A Brief Guide to Native American Myths and Legends (3 page)

The almost unbroken ocean of grassland known as the Great Plains, home to great herds of buffalo, extends south from Alberta in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, from the foothills of the Rockies east to the Mississippi. The original Plains dwellers were small bands of nomads who subsisted on foraging along river bottoms, plus the hunting of buffalo on foot (and stampeding them over cliffs into ‘blood kettles’) twice a year, in February for robes and in autumn for meat, before taking up part-time farming. Population expansion in the eastern woodlands pushed more people onto the plains c. ad 1300, so that by the mid sixteenth century the grassland supported upwards of 150,000 peoples. However, the tribes which became renowned as
the
Plains Indians – the Sioux, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Comanche – mostly arrived in the 1700s when the white man’s horse had gone native and was available for the taking. These previously pedestrian foragers and farmers took up a mounted, nomadic lifestyle exclusively organized around the hunting of the buffalo. The Sioux found no less than 88 uses for
bos bison Americanus
excluding food.

Plains tribes spent the winter in conical earth lodges; in summer they lived in portable teepees as they followed the
buffalo. Fully nomadic tribes lived in teepees made from as many as thirty buffalo hides; until the horse, teepees had been restricted to between six and ten hides in size, because the dog, the aboriginals’ original beast of burden, could pull no more. The Sioux liked to decorate the outside of their tents with pictographs, believing that these had supernatural powers to ward off misfortune and sickness; in Blackfeet bands, only high status members were permitted to paint the sacred Morning Star symbol on the top of their teepees.

There was little formal governance on the Great Plains, with bands (extended families sharing a common ancestor) organized into tribes led by a chief, who won his position through bravery or wisdom. Plains society, however, was intricate, and was based on ownership of horses, spiritual power derived from visions, and, above all, from war honours. Most tribes had warrior societies, such as the Kit Fox or Crazy Dogs, that jealously administered war honours, which were recorded on teepees and war bonnets. Warfare was a way of life for Plains Indian males. There were certain differences between the tribes as to what counted as the most daring exploit in war, but generally to ‘count coup’ – to touch an enemy warrior harmlessly with hand or weapon – was topmost. Scalping had religious purpose, because scalps empowered the taker and ritually transferred mourning to the enemy. Shamans, priestly magicians and healers, were integral to tribal life.

A land of mild winters and high rainfall, the Southeast provided abundant and fertile soil, forests filled with game, and rivers teeming with fish. Native society, much influenced by the Mesoamerican tribes to the south, was advanced. Beginning with the Hopewell civilization, which adopted maize-growing c. ad 100, the region saw successive cultures which constructed vast earthen burial mounds, culminating in the Mississippian civilization that flourished c. ad 750 to 1200. The Mississippians were the benefactors of a new strain of
corn so productive it became almost the sole crop. As elsewhere, agriculture encouraged more complex social and political structures; the Mississippian capital of Cahokia (across the river from present day St Louis), which contained over 10,000 people, was ruled over by an absolute monarch, the Great Sun chief. Whereas the previous mound cultures had settled for using the mound as a burial site, the Mississippians topped their tumps with temples and palaces. The Great Sun’s complex at Cahokia stood on top of a mound 100 feet high and 16 acres in extent. Mississippi culture was unique in North America developing a distinct ruling class. Even with the decline of the classical Mississippian culture, life in the region continued to be based around agriculture and permanent large-scale villages. Often these were governed by a council of elders with a chief (or chieftainess) in a presiding role.

Although they consisted of a large number of tribes, the Indians of the Southeast had in common a complex belief system centred on farming. The most important ritual was the Green Corn Ceremony, a festival of thanksgiving and renewal held to coincide with the ripening of the autumn crop. The Southeast tribes, additionally, all followed a matrilineal clan system.

