| Storytelling is an art form that has been in rapid decline among Yukon First Nation peoples. However, in the current political environment, storytelling has been stimulated through language revitalization efforts. In this context, an ethnopoetic survey was conducted among the Northern Tutchone-speaking people of the Little Salmon/Carmacks First Nation, located in the central Yukon Territory, Canada. Ethnopoetics entails two goals: first, the textualization and translation of verbal art and, second, the analysis of its constitution. Analysis of rhetorical structure here was initiated by defining and demarcating the line. To do this, I have drawn on conversation analysis, ethnopoetics and other areas of anthropological linguistics that analyze naturally-occurring language data. In the Northern Tutchone texts, the ends of lines are signaled by a convergence of features constituted in the fields of morpho-syntax, pragmatics, and prosody. Regarding levels of organization above the line, it appears unlikely that storytellers follow models or templates comprised of verses and stanzas, or acts. Instead, building on performance-centered approaches and dialogic anthropology, I conclude that the deployment of linguistic and social resources by storytellers in the evocation of structure can be seen as a literary device that creates emergent structures to serve rhetoric/poetic needs in the moment and context of performance. The use of these resources may or may not be textualized as higher levels of organization in analysis.; One of the most significant domains of storytelling resources is the evidential system. Defining evidentiality broadly, as metapragmatic commentary instead of strictly a grammatical feature, can better account for the assertions storytellers are making about the truthfulness and importance of their stories. When the totality of evidential reflection is considered, we see a relationship between evidentiality and genre. Since all stories are “true,” the difference between genres is based on how their truthfulness is established and how confident the storyteller feels she or he is about relaying the content accurately. Furthermore, this discrimination is not arbitrary; it patterns along the lines of categories in Dene epistemology. |
