Reflection on Gill's "Native American Religions"

Anna Hemphill

The main distinction of these primal peoples is their oral culture. I connect very well with their reverence of the voice and sharing communitas through performance and orality. Native Americans view speech as a very personal experience, exposing the spirit of a person. Gill explains in "Native American Religions": "Speech is an act that is fragile, impermanent, and intimate. Every speech act is unique, engaging a speaker and a listener in a specific existential situation... When uttered by the mouth in an act that requires the expiration of breath, these thoughts fill the surrounding space within the power of the sounds... [Speech] is an act of the outh, breath, heart, ear, and mind. Speech is of the body."

How much more personal can one be than to share the breath that gives human life? Speech is just the release of vibrations on that very breath that sustains us. It is necessary to speak, just as it is necessary to eat and sleep and love. In the theater department we study the voice, as we train our bodies and voices to function to the fullest capacity for stage. We are artists, and our voices and bodies are the mediums by which we express our art, our stories. It is extraordinary what kind of emotional responses I can feel when I register different parts of my voice. There is a place called the middle voice, located right in the middle of the face kind of between the nose the eyes, where we experience the most emotion. Whenever you're about to cry (or you are crying) and you try to speak - the voice that is shaky and high pitched is your middle voice. Usually you reach emotion before you tap into the voice. But if you register the voice first, the emotion can easily follow. Isn't that extraordinary? The physical sensation of vibrations being released on breath through your body is enough to make you cry!

I think the voice is amazing. But in our culture we censor our voices to fit the norms of our society. Think of a baby. Babies can cry and cry and cry without going hoarse. Can we cry or scream for very long before we lose our voice? No. Because we are not connected to impulse. Babies cry because they need something, and they are not inhibited in their means of communicating what they need. As we develop we are constantly told "NO!" and so we censor ourselves (and our voices) until we communicate on a very mundane level. Native Americans and oral cultures do not censor, they do not judge. They are connected to impulse, and value the voice as a beautiful human experience, powerful enough to connect not only people with people, but people with the supernatural.