The Northeast culture region stretches south from Canada to Tennessee, west from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. In the heavily wooded Northeast culture region the Indian tribes sustained themselves by hunter-gathering and agriculture. Divided principally into two language groups, Iroquois and Algonquin, the peoples of the Northeast lived in small semi-permanent villages (often fortified) and maize was a staple foodstuff, its culture learned from the horticulturalists of the Southeast. The Algonquian language has added ‘tomahawk’ and ‘moccasin’, among other words, to the English lexicon. Most of the tribes of the Northeastern Woodlands were matrilineal. The Iroquois were intensely politically
sophisticated, and formed a confederation in the sixteenth century to dominate neighbouring tribes. Native land struggles were intensified by European colonization from 1497 onwards, and by the 1700s many Algonquian nations had migrated west to the Great Lakes, where they in turn displaced some of the existing tribes.

The land struggles of the Northeast tribes were not about ownership in the accepted, Western sense. A band or tribe might claim certain land as their territory – which could be vast, as with the Comanche of the southern plains – but it was held communally. Five hundred years of tragedy resulted from the inability of the whites to understand that the Native American’s hunting or farming grounds were also his home, and the place to which he was spiritually attached.

But it was not just the tribes and their land that were devastated by European colonization. So was their culture, including their mythologies.

No Native American culture had writing. Consequently, myths, legends and tales were transmitted orally. With the eradication of the tribes, whether through war or the white man’s microbes, many myths were lost forever, along with the languages with which they were spoken. About a third of the tongues of native North America were lost for ever.

Although many early European explorers noted the beliefs of the Native Americans they met, Americans and Europeans did not begin recording and collecting Indian myths in earnest until the 1820s, beginning with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Indian agent, and spouse of a half-Ojibwa woman. (Schoolcraft’s ethnographical studies of the Ojibwa provided Longfellow with much of the source material for his epic poem,
The Song of Hiawatha
.) Another early collector of Indian myths was the artist George Catlin. But the recording and translation of Native American myths reached its zenith between 1887 and 1934, as scholars rushed to record these texts before yet more tribes and their mythological heritage vanished.

One such collector was the Scottish folklorist Lewis Spence (1874–1955), author of
Myths and Legends of the North American Indians
, first published in 1914 and which forms the bulk of the current volume. Spence, rightly, was hugely impressed by the ‘conscientious and enterprising’ United States Bureau of Ethnology, and relied heavily on their endeavours. In recording Native American myths Spence was sound. However, the interpretation and classification of myth has changed considerably in a century, as has the anthropological understanding of Native Americans in the prehistoric times. Consequently, in order to reflect the state of contemporary research on Native American mythology this volume has omitted Spence’s
chapter 1
(‘Divisions, Customs, and History of the Race’) and replaced it with the above survey. Additional information about the tribes, their myths, as well as current folkloric concepts (notably the ‘trickster’, ‘culture hero’ and ‘transformer’) is contained in the commentaries which begin each chapter.

As Spence himself recognized so accurately and sensitively, the reader coming to Native American myth for the first time is stepping into a world wholly unlike the safe and certain belief systems of Western science. It is a world which is often threatening and fantastic, a world where capriciousness, deceit and the inexplicable rule. Welcome to the world of the infamous shape-shifting trickster Coyote.

As is obvious from a mere moment’s reflection, myth was the means by which American Indians made sense of an unpredictable universe. Myth was, above all, the method by which the present was explained by the past. Mythology evolved as people sought to answer questions about the world: Who made man? Where did corn – a staple crop of numerous native societies – come from?

Myths have other functions. Another key function of myth is to account for a tribe’s religion and lifestyle; in Sioux origin stories, for example, the ‘culture hero’ (see p 21 for an explanation of the term) White Buffalo gives the Lakota tribes
a sacred pipe, the obligation for following seven ceremonies, and the buffalo as their principal food source.

More minor functions of myth are to teach moral values and principles. The recitation of myth plays a role in healing and cultural renewal. The Navajo ‘Blessingway’ ceremony is simultaneously a telling of the tribe’s creation myth and prayer for healing and harmony.

