queres” collected by John Gunn and printed originally in his book Schat-chen, published in 1917 and reprinted by AMS in 1980. Interesting in its own right as a more or less “typical” example of turn-of-the-century ethnography, the text (like the book as a whole) may also be of interest to readers of Leslie Silko's more contemporary books Storyteller and Ceremony, because one of the sources these three texts have in common is Laguna oral tradition. As I hope to show, one of the major differences between the...