"In vain I tried to tell you": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics

This book is . . . devoted to the first literature of North America, that of the American Indians, or Native Americans. The texts are from the North Pacific Coast, because that is where I am from, and those are the materials I know best. The purpose is general: All traditional American Indian verbal art requires attention of this kind if we are to comprehend what it is and says.

There is linguistics in this book, and that will put some people off. ''Too technical," they...