Native myth-making did not stop on contact with the Europeans. Some Native American myths, indeed, were influenced by contact with the first missionaries. This interaction can be detected in the ‘First Creator and Lone Man’ version of the creation myth of the Mandan, in which the second deity character, Jesus-like, is born as a man then disappears from earth after his good works.

Myths are sacred ancient narratives. Legends and tales, in contrast, while commonly containing a moral kernel, are principally for entertainment rather than religious or social purposes. Both myths and legends were, as already noted, oral narratives; the bare words collected by white scholars would have been complemented in their original telling by the speaker’s gestures and illustrative aids, such as stone carvings, shells, or pottery. Speakers in Northeastern tribes used mnemonics to aid their story-telling. The Iroquois had Wampum Belts, while the Ojibwa (Chippewa) recorded the mythical stories of the tribe’s heroes in pictographs on birch bark.

The word myth trails an unfortunate connotation of falsehood. In no sense should Native American myths be regarded as being untrue. They are alternative explanations of reality. They address issues germane to those people who developed them. They contain empirical information about history that passes the muster of Western science and law. In one celebrated example of the validity of myth, in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the Bear Mother myth of the Gitksan as evidence in support of the tribe’s claim to 22,000 square miles of British Columbia.

As the case of the Gitksan demonstrates so dramatically, myth is not dead. For Native Americans it is a source of identity, a mechanism for cultural and political renewal. For everyone else, the myths of Native America are extraordinary gateways into the minds and lives of the continent’s original inhabitants.

All mythological systems spring from the same fundamental basis. The gods are the children of reverence and necessity. But their genealogy stretches still farther back. Savage man, unable to distinguish between the animate and inanimate, imagines every surrounding object to be, like himself, instinct with life. Trees, the winds, the river (which he names ‘the Long Person’), all possess life and consciousness in his eyes. The trees moan and rustle, therefore they speak, or are, perchance, the dwelling-place of powerful spirits. The winds are full of words, sighings, warnings, threats, the noises, without doubt, of wandering powers, friendly or unfriendly beings. The water moves, articulates, prophesies, as, for example, did the Peruvian Rimac and Ipurimac – ‘the Oracles’, ‘the Prophesiers’. Even abstract qualities were supposed to possess the attributes of living things. Light and darkness, heat and cold, were regarded as active and alert agencies. The sky
was looked upon as the All-Father from whose co-operation with the Mother Earth all living things had sprung. This condition of belief is known as ‘animism’.

If inanimate objects and natural phenomena were endowed by savage imagination with the qualities of life and thought, the creatures of the animal world were placed upon a still higher level. The Indian, brought into contact with the denizens of the forest and prairie, conceived a high opinion of their qualities and instinctive abilities. He observed that they possessed greater cunning in forest-craft than himself, that their hunting instinct was much more sure, that they seldom suffered from lack of provisions, that they were more swift of foot. In short, he considered them to be his superiors in those faculties which he most coveted and admired. Various human attributes and characteristics became personified and even exaggerated in some of his neighbours of wood and plain. The fox was proverbial for craft, the wild cat for stealth, the bear for a wrong-headed stupidity, the owl for a cryptic wisdom, the deer for swiftness. In each of these attributes the several animals to whom they belonged appeared to the savage as more gifted than himself, and so deeply was he influenced by this seeming superiority that if he coveted a certain quality he would place himself under the protection of the animal or bird which symbolized it. Again, if a tribe or clan possessed any special characteristic, such as fierceness or cunning, it was usually called by its neighbours after the bird or beast which symbolized its character. A tribe would learn its nickname from captives taken in war; or it might even bestow such an appellation upon itself. After the lapse of a few generations the members of a tribe would regard the animal whose qualities they were supposed to possess as their direct ancestor, and would consider that all the members of his species were their blood-relations. This belief is known as totemism, and its adoption was the means of laying the foundation of a
widespread system of tribal rule and custom, by which marriage and many of the affairs of life were and are wholly governed. Probably all European and Asiatic peoples have passed through this stage, and its remains are to be found deeply embedded in our present social system.