Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (69 page)

So why name a celestial object after a gruesome, murderous child? The not-quite-a-planet is thought to be very dark and very cold, so the goddess of the Arctic underworld seems perfectly appropriate. That’s the same reason Pluto was named for the Roman god of the underworld.

Sedna was actually the second of two recently discovered celestial objects to get a Native American name. In 2002, another large piece of orbiting rock was picked out of the very distant Kuiper Belt, the band of ice-and-rock objects at the very far reaches of our solar system. This rock was named Quaoar. The word comes from the Creation myth of the Tongva people, who are sometimes called the San Gabrielino Indians. The Tongva people lived in the Los Angeles area before the arrival of the Spanish and other Europeans.

Not exactly a god in the traditional sense, Quaoar is seen as the great force of Creation, who literally performs a “song and dance.”

When Quaoar dances and sings, the first sky father is born. This pair continues to sing and dance, and then the Earth Mother comes into existence. Now a trio, they all sing together, and grandfather sun comes to life. As each emerging deity joins the festivities, the song becomes more complex and the dance more complicated. Grandmother moon, the goddess of the sea, the lord of dreams and visions, the bringer of food and harvests, the goddess of the underworld all eventually join in the singing, dancing, and creating, which is completed when the “earth diver” Frog brings up soil, and the other animals dance on it until it becomes the flat, wide earth. Such are the musical and mythical adventures of Quaoar.

What famous poem contributed to the “myth” of the Native Americans?

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when most American schoolchildren were forced to memorize at least some part of a piece of Americana that shaped their views about the Native Americans. Though its popularity has long since declined, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem,
The Song of Hiawatha
, is still found in the pantheon of American verse. It also inspired a 1952 Disney cartoon that did little to broaden our understanding of Native American traditions.

Written in 1855,
The Song of Hiawatha
employs twenty-two long sections to tell the story of an Ojibway Indian called Hiawatha, whose life is full of triumphs and tragedies. The poem recounts the somewhat miraculous birth of Hiawatha in a time of turmoil between tribes, how he grows to become a great hunter and woos and weds the beautiful but doomed Minnehaha, commencing a golden age that will carry him toward further trials and adventures. The poem ends with the coming of the white men called “Black Robes,” who bring the Christian gospel, and Hiawatha’s own symbolic departure into the sunset in his canoe. As he leaves his people, to whom he has brought peace, he tells them to listen to the wisdom of the Black Robes:

Though it may sound to modern ears like Christian-mission propaganda, Longfellow (1807–1882) meant well. Writing his melodic paean in the heroic style of old sagas, he was trying to capture a sense of the humanity and nobility he saw in the Native American experience. His poetic sentiments were based on the anthropological writings of the first “experts” of his day, who were certainly not Native Americans. Most were people of European descent, who may have truly believed that the natives benefited from the coming of the white man. Along with Longfellow, these well-meaning “experts” helped create, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a highly romanticized myth of America as a “New Eden,” and the native people as “noble savages.” The latter concept was coined by the influential French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that true men of nature were proud and uncorrupted by civilization.

Longfellow’s poem became standard classroom fare for more than a century. As it did, it left the impression that Hiawatha had done his people a great favor by leaving them in the hands of the “Black Robes.” According to the poem, God Himself—the “Master of Life”—sent these Christian missionaries “from the land of light and morning” to speak “words of wisdom.” It sounded like a good deal. But, in truth, the paternalistic missionaries weren’t concerned with much besides bringing the “savages” to Jesus. Then there were the great masses of Americans who, by the mid-nineteenth century and certainly after “Custer’s last stand” in 1876, agreed with the popular notion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Of course, the grim testimony of history shows that last sentiment largely won out.

While Longfellow may have had good intentions in helping foster the “noble savage” myth, he also took poetic license with a few facts, beginning with the name of the poem’s chief character. The name Hiawatha—which the poet apparently used because it fit his meter—comes from the Hodenosaunee. Commonly called the Iroquois, the Hodenosaunee lived in the Northeast, and their name meant “the people of the long house.” Yet Longfellow sets Hiawatha among the Chippewa, a tribe of the Great Lakes in the Midwest.

Which raises another question: Did a person called Hiawatha exist? According to Hodenosaunee history and lore, the answer is yes. Hiawatha was a leader in precolonial America, who probably lived during the 1500s and is credited with helping establish peace among the five major tribes—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—who once dominated what is now Upstate New York.

For years, these tribes had been torn by raids and counterraids, in which captives were either tortured to death or, in some cases, adopted into the tribe to replace a lost family member. According to tribal legend, Hiawatha of the Onondaga had fallen into great grief after years of constant fighting and, in some versions, became a cannibal after his five daughters were killed. He was rescued from his grief and madness by Deganawida, a Huron elder said to be born of a virgin and on a mission to make peace and unite the Iroquois. With Hiawatha acting on what was believed to have been a sacred vision, the two men went from tribe to tribe, persuading them to make peace.

