Life After Extraction; Willful Re/Reading in the Fixed Accounts of Oral Story/Tellings

In their analyses of oral stories, socio-narratologists and indigenous scholars often acknowledge the deep relationship that exists between oral stories and the communities from whom they are shared. Such stories, they insist, are connected to their tellers but also independent from the fixed form of their individual tellings, continuously shifting across the conditions of their sharing. But while these and other scholars have written extensively of the respect and community engagement required for oral stories’ documentation, comparatively little has been written regarding stories that have already been told without their communities’ guidance. In these accounts, often collected by Western scholars throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, oral stories become fixed into rigid tales whose events never change and whose worlds are entirely known, willfully extracted from the past traditions of their tellers and communities. However, rather than accept extracted stories as irrevocably damaged, this article instead considers how the voices silenced by extractive practices can be regenerated in our careful engagement with the tellings they leave behind, examining, in the story of the calf that belonged to the cow, not just what extracted stories explicitly say, but what they imply, and indeed what they choose to leave out.