[Review of] Brian Swann, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature

The red and black Chumash pictograph reproduced on the cover of Smoothing the Ground shows an alert human figure poised amidst a group of animal and bird people, all related by the stars that are their hands and feet. As Ken Roemer, one of the contributors to this collection of essays on Native American ethnopoetics, says: The constellation tales give listeners relatives in the sky. Stories, like starfeet, reflect this kinship