I thought I would write about my experience last week of transcribing Andrew Peynetsa’s English version of one of his traditional Zuni stories. For me this story is part of  a cyclical journey, one that never ends, is constantly evolving and is tied into every class, every experience, every moment I’ve ever lived.

          To fully appreciate what I learned last week while transcribing Andrew Peynetsa’s story let me take you back a few years to my undergraduate degree. You know, the degree we all have to take- despite our best intentions. For my undergraduate degree I majored in elementary education with a concentration, or minor, in English. I felt comfortable in meeting my graduation requirements, one of which was an upper level English class.

The undergraduate English class I am thinking of was a 300 level course –feared by all because the professor was rumored to be strict. Sometimes graduation requirements can be a tricky thing. Not so this time. Until this class I had never had a professor, or any other teacher for that matter, so profoundly impact my learning and my style of teaching as did that English professor. I will forever be indebted to her and I will also be forever sentenced to teach as she does. Teaching is an insidious business this. How was I to know that that assignment, so long ago and so far away, would prove to be the training ground for future work? The answer is that I didn’t know. No one knows what one word, one moment, one class will portend.

          One of the requirements for that required undergraduate English class was to conduct a tape-recorded interview and to transcribe it, as taped.  No editing, no leaving anything out, every um and snort was to be included. Some students when finished handed in three pages, some four…I had twenty, spiral bound. I should have known then that ethnography was for me. The only problem was that I hadn’t yet heard the word ethnographist, didn’t even know what the word meant.  

Anthropology I had heard of –and it was closely tied up with archeology, at least at that university. How was I to know ethnography, under the heading of anthropology, was  going to come knocking at my door, or that I would answer the call? What’s important here was that last week transcribing a Zuni story I found my missing link.

          Fast forward to last week’s assignment, I thought “no problem I’ve done this before”. But this time was different, this time meant something more. This time I knew who I was; what this assignment meant, where I wanted to go with this story and others like it, where I wanted the story to take me. I saw how words become the vehicle and how we can choose to drive- or be driven.

          I saw how myth relates and correlates across time and space. How from Olson to Peynetsa, time and space are a continuum. Connected across all boundaries are we by myth. Our only hope is to transcribe, as authentically as is humanly possible, all stories, not just the ones that appeal to us in the here and now, in this time and place. One alone does not have the key to the door of life. All hold a key and stories are a door to life. We are here, as humans, to serve the gods of storytelling. We are myth, we are storytelling, ours is not to question why but to serve at the altar and preserve for those, who in a different time and space, hold keys or need them to go through the doors of myth that we now know and stand at the threshold of.