I starting thinking about this duirng the year I was making a documentary film in a village. I could not get the Natives to talk with the camera around. I couldn’t ask direct questions and get direct answers. It was very frustrating because I really wanted to get the Native point of view in my film.

So what I did was just attend village activities: the games, church, dances, to film them doing things, rather than saying things. That seemed to work, they seemed to express themselves much more through the way they work and play than through what they say.

Me:

Barre Tolkien talks about this very thing in his essay “The Pretty Language of Yellowman.” Tolkien recounts that whenever he fell into his anthropologist mode with the Navajos, he seemed either to hit dead ends or to receive disturbing surprises. Many times he sat listening to Yellowman tell his tradional tales to his family members in lively fashion, but when Tolkien tried to get Yellowman to talk to the recorder the tales went flat. Tolkien said it became clear to him “that Yellowman sees the … stories not as narratives (in our sense of the term) but as dramatic presentations performed within certain cultural contexts for moral and philosophical reasons.” Yellowman’s tales, chants, and rituals disembodied from a relevent context lost life. I actually admire this aspect of native cultures — this sense of audience.

Stephen:

Maybe asking them to learn to write is a lot like asking a guy like me to learn a dead language. “Who on earth can I talk to?” I would say.

Me:

Agreed, except for one thing: these kids are in college, in pursuit of the academic culture with all the bells and whistles of the Western Tradition, and they have their reasons for doing so. It’s my job to help them figure out how to go about whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish and that their families are trying to accomplish in encouraging them to take on academia.

Also, while they still have the high-context support of their families, which is very important to them, most of the kids I teach don’t speak their traditional language. Some can understand it to greater and lesser degrees, but speak it well, read it well, or write it well they cannot do. So they don’t communicate well in their own language (though some are in the process of learning), and they’re struggling to learn how read and write in English. This means they have no “native tongue.” Imagine what kind of position this puts them in. I grew up speaking English, I read English voraciously, and I wrote a bunch of stuff in English. My native language is my vehicle of transport; I can only imagine what it’s like to grow up between languages. The best case scenario: they become proficient in English and their traditonal language, both together. Imagine how rare and wonderful that would make them.

However, I don’t think the trouble these kids have with audience is limited to their cultural circumstances, and that’s the point of this post. Think about it: how clear is your own sense of audience? When you write, where do you think your words go? Where does the meaning of what you write “happen”?

Me: At this stage, I’m beginning to think the writer’s creative power as a thing in and of itself may be overestimated and the audience’s creativity underestimated.

But ask me to draw a picture of what I think my audience looks like and you’ll get a blank stare.

I don’t know how analogous it is, but my experience with students in rural Alaska has led me to believe that writing just isn’t a part of the Native worldview. Storytelling, yes. Writing, no.

One reason for that may be what I see as a cyclical worldview. It seems to me that Alaska Natives tend to view their role in the world to be more orbital than progressive. Writing, at least the way we do it, is very progressive (meaning starting at one point and deliberately progressing to the next). The Native I knew seemed to make their points (if you can call it that) indirectly, through collage-like utterances, through gestures, through merely being in the place they are. It’s an amazing statement, for example, to live in an icebound village hundreds of miles from the supply line, when it is clearly more expensive to do that than to move to a more populated area.

I starting thinking about this duirng the year I was making a documentary film in a village. I could not get the Natives to talk with the camera around. I couldn’t ask direct questions and get direct answers. It was very frustrating because I really wanted to get the Native point of view in my film.

So what I did was just attend village activities: the games, church, dances, to film them doing things, rather than saying things. That seemed to work, they seemed to express themselves much more through the way they work and play than through what they say.

I hope that comes off well when I finally edit this thing.

This is a roundabout way to talk about how your students may be thinking of audience. Perhaps they are much more aware of context than we are. If they are much like the Alaska Natives I knew, context is almost everything. It’s like there’s a giant story built up around everything and communication occurs through pointing out the requisiite details of the context. In a way, the audience is as much a partner in creating what the speaker (or gesturer) is trying to say as the speaker him or herself.

I wonder if Native students find it difficult to write because it is such a contextless act for them. If you’ve been raised with text creating the context of your (and everyone else’s) life, as the main method of communication, then it would doubtless be pretty easy to move in that construct. But if you’re raised in an oral culture, or in a body language culture, then that’s your language.
Maybe asking them to learn to write is a lot like asking a guy like me to learn a dead language. “Who on earth can I talk to?” I would say.

I may be way off on this.