Sky Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song

Sky Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song. Edited by Brian Swann. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 537, orthography, introduction, notes, source acknowledgements, contributors. $40.00 paper.)

Sky? Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song is not an anthology of American Indian folktales as much as it is a reader concerned with indigenous folktales and how they can be viewed from theoretical viewpoints. Ethno-linguistics and language translation are used to convey motif and theme in a folkloristic manner so the emphasis is placed on the tales rather than what the editor, Brian Swann, correctly identifies as the common course for such presentations, which is salvage anthropology.

Swann uses his experience editing essays and presentations of American Indian oral narrative to select key articles he has noted as representing an enlarged...