Making paper talk: Writing Indigenous oral life narratives

How spoken words arc written is a corc concern in collaborative Indigenous life writing. Especially imporram, as Kimberly Blaeser notes in the citation above, are the efforts to present Indigenous narratives in a visual form that will facilitate their fe-speaking. Mindful of this goal, my argument will concentrate on (he panicular dilemma of presenting Indigenous narratives in paragraph form or formatting them in an arrangement resembling poetic lin es. While aware that this is bur one of many considerations in the process of transforming speech to writing, I argue that in a number of Indigenous li fe-writing publications it is a crucial decision, and one with significant repercussions that warrant this focused approach.