Storying (by and with) the Sylvan: Indigenous Naga Phytoloric Storytelling in Avinuo Kire’s Where the Cobbled Path Leads

[T]hat’s what the tree sang to the girl. … The name of the tree is süngwa, we regard the tree as ken (song) dong (tree), mean[ing] “song tree.” … So that’s the story. Before that story happened, there were no songs in the olden days. That’s the starting of the songs. (Kaiser 241) From the süngwa tree that sang the first song and story into existence in a prehistoric Naga village1 to the long-standing tradition of storytelling beside firewood-fueled kitchen hearths in Naga communities,2 the vegetal has remained an ever-present agentic character in the genesis and continuity of Naga narrative culture. At the core of this more-than-human Naga narrative orientation lies the narratological premise that posits a co-constitutive, dialectical framework of storying–worlding where stories are “shaped by and help shape broader cultural understandings of creatural life; [and] these understandings encompass how we view our relationships with and responsibilities to other-than-human agents and communities” (Herman 22). That is to say, Naga storyworlds can be understood as inspired by as well as giving form to the “multispecies consciousness [that], albeit without its current scholarly vocabulary, has long existed in the region” of Nagaland and across Northeast India (Wijunamai, “Multispecies” 342). To put it differently, Indigenous Naga onto-realities instantiate an ethic of careful, attentive, and reciprocal co-existence with more-than-human persons. Within this cosmo-relational worldview, multifaceted relational entanglements between humans and a/biotic inhabitants of the living Earth—such as those involving the Mithun (Bos frontalis), the paddy crop, and even certain culturally significant stones—are discursively constructed in folkloric narratives, and in turn, materially enacted within socio-ritual lived spaces in Naga cosmology (Wijunamai, “Multispecies” 344–46). As such, Naga story(tell)ing tradition emerges from and reciprocally feeds back into the communities’ cultural worldmaking practices of multispecies coexistence.