Truth and Stories

This essay attempts to account for a shift, over the past century, in the narrative particle used in San Carlos Apache storytelling. Early text collections feature a verb of speaking. More recent storytellers tend to use a particle glossed variously as a received wisdom particle, a remote past particle, or, most productively, a deferred realization particle. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that the collective administrative agendas of government, education, military, and religious personnel on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, orbiting around the conjoined metapragmatics of modernity, Christianity, and literacy, help to explain the social life of these narrative particles. I focus particularly on the role of Lutheran missionaries in San Carlos in supporting the idea of an increased reliability accruing to the deferred realization of writing and reading.