A Brief Guide to Native American Myths and Legends (2 page)

Something else modern Western scientific minds largely agree on: the first humans in America were Paleolithic, their culture characterized by the use of crude stone tools. A second stage of development (Upper Lithic or Paleo-American) beginning circa 20,000 bc, saw American aboriginals fashion
stone knives and points for spears which were thin, flat and fluted; the spears themselves were launched from a wooden spear-thrower or atlatl. Then, around 10,000 years ago, either because of a shift in the Earth’s axis or because of over-hunting, the giant Pleistocene herbivores that had enticed humans to the Americas vanished, forcing these so-called Clovis People (named after the archeological site near Clovis, New Mexico) to turn to the hunting of smaller game, and even farming. Milling stones and manos began to appear. In this ‘Archaic Stage’ the Native Peoples became spectacularly efficient in adapting to the environments in which they found themselves, whether it was the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast (the Tlingit), the wild rice bearing Great Lakes (the Menominee), or the harsh deserts of Arizona with their life-saving Mesquite trees (the Pima). As the tribes built relationships with their land, so they themselves changed, in shape, culture, religion, and tongue. From the single voice of the first settlers, there came a Babel of languages: Algonquian, Siouan, Iroquoian, Athapascan, Piman, Shoshonean, Shahaptian, Caddoan, Salishan among hundreds of others. The linguist Morris Swadesh estimated that when Columbus waded ashore in 1492, the inhabitants were speaking 2,200 languages.

Although the white latecomers like to talk of ‘the Indian’ when they gate-crashed the New World, 5 or so million original inhabitants living north of Mexico had long diverged into distinct nations – about 500 of them. In much the same way as the French and English both inhabited Europe but were utterly unlike each other, so were the nations of North America. This diversity of nationality ensured that while some tribes would resist the European colonialist, others threw in their lot with the newcomers, either to extend their power over their neighbours (the Mohegans), or to defend themselves from hegemonic locals (as did the Crows, who shared the same neck of the Plains as the expansionist Sioux).

It follows that the Native Americans did not share a single
religion. Yet certain generalizations about Native American religion may be hazarded. Running through the religion of Native Peoples was a sense of sacred interconnection between the aboriginal and his environment, a spiritual axis around which myth, morality and aesthetics revolved. To many Native Americans, each tree and animal had its own spirit, with which the individual could commune. If the harmonious relationship with nature was put out of kilter, only bad things could happen until respect, virtuous deeds, beautiful art, dances and prayers harmonized the tribe and their land. Above all, indigenous peoples of the continent sought to preserve balance in their relations with the world by ritual.

Most tribes had shamans, individuals who mixed priesthood with medicine, who were believed to be able to establish direct contact with the spirit world, as well as ward off evil spirits, ensure good hunting, help the crops grow, bring success in battle. But these good things could only happen if the world and its animals were accorded respect, as well as accessed and honoured with ritual. Animals had the power of reason – and they reasoned that they would only give their life to those who honoured them. The Montagnais above the St Lawrence River, to the incredulity of the Jesuit priests who encountered them in the 1630s, would not allow dogs to eat the bones of animals the Montagnais had trapped. Souls of the beaver, patiently explained the Montagnais to the black-clad priests, visited the home of prospective hunters to see how the bones of dead beaver kin were treated. ‘If they [the bones] have been given to the dogs, the other beavers would be warned, and so they would make themselves difficult to catch.’ The Dakota Sioux ceremonially buried the bones of elk and beaver after eating the flesh. The Powhatans made offerings of tobacco for their fish traps.

Although generally bound to the Earth, the Amerindian was especially bound to one corner of it. Common to Amerindian religion was the belief that each nation was
created for its own land, and it was special to them. In the words of Geronimo, the famed Apache war chief:

For each tribe of men Usen [God] created he also made a home. In the land for any particular tribe He placed whatever would be best for the welfare of that tribe, the Apaches and their home [were] each created for the other by Usen himself.

And in the words of Luther Standing Bear, who became chief of the Oglala Sioux in 1905:

The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild flowers; he belongs just as the buffalo belonged.

Just as the Native Americans had no common religion, they had no universal mythology. The multitude of tribes each developed their own stories about the creation of the earth, the coming of the first people, and the lives and doings of deities and heroes.

Before exploring the mythology of North America, it is beneficial to consider the geography and climate of the continent because, as Geronimo and Luther Standing Bear so cogently explained, the link between the Native American (and his and her mythology) and the environment is absolute.

In dealing with the vast mythology of North America contemporary anthropologists, for convenience, organize myths by geography to produce nine or so principal culture areas. These are:

A vast desert of ice, tundra, cold seas and rocky beaches, the Arctic culture area extends from Alaska around the northern rim of the continent to eastern Greenland. The two primary
Native peoples are the Inuit and the Aleuts of the Aleutian archipelago off the southwest coast of Alaska. Both groups in the Archaic Period before white contact developed a hunting lifestyle that was nomadic in summer and sedentary in winter, with the key food source being sea mammals and fish, led by seals, salmon, trout, capelin, the narwhal, beluga whales. Inland in summer and in autumn eggs, roots and berries were gathered. Due to nomadism the Eskimo did not evolve political structures; the Aleuts, who lived a more settled existence developed a caste system, which included a slave category.

The Subarctic culture area covers most of Canada, except for the Northwest Coast and the Arctic margin; it also includes the interior of Alaska. The subarctic tundra and forest was home to numerous Native American peoples that can be divided into two major groups: the Algonquian speakers of eastern Canada (including the Cree, Montagnais and Ojibwa) and the Athapascan speakers of western Canada and the Alaskan interior (such as Chipewya and Dogrib). Most tribes were hunters of the caribou, living in easily transportable dwellings of bent poles and caribou skins. Hunting and fishing were supplemented by plant-gathering. To the south of the culture area birch bark was a staple building material, used for everything from wigwams to canoes. The subsistence lifestyle of the subarctic tribes militated against the formation of large political or social groups, and ‘villages’ were small and based on single autonomous families.

