>>Dr. Swan: In this lesson we're going to examine the origins and emergence of the native
peoples of Oklahoma. Most courses begin, if you're going to talk about Native Americans,
begin with a discussion of the Bering Land Strait.
>>Dr. Nelson: Many years ago, right, [both laugh] when when the world was covered in
ice.
>>Dr. Swan: And and there's scientific evidence for that. I mean, there's very, very strong
connections between the native peoples of North America and the indigenous peoples of
Siberia. And we do know that the land bridge existed, but one of the problems is that that
locked us into an understanding of the peopling of North America that was confined to the
parameters of that land bridge--
>>Dr. Nelson: Right.
>>Dr. Swan: --and increasingly we find evidence that refutes that.
>>Dr. Nelson: We were finding a lot of anomalies that you couldn't very well explain--
>>Dr. Swan: Exactly.
>>Dr. Nelson: --with a land bridge.
>>Dr. Swan: So so archaeologists spent a lot of time trying to explain that away--
>>Dr. Nelson: Right, right.
>>Dr. Swan: --but now they're looking at a diverse suite of of interpretations for the
peopling of of native North America.
>>Dr. Nelson: And crazily enough including boats in that conversation and things like
that. [laughs]
>>Dr. Swan: Exactly. Exactly. It may well be that more people came by boat than they
did by by the land bridge. But I think that what we want to emphasize here is that we're
going to examine people's own stories, their own creation stories. Their oral tradition
that's the foundation of of native literary traditions, if you will. And and it's in those
stories in which the people of the native peoples of Oklahoma continue to perpetuate
that oral tradition, and it's an incredibly important part of contemporary native society.
>>Dr. Nelson: I think that's exactly right, and I think you're exactly right, too, about
how it is that literature has long been a conversation with these oral traditions. Orature
is another word that I kind-of use to cut down on the syllables here and there. Something
I don't always do, right. But in in talking about these sorts of oral traditions, we see
that they're not all creation stories. They're not even all trickster stories, as wonderful
and funny as those are. We're also going to be talking about the rules that surround who
can tell stories, and when they can tell stories, and the general environment in which stories
get told. So what kind of information gets transmitted through them. We come to mean
much more than just a creation story. So what are the kinds of stories are we going to need
to consider as we start off here?
>>Dr. Swan: Well, in in societies that didn't have writing systems, all of their information,
all of their experiences, their history, their insights into the natural world were all perpetuated
through oral oral tradition, by by word-of-mouth in in very real terms. So what we have embedded
in that oral tradition are worldviews, the ways in which native peoples organized the
the world and made sense of of the universe around them. So that we we have very complex
taxonomies that are obviously based on on years and years of of critical observation
of the natural environment. We have explanations for the unexplainable, so supernatural phenomena,
explanations for weather events, celestial events, meteor showers, comets, all of this-
>>Dr. Nelson: You're you're talking about some science in essence.
>>Dr. Swan: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's important to remember that native
peoples built upon the experience of the past generations, but that information has to be
perpetuated and passed on in one way or another.
>>Dr. Nelson: One of the things that I'm always interested in is how those have, those oral
traditions also communicate values. How they communicate histories that are both personal
and communal, and how it is in general that they in many ways become a kind of cultural
repository. So this is a a great big pool, maybe we ought to dive into it and take a
look at some people telling their own stories.
>>Dr. Swan: Absolutely, it's so incredibly rich, and each time I hear a story, you know,
I can't hear it enough. Every time I hear it, I learn something new, and that's one
of the great things about oral tradition, I think.