NARRATIVE

Narrative most often involves the telling of a story. Narrative can also be an account of a specific event or a series of connected events. Narrators inherently know - or learn - to give a meaningful order to the events or circumstances in the story they are recounting. This is because oral narrative genres also most often follow the pattern of beginning, middle, and end.  New Englanders love to tell stories. The region carries a rich heritage of traditional and personal storytelling into the present day.

Narratives are ageless and multicultural. They have survived for so long and are so widespread because they most often express a very important truth about life. Narratives are not only found in all cultures, they are central to maintaining community life and in giving meaning to individual life. Traditionally, the oral tale has been the most universal of all narrative forms, and has served a vital role in the lives of those who tell and listen to them.

Traditional narratives pass on enduring values and lessons about living life deeply, while all narrative genres - sacred stories, myths, legends, folktales, fairy tales (marchen), personal experience narratives, and life stories - fulfill four distinct functions, those of bringing people more into accord with themselves, others, the mystery of life, and the universe around them. Narratives can connect both the teller and the listener to the psychological, social, mystical, and cosmological realms. They illustrate that one person's experience or situation in life may seem unique, but is really more likely common to others, as well.

The first storytellers of New England were the Wabanakis, or people of the Dawnland (consisting of the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Micmac, Maliseet, and Abenaki tribes), the Massachuset, Wampanoag, Natick, Narragansett, Pequot, Pawtucket, Mashpee, and  other tribal peoples of the region.   Their traditional narratives tell how storytelling, as well as creation, came into being, and what the important values, beliefs, sacred knowledge, and practices are that sustain the people. All events of importance, as well as the virtues they wanted to keep alive, were recorded and told in story form. Everything was held in the collective memory of the elders of the community, and was passed on through storytelling. The ability to tell a story was and still is one of the most admired skills in Native communities. Storytelling was an occasion for quiet intimacy among the members of the community, a time for teaching what mattered most to them.

Many myths in the Native tradition are narratives that explain the origin of creation, or are about sacred beings, either human or animal. When the subject, or hero, is purely human and not divine, the narrative becomes legend. Myths are connected to religious beliefs, while legends tend to be more historically based. The central character in these sacred stories for the Northeast Woodland tribes is Glooscap, whose activities are responsible for features of the landscape, for taming the winds, and for securing water and food for the people, as well as for bringing forth the people themselves from the ash tree. In this story, Glooscap took his bow and arrows and shot at the basket trees, and then Indians came out of the bark of the ash trees dancing. Glooscap also fought a water monster and turned it into a small bullfrog. He is known to even behave like a trickster, especially when people ask him for the frivolous.

In addition, traditional Native folktales include stories of ghosts, treasures, witchcraft, shamans, giants, and little people, among others. The Natick, Mashpee, and Wampanoag peoples told stories of Indian folk healers who practiced herbal cures, which often involved applying secret properties from roots and plants to expel spirits from the bodies of patients. There are also stories of the Indian spirit Cheepi, who appeared to Indians in the Boston area around the contact period to warn them against departing from the ancestral ways, and to uphold custom and guard traditional values.

Recently, for the first time ever, a new generation of Native American storytellers from New England toured  the region presenting traditional tales - creation stories, fables, and legends - handed down over the generations, as well as personal stories of Native experiences today, in order to promote and preserve the cultural heritage of the New England tribes.

Settlers from Europe brought many traditional narratives with them, as well as tall tales. Colonial New England stories were both fantastic and wondrous, while competitive storyswap-ping almost became the first New England pastime. Yankee yarns developed from the tradition of European and English rogue tales, but acquired their own special twist. Coastal towns, too, had their remarkable narrators that told of heroic family members, local characters, and coastal legends carrying beliefs held in common with deep-sea sailors in other parts of the world.

Woven throughout and within early New England stories was the phenomenon of the pervasive Yankee character, which consisted of a good portion of craftiness mixed with a dash of the country bumpkin. Folk humor found its greatest outlet in the tall tale and the exaggerated personal experiences of the storyteller, often shared in the comfortable surroundings of the village square, or in the kitchen. A particularly distinctive form of this is Maine humor, with its Down East accent and dry, understated wit, characterized best by Marshall Dodge and the Bert and I tradition.

Contemporary personal narratives in New England are found everywhere, covering  the themes and issues of contemporary life. A story-swap is born every time one personal story evokes another. The forms of personal narratives are many, depending on the emphasis. They include personal experience narratives, true experience stories, oral history, family stories, occupational narratives,  life history, life stories, or autobiographical stories.

