Telling Stories

In what follows I will be using Native American culture and literature as the primary focus for a discussion of storytelling. For this culture, the life of speech and the presencing of meaning through the sharing of stories are vital to the very existence and identity of a people. Momaday\u27s remarks about the nature of the relationship between language and experience surely are not limited to the lives of Native Americans. His accompanying claim that we cannot exist apart from the moral dimension of language is no less applicable to our own culture, but showing the importance of an awareness of this condition requires a bracketing of the cultural insensibility that pervades the routine of our lives. The interest of this paper is not in Native American culture or literature as such, but what lessons it may have for a dominant culture which has forgotten the sense of, or lost the genius for, telling stories