oral and written traditions

[Julie Smith]

Greetings ~

Several weeks (months?) ago we had a conversation about oral traditions.
I wanted to share something from a book titled The Gospel According to
Peter John, but I couldn't find my copy of the book.  Now I have.  This
is from a commentary by Bill Schneider provided at the end of the book:

        I suspect that Peter John is known to people in lots of
different ways: as the Traditional Chief of the Tanana Chiefs'
Conference, as an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, as a strong and
knowledgeable hunter who has been able, through these skills, to provide
for his family, as a leader in the Alaska Native Land Claims movement,
as an advisor to religious leaders, and, in his early years, as a hard
liver.  I suspect that in all of these aspects what is most clear is his
tremendous strength to overcome challenges and his independence.  He is
a champion of the individual taking charge of his life, making the hard
decisions, and following through.  Reading this book, at this particular
time in my life, reminds me how poorly I do in measuring up to the
strict standards that he sets in his life.
        I have had the pleasure of knowing Peter John for the past eight
years.  Like many others, I came to personally treasure what he tells me
about how to live.  I listen very carefully to him and his stories are
lessons for me in my own life.  The moose story that he tells on page
forty-seven has often given me pause to consider my own responsibilities
to my wife and daughter and the demands that go with a family.  I have
struggled with that story because the meaning I want to derive from his
telling doesn't go as far as he wants me to take it.  Whenever I picture
him out on the trail in extreme cold and hunger trying to decide whether
to follow the moose, I see strength and moral fiber.  But, each time I
retell this story, I also hear him saying to me that his strength comes
from God and that if I don't tell that part of the story I am distorting
his meaning.  I sometimes try to run with just the first part of the
story -- the part I identify with -- but the more I get to know Peter
John the more I'm sure that he means that his success is with God's
help.  In the back of my mind I hear him saying something like this:
"You got to go all the way with God, you can't go part way," (meaning
that you have to realize and accept that your success is in God's
hands.)  So now I can't leave out the second half of the story, even
though I still identify most immediately with the first part.
        In this way, Peter John taught me that to really understand what
someone says I have to know the person and what they value, the value
they attribute to the words they use; I have to struggle with how I hear
and remember and my growing awareness of the teller and what they mean.
This tension between what we remember of a story, how we interpret it in
our lives, and the teller's meaning is a hallmark of the oral tradition.
Implicit in the oral tradition is the understanding that stories will be
told many times and that we will know the speaker in many different ways
over a long time.  We will come to know their meaning by coming to know
them.  It takes time to know someone and to fully appreciate what they
mean.  This is quite different from the written tradition where we are
trained to focus on the words and the way thoughts are constructed on
paper, where we return to the words, not the teller for our
understanding.

Best wishes from this warm winter Wednesday in Fairbanks ~

Julie

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