New England is well known locally and in other parts of the country for its personal narrative raconteurs. While once it was primarily the elders who had this role, today adults, teenagers, and even children tell others what is going on for them as long as there is a listening ear. It seems as each generation passes, new narrators emerge from the younger generation. An example of this is the Maine Public Television four-part series, "Our Stories," which featured in-depth and very personal profiles of members of the Passamaquoddy community, a lobstering family of Islesford, a farming family from Bethel, and a Franco-American potato farming family from the St. John Valley. In this series, people of all ages related stories of survival, stories of struggle in keeping the farm going in today's conglomerate world, stories of prejudice and discrimination, stories of alcoholism, and stories of hope.

The telling of personal narratives, or life stories, has all over New England united one generation with another, one family with another, one person with all those who hear the story, as each personal story is part of the collective truth. Personal stories, told from one person to another, inform, inspire, teach, maintain moral codes, record events that become history, preserve customs, guide, direct, clarify, and connect.

New England narratives contain the entire range of motifs identified by Stith Thompson in the Motif-Index of Folk Literature. A motif is the smallest element in a narrative that persists across generations. There are literally thousands of possible motifs, and they are usually of three main types: characters, background elements, and incidents. Motifs serve to identify similarities across narratives. Examples of just a few motifs common to New England narratives include: sea serpents (B91.5), who were encountered at various places along the coast; magicians (D1711), who could make water burn, rocks move, or trees dance; mountain spirits (F460), who were called upon for assistance; and, ghost ships (E535.3), New England's most famous apparition.

Narratives of immigrants and refugees to New England are also growing in significance. The larger and smaller cities of New England, and many villages, today struggle to move beyond the melting pot metaphor characterized by assimilation and toward a flower garden metaphor where many varieties of colors, backgrounds, and stories complement each other and contribute to a mosaic that stands out for its inclusiveness. The archive of the Center for the Study of Lives at the University of Southern Maine may be an indication of this new diversity; within its collection of nearly 500 life stories, 40 ethnic groups are represented.

Among the many contemporary forms of narrative is the immigrant epic, covering the immigrant experience from life in the old country to arrival in and adaptation to the new country.    The increasingly diverse communities of New England are now the nurturing ground for the refugee epic, as well, a rich and powerful genre of personal experience narratives. Particularly noteworthy is the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.

There are many important current initiatives throughout New England that attest not only to the power of stories, but to the strength of the renewed interest in storytelling in the region. With over fifty professional storytellers from the six New England states, there are hundreds of others who tell their own, their families, or their communities stories in informal, impromptu settings all the time. There is also a large corps of raconteurs who informally maintain and pass on the living heritage of folk storytelling in New England from their front porch, kitchen table, or wherever there are listening ears. Traditional storytellers from diverse cultural backgrounds and immigrant, refugee, and longstanding communities in all six New England states strive to maintain the stories of family, community, and occupations not only in informal settings but also on public radio shows, in exhibits, and on television.

A wealth of individuals, community organizations, and events in New England are currently engaging in regular activities that will keep alive the distinctive regional genre of narrative for a long time to come. In Maine alone, there is the Maine Folklife Center in Orono, which has been recording stories for over thirty years, the Center for the Study of Lives at the University of Southern Maine, which has a growing, diverse archive of life stories, and the Acadian Archives in the St. John Valley. Connecticut has the Oral History Center at the University of Connecticut, the Mystic Seaport Museum oral histories of whalemen, the Ethnic Heritage Center Archives at Southern Connecticut State. Massachusetts has the L.A.N.E.S. Festival at Simmons College, and the New England Folklife Center in Lowell, while New Hampshire has the annual Keepers of the Lore gathering, and the Vermont Folklife Center has long coordinated storytelling efforts in that state drawing from the Abenaki, Cuban, Franco-American, Italian, Lebanese, and Vietnamese communities.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the New England experience as told through the narratives of its storytellers now reflects a diversity rich in cultural, occupational, communal, and personal breadth. Still at the heart of each personal narrative, though, is the enduring ethic of self-determination and self-reliance coupled with a strong sense of place and community.

Robert Atkinson, The Gift of Stories: Practical and Spiritual Applications of Autobiography, Life Stories, and Personal Mythmaking (1995); Richard Dorson, American Folklore (1959); Linda Degh, "Folk Narrative," Folklore and Folklife ed., Richard Dorson (1972); Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends (1984); Edward Ives, ed., "Symposium on the Life Story," Folklife Annual (1986); Maine Indian Program of the New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee, The Wabanakis of Maine and The Maritimes: A Resource Book About Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Micmac, and Abenaki Indians (1989). William S. Simmons Spirit of the New England Tribes (1986);  Stith Thompson, The Folktale (1977)


Robert Atkinson
Center for the Study of Lives
University of Southern Maine
Gorham, Maine


Narrative
Robert Atkinson
See also: The Yankee; Native American Folklife; Native American Reservations; African-American Folklife; Anglo-American Folklife; Asian-American Folklife; Franco-American Folklife; Irish-American Folklife; Jewish Folklife; Latino Folklife; Portuguese-American Folklife; Women's Folklife; Archives; Cape Verdean Folklife.

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