The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale

The Blind Man and Loon: The Story of Tale. By Craig Mishler. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 246, list of illustrations, foreword, preface, acknowledgements, introduction, conclusion, afterword, appendices, notes, references, index. The result of forty years of research, Craig Mishler's The Blind Man and Loon is significant example of what twenty-first-century folklorists do. Mishler's text is an auto-ethnography--a work in which Mishler acknowledges his role as curator, biographer, interpreter, and friend of story as well as those tellers whose continual reiterations span across subarctic from Alaska and Northwest Canada to Labrador and Greenland (xx). The narrative, in variation, spans eight groups or oicotypes, moving fluidly across continents of North America and Greenland like gigantic herds of caribou (xxv). Mishler gives ample evidence of livingness of tale as it has emerged from time immemorial (when loons could speak with people) into popular media: films, compact discs, radio broadcasts, ballet, composition of chamber music, theatrical performances, and various literary adaptations (119-20). Mishler says that an estimated 33 million people have seen abbreviated film adaptation/revision The Loon's Necklace (123). Mishler has also discovered ... eighty-six artistic works based on tale created by no less than fifty-four different artists--paintings, etchings, sculptures, woodcuts, and masks (96). Contemporary Native storytellers Annie Blue (2009), James and Maggie Gilbert (1973), and Kenny Thomas (2000) are included under Mishler's designation of artists. The text includes Mishler's commendable discussion of contributions and shortcomings of well-known folklorists Hinrick Rink, Emile Petitot, Franz Boas, and Knud Rasmussen, as well as criticisms of semi-literary variants by such notable authors as N. Scott Momaday. The ethics of collecting, translating, and redacting are brought into question. Mishler calls Native storytellers cartographers. He contends that the story of Blind Man and Loon is cognitive map of ancient Indian and Eskimo cultures, plotting systems of knowledge, emotion, belief, and value (154). The tale is, in many respects, cautionary tale. Even when corrupted by ignorant, unaware, unethical collectors who don't acknowledge their informants, edit out portions (the violence) of tale, or mash versions together, story remains a vibrant, protean piece of culture, life force, says Mishler (155). If anthropologists, ethnographers, folklorists, and mythographers can be called scientists, Mishler's text is dense with stuff of scientific investigation: data, facts, maps, folkloric structures (the morphology and molecular structure of narrative), and linguistic analyses (original native renditions set alongside translations). Drawing on an analogy from Darwin's study of groups of finches, Mishler groups various versions of tale into eight regional oicotypes. However, it is in chapters discussing function and possible meanings of story that Mishler's text takes flight and travels with loons. The story is troubling in any Native variant (popular redactions tend to leave out violent reciprocity). A blind man (often shaman) in subsistence culture is tricked out of his kill for food by selfish, cruel, and angry grandmother or wife. Often left to survive on his own, or with help of sister, loons take pity on medicine man and restore his sight through their healing medicines or rituals. With his sight restored, man returns to his people and wreaks vengeance on woman who betrayed him. The above oversimplification of narrative runs counter to what Mishler advises for any retelling; but essential disturbing details are there--void of ethnopoetics typical of telling by Maggie Gilbert rehearsed in Chapter Four. …

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