Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa¹

This article examines an especially valorized genre of Arizona Tewa traditional stories, pééyu'u, by emphasizing ideologies of storytelling, narrative practices, and the indexical orders in which they are embedded. Tewa storytelling practices are culturally indexed to plant and human growth, to the moral development of children, and to the reproduction of the Arizona Tewa community. Native performance aesthetics encourage “speaking the past,” yet traditional stories should not be viewed as conforming examples of Bakhtin's “authoritative word.” Intertextuality is also considered, especially “generic regimentation” (Bauman 2004) and the influence of a dominant discourse model of “kiva speech” (Kroskrity 1993, 1998). [generic regimentation, ideologies of storytelling, intertextuality, the authoritative word, Pueblo Southwest]