Bob Boyer: His Life's Work

Transcript

Andrew Oko: So Bob Boyer and I talked about this work “A Seven Arrow Storm” dating from 1984. It relates to the marketing of Indian spirituality which was a big issue among young Indian people at the time.

The title of the work refers to a book that was written in 1972. It was called Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm and the book purports to convey the meaning of the Sun Dance way. If you look at the book, Storm talks about how native culture is transmitted by an oral tradition and is meant to be spoken and not written but yet here are these stories relating to the Sun Dance and he says well, these written words should be taken symbolically and not literally. In fact he’s got these words that are supposed to be symbols italicized throughout the book.

At issue here is that the moment neural tradition is written down its ossified, in other words petrified and the dynamicism and the very changeability that is a part of the organic nature of a neural culture is very much diminished.