Time Travel

Where are you going, where have you been?

Wisdom is Memory

“What I know was given to me for men and it is true and it is beautiful. Soon I shall be under the grass and it will be lost.”

—Black Elk (Neihardt 1960:xviii)

Humans have evolved the capacity for mental time travel—the ability to remember past events (episodic memory) and imagine future or possible events (planning). Memory and planning are intimately related: our visions of what might happen in the future are generated from our knowledge of what happened in the past. The details of past experiences provide the building blocks for constructing future scenarios: our memories of where we have been and what we have done help us chart our next move. Knowledge of the past is thus integral to predicting the future and making decisions based on those predictions. The more experiences that can be factored into these judgments, the more sound they are likely to be. As Snorri Sturluson wrote in the Edda, wisdom is memory.

tracks

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

ice covered twigs and branches

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

In temperate climates, for example, knowing that the seasons are cyclical and remembering the snow and ice of past winters enables people to anticipate freezing weather and prepare for it by stockpiling firewood, insulating their shelters, and making sledges and snowshoes. Storytelling aids in this process by enabling humans to share their experiences and pass them on to future generations. By listening to stories, individuals can exponentially increase their mental magazine of past events, giving them more experiences to consult when making plans for the future.

“We’re pretty smart, we’re doing this. This is long before my time and yet I know it.”

–Yukon Elder Angela Sidney (Cruikshank 1990:50)

closeup of tree rings on driftwood

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

grove of tall trees with sparse autumn foliage and mossy trunks

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

Significantly, Elders tend to be regarded as the most expert members of the community, and the most proficient transmitters of cultural lore. Under conditions of ecological and technological stability, heeding the wisdom of the Elders is sound practice. In oral cultures, Elders tend to be more knowledgeable than others by virtue of the fact that they have had more time to accumulate experience. With their vast memory stores, Elders are the equivalent of libraries.

“Older people in Aboriginal society are regarded as reserves of important knowledge concerning the Dreaming and the physical resources of the landscape. By virtue of their survival experience, older people in society are often considered to have immense spiritual power.”

Clarke (2003:49)

“When asked if they knew any stories, some elders replied that they did not, as they were never around their elders. . . . One elder jokingly stated, ‘Ask by the graveyard,’ for when the elders die, they take with them an encyclopedia of knowledge.”

Hanna & Henry (1995:11)

yellow autumn leaf

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

Keeping the Stories “Right”

“Oral traditions . . . have developed forms of organization (i.e., rules, redundancies, constraints) and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material.”

Rubin (1995:10)

As a species, humans have depended on oral knowledge transmission for most of their existence. Given their heavy reliance on culture, it is unlikely that they left the transmission of important information to chance. Tellingly, many forager societies had rules for when and how myths could be told. In temperate climates, for example, many cultures restricted the recounting of myths to winter nights. At this time of year, cold weather and short days limited work hours and drove people indoors for warmth.

bare maple tree branches covered with snow

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

moon in snowy trees

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

“In the old days, elders . . . recited the oral traditions of the tribe during the wintertime and as a regular part of camp or village life. Religious ceremonials generally involved the recitation of the origin and migration stories.”

Deloria (1997:37)

“Narrators are ordinarily stimulated by firelight, leisure, an audience with an understanding of the setting. Linguists tear them away from work or play, which they prefer, to sit and tell stories without listeners in broad daylight, usually in summer when there are more active things to do.”

Reichard (1947:5)

camp fire
trees in fog

Photos by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

autumn maple leaves on ground

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

Limiting storytelling to winter nights and special occasions takes advantage of people being gathered together and having leisure time. It ensures that stories and the knowledge they contain are broadcast widely, and that multiple “copies” of the stories are made at each telling. Each listener who commits the story to memory serves, in effect, as backup storage. This practice also enables debate over the accuracy of the narrator’s rendition.

Klamath and Modoc storytelling practices are a case in point. The recounting of myths was restricted to winter nights, and it was forbidden to mix them with other story forms, such as histories and personal anecdotes. Only adults were allowed to recount myths, and narrators were not permitted to deviate greatly from the accepted version of the story. If they did, listeners could interrupt and debate until the correct version was agreed upon. For this purpose, the Klamath preferred to have two people present besides the narrator who were thoroughly familiar with the myth. These rules were enforced in order to keep the stories “right”—to keep story content consistent from telling to telling and generation to generation. Misfortune was believed to befall anyone who broke these rules: a common warning was that a person who told stories during the summer or daytime would be attacked by a poisonous snake.

frost covered oak leaf
black, red, and yellow snake coiled on dirt in wetlands

Photos by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

raccoon tracks in snowy woods

Photo by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

‘“They used to say . . . tell these legends only at winter time; otherwise some snake or worm may crawl into your bed. Or a bug or bee might sting your lip. During winter time the story-tellers would be going house to house; they would come in; the wee children . . . gathered around the Fireplace . . . as he relate[d] his stories of the animals or the mighty beings and beasts.”

Jesse Cornplanter (1938:57)

“formal oral mythologies are neither unimportant . . . nor random in their content.”

Barber & Barber (2004:9)