Today She Sits among Them: Spiritual Leadership, Continuity, and Renewal in the Cowlitz Indian Tribe

Abstract

native communicative systems and the concrete ways by which Native Americans create and maintain their own specific conditions for group identity and belonging deserve attention. Individual creativity within a group can hold memory for both the individual and the group, though the nature of remembering and the terms of memory itself are under negotiation and emergent. Performancefocused studies in folklore and ethnolinguistics have done much over the past four decades to explain these conditions for belonging by lending “more fully theorized and contextualized accounts and transcriptions of Native American narrative and narrators.”1 In her account of Yukon women today she sits among them spiritual Leadership, Continuity, and renewal in the Cowlitz indian tribe