According to Alvin Josephy’s
500 Nations
, “The Peace Maker, as Deganawida was becoming known, conceived of thirteen laws by which people and nations could live in peace and unity—a democracy where the needs of all would be accommodated without violence and bloodshed. To a modern American, it would suggest a society functioning under values and laws similar to those of the Ten Commandments and the U.S. Constitution combined. Each of its laws included a moral structure.” When one chief balked at the plan, Hiawatha was able to persuade him to change his mind. According to tribal legend, the reluctant chief, Tadadaho, was an evil sorcerer whose hair was a Medusa-like tangle of snakes. Hiawatha—whose name means “he who combs”—smoothed out the tangle of snakes, cured Tadadaho’s evil mind, and the Great Law of the Five Tribes was adopted. (A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, later joined the league.)

In fact, as far back as 1751—a quarter of a century before the Declaration of Independence—Benjamin Franklin was inspired, or at least impressed, by the Iroquois League, when he proposed a colonial union in his Albany Plan. “It would be a very strange thing,” wrote Franklin, “if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to execute it in such a fashion that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to which it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.”

Franklin’s blueprint for a colonial union failed. But there are many historians who believe that in 1789, the principles of the Iroquois Confederacy were studied by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. However, the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution chose not to include the aspect of the Native American plan that gave men and women equality. That would not be a feature of the U.S. Constitution until 1920. So much for Franklin’s “ignorant savages.”

Do Native American myths still matter?

Remember the movie
Poltergeist
? You know. The one with the little girl who looks at the fuzzy television screen and says, “They’re here.” Made in 1982, the movie centers on a haunted house in a suburban development built over an American Indian burial ground.

What about
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
? This 1977 movie depicts benevolent aliens arriving on earth for a “close encounter” at Devil’s Tower, the 1,200-foot-tall rock that seemingly erupts out of the earth in northeastern Wyoming. A popular tourist destination, especially for rock climbers, Devil’s Tower is known to some Plains tribes as Mato Tipila, or Bear’s Lodge, and it is sacred land to at least twenty-three native groups. Both
Poltergeist
and
Close Encounters
, which are the products of Steven Spielberg’s fertile imagination, touch upon an issue of great importance to many Native Americans—what modern society is doing to their sacred spaces and religious traditions.

The Devil’s Tower controversy is a case in point. On one side of the standoff are Wyoming state officials, the National Parks Service—and rock climbers—who stand for tourism and recreation. On the other side of the argument are the Native Americans who revere Bear’s Lodge as a sacred place and want to restore its native name. Writing about this landmark in
Sacred Lands of Indian America
, historian Jake Page points out that “in its presence it is easy to understand why climbers are drawn to it. Easy enough to understand if you are not an Indian. For Indians, climbing the tower is an invasion of the sacred. One has to wonder what it would feel like to Christians if the steeples of churches and cathedrals suddenly became climbing destinations.”

The fight over Devil’s Tower, like the conflict over the construction of a large telescope near Tucson, Arizona, on Mount Graham, a mountain sacred to the Apaches, pits powerful economic interests against ancient tribal traditions. It is a fight being waged in various places around America, as development projects with a variety of purposes, including ski resorts, new highways running through reservations, and mineral rights, proliferate. These enterprises often collide headfirst with Native American sacred spaces that, to the uninformed, seem like open land or wilderness, completely suitable for modern development.

In other words, the myths—the sacred stories—of the people who have been in America longest are crashing headfirst against the desires and wishes of the federal government, science, developers, and, yes, rock climbers. These controversies have embroiled U.S. courts and Congress during the past decade in a face-off between native beliefs and government control.

In 1990, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate Native American religions that employed the use of peyote, a natural hallucinogen. In a majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “It may be fairly said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that
unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred
.” (Emphasis added.) Scalia’s opinion meant Congress—or other government bodies—can pass laws that regulate religious expression. The First Amendment, it would seem, goes only so far.
*

Seeing the danger to religious expression posed by the decision and Scalia’s opinion, many mainstream religious groups and other civil rights groups asked the court to reconsider, but their petition was denied. In response, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments in 1994, which restored a measure of protection for Native American religions, including the use of peyote in traditional sacraments. In 1997, the Supreme Court declared RFRA unconstitutional. The court ruled that Congress had overstepped its power to legislate constitutional rights when it passed a law attempting to protect religious observances from government regulation. (Peyote use for religious ceremonies was unaffected by the decision.)