Joy Hario's Deer Dancer

This is a narrative poem and represents a native storyteller. In other words narrative poetry has a place in the legacy of American Indian culture.

1. What might be the role of storyteller in this culture?

2. This poems speaks of nostalgia and memory. What is being remembered? What does the deer represent to you?

3. What has replaced the past? Why a bar? What are the only promises that make sense?

4. What happen to the narrator's brother-in-law? What perspective does the brother-in-law now have about whites?

5. The narrator admits that she was not there when this happen. What does this imply? What is the role of the storyteller if not to tell about personal observations?

6. Dance? What is the social function of dance (particularly in a bar) in American mainstream culture? What might be the social function of dance in American Indian culture?

7. When the women is stripping on the table, she becomes "myth slipped down through dreamtime." This is metaphor. What does it mean?

8. What is the function of dreams in American culture? Native American Culture?

Can you identify any other stories where deer are used symbolically to identify some aspect of character (in any culture)?

Diana and Actaeon

Cadmus is a figure from Greek Mythology. He was exiled by his father--that is, he was told to never come home unless he can find his missing sister Europa. Cadmus kills the mighty snake (or in some stories a dragon) and establishes the city of Thebes. He prospers and marries. He is credited with combining consonants with vowels and thus unlocking the secrets of speech (Writing that is phonetic instead of symbolic or calligraphy). This is the story of his grandson Actaeon, a prince.

Dogs and Deer; dogs often represent a kind of duality of existence and certainly stand at the threshold of many crossings from one world into another. Cerebus is an example.

1. Can you cite some examples?

Usually the dramatic actions involves characters moving from the sophisticated or urban world into a world that is "of nature" or rural. In the crossing, these characters then find that they do not have the same kind of understanding of the world as they previously had, but oddly enough they can see the urban world of the court more clearly.

2. And thus dog stories sometimes represent the forces of domesticity and savagery at each other. Why is the logical given the history of domestic dogs? Where do they come from?

3. In Kipling's poem and Homer's Odyssey (the tale of Argos) we see dogs representing what? This domestic tenor is reflected by the pack of dogs in this poem. What might we say about the quality and origins of these dogs? What do they tell us about their owners and the breeding of dogs?

4. What are the qualities of dogs? How might they represent our highest and lowest aspirations?

5. Aristotle identified the elements of good art as reversal and recognition. How might this play out in this story?

6. For Aristotle, the third quality is "tragic flaw." What might be the flaw in Actaeon's character? What are he and his friends doing?

7. Why the deer in the story? How does this work that Diana changes Actaeon into a deer instead of some other creature?

8. Contrast Actaeon's initial behavior toward deer to Odysseus encounter with the deer. What is different?

9. How do dogs transform the realtionship between deer and our species?

10. Contrast Ovid to the Native American storyteller?