Stretching from southern Alaska to northern California, the Pacific Northwest offered a wet but temperate climate, which afforded a comfortable lifestyle based around fishing, predominantly of the salmon that swarmed in the sea and rivers. The forested land behind the shore, which backed onto the
Cascade Range, offered easy and rich pickings, with abundant moose, caribou, deer, mountain sheep, birds, berries, eggs among the firs and redwoods. There was no agriculture. Wood was used for the construction of lodges and canoes, and bark fibres, together with goat and dog wool used to make clothing. (The Salish kept a small breed of dog expressly for the purpose of shearing.) Relative affluence and a sedentary lifestyle, based around permanent large shore-side villages, with up to thirty houses, resulted in a sophisticated culture and highly stratified, hierarchical society based on kinship to the chief. War with rival villages was endemic, with the consequence that heroism was a significant strand in the culture’s mythology.

The favourable climatic conditions in the culture area of California, approximately the current area of the state absenting the southeast section along the Colorado, provided prolific food and raw materials for housing, cloths and tools. At the time of first contact in 1540, the aboriginal population was estimated to be upwards of 300,000 people. These lived in some 100 tribes and bands, speaking 200 languages. Despite this diversity, almost all native Californians were primarily foragers; only alongside the Colorado River was agriculture practised. Lamas, a type of edible hyacinth, and acorns were major sources of starch. Villages were typically comprised of a small number of families related through the paternal line; the villages were not allied to tribes and rights were extended to all within the curtilage. Indian culture and land holding in California was first eradicated by Spanish missionary activity (‘The Mission Period’), then by the gold rush that began in 1848.

The Southwest culture area comprises present-day New Mexico and Arizona together with parts of Utah, Colorado, Texas, and northwest Mexico. An arid region of desert and
mountains, the Southwest culture area had been home to different people at different times before white contact. Some of the aboriginals were hunter-gatherers and remained so, while others c. 4,000 bc began cultivating maize and squash, probably after contact with cultures from Mesoamerica.

Because farming in the Southwest was labour-intensive (it required irrigation in the form of hundreds of miles of canals), the local society of the Native Peoples ineluctably transformed into a sophisticated, stratified, sedentary village-based civilization – as had all other cultures based around water-control, beginning with the ancient Egyptians. Three complex cultures emerged in the Southwest between ad 200 and 1100 in the form of the Mogollon, Hohokam and the Anasazi, all of which constructed stone and adobe villages (called Pueblos by the Spanish) overseen by a hierarchy of men who combined in their personages the functions of chief and priest. Until 1882, the Anasazi pueblo at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, with its five-storey building housing maybe 1,500 people was the biggest apartment block in America.

The Anasazi were the probable ancestors of the Acoma, Zuñi and Hopi, while the Hohokam were the ancestors of the Pima and Papago. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Hohokam and Anasazi agriculture experienced a decline due to soil depletion and drought. (The same drought affected the Great Plains; in the mythology of the plains there are stories describing how a giant serpent swallowed all the rivers.) The Hohokam abandoned their villages and reverted to nomadic hunting and gathering; the Anasazi, meanwhile, moved south and east into new pueblos.

Approximately two centuries later, archeologists suggest, the Apache and Navajo migrated to the Southwest from the subarctic (both tribes are Athapascan speakers); the Navajo took to the farming lifestyle of the local tribes, especially sheep-herding, but the Apache remained hunter-gatherers. Generally ‘Archaic Period’ Indians in the Southwest outside the Pueblos had a loose system of tribal government because
the poverty of the environment obliged them to split into small groups. Shamans were known to all tribes. Unusually, Navajo medicine-men often considered themselves to have been magically transgendered and would wear women’s clothing.

The popular image of the Native American might be a be-feathered hunter astride a pony on the buffalo Plains, but it is nonetheless the case that 60 per cent of the world’s contemporary food comes from plants domesticated by Amerindians such as the Pueblo peoples and their ancestors. These vegetable crops include potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, pumpkins and maize (or ‘corn’) plants. Maize derived from a wild grass of Mexico called teosinte, and took approximately 7,000 years of genetic selection to provide large, sustaining cobs. The Indians of the Southwest also domesticated the turkey; this, along with the dog, was the only animal domesticated by Native Americans before white contact.

The move to agriculture enabled population growth. Many have tried to estimate how many ‘Indians’ inhabited the New World prior to the arrival of the Europeans. While many scholars suggest 5 million aboriginals lived in North America in 1492, the range of population figures spans from 1 million to 10 million. Beyond dispute is that population density was highest in agricultural areas.

A vast area of inhospitable desert and salt flats run through by mountains, the Great Basin largely overlaps with the states of Utah and Nevada, together with parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, California, and includes the Columbia and Fraser River basins. Nearly all of the dominant tribes, which included the Paiute and Bannock, spoke Shoshone. Prior to European contact, the tribes were nomadic foragers, with the exception of some sedentary tribes located along the major rivers and the foothills of the Rockies; the absence of
large game meant that the diet was often vegetarian, supplemented by small animals, reptiles, fish and insects. People generally lived in small family units, only coming together for specific events, principally the pinion harvest in the autumn. As was typical of hunter-gatherers, leadership and social organization were informal; even shamans had no special rights, and the vocation was open to anyone with a calling. Great Basin tribes were pantheistic, believing that a supernatural force, puha, resided in everything. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of the Great Basin tribes became horsed and formed bands of mounted hunters which took on the cultural attributes of the Plains Indians.