Origins

In the Sioux story about the younger brother we encountered such phrases as "If he had not done this, all women would be dangerous to their lovers." Statements like this appear again and again in native American stories, many of which begin, "This is why..." or conclude, "that is how," for example, "the beaver came to have a broad tail." These seeming explanations of origin are usually not to be taken at face value. Sometimes they are ironic jokes, and they are often rhetorical devices, formal announcements that a story is about to be told, or that has now ended. And even stories genuinely concerned with the origin of some creature or custom or characteristic of man or the natural world normally were not told or listened to as literally factual accounts. The "explanatory" phrases are signals of imaginative narratives about what no one can with absolute certainty know the complete truth. Their function is to arouse the audience's imagination to attend carefully to some facts of nature, some ethical issues, or some historical traditions. Such stories in an oral culture may serve something of the function of an encyclopedia, as does the Cherokee story (6).

Major "origin" myths that are foundational for a tribe's religion and mythological system are, of course, to be taken seriously (although frequently they include amusing features). But their seriousness would be undermined if they were treated as only literally realistic. Their high significance arises from their proven efficacy in concentrating thought and feeling on primary cultural principles by dramatizing their profound congruence with basic processes of the natural world. Thus the Gros Ventre myth (7), which belongs to the type ethnologist classify as "Earth Diver" (see also the Seneca myth (9) of the woman who falls from the sky), compels its audience to imagine elemental features of the environment as dynamically emerging out of one another. The primary animating power of the cosmos is identified with the movement of invisible air, the breath of earthly life. Air shaped into sound, word, and song permits purposeful human consciousness to enter as a specially creative force into the perpetual interchanges that are the physical world.

Re-creation is an ideal theme for oral storytelling, because each telling re-performs earlier recitations in a new way, thereby opening possibilits for innovative interpretation. This is why all mythographers not accept Clude Levi-Strauss's principle that each myth is in fact constituted not by a cor core narrative, not by some essential meaning, but by the sum of all its retellings. Myths, like species of organisms, persist by evolving. Those that offer an account of how a particular cultural practice came into being enable teller and listeners to re-examine what Pierre Bourdieu called the habitus, the most traditional, customary, unthinkingly accepted ways of doing things of any social group. Myths that affirm the importance of a specific ritual, or condemn some tabooed behavior, or assert the cosmic origin os some institution, simultaneoulsly expose the ritual, beharior, or institution to self-conscious evaluation. Wuch a myth telling of an imagined origin necessarily revels in the clear light of present actualities of tribal life its subject's raison d'etre. In Native American myths erevered tradionts always his appear in terms of their relevance to presnet histrical circumstances. This is why the retelling of sacred myths is for Indians inspirational, not the mere formal rehearsal of whis is respected only becuase it is ancient. The central Indian myths are not simply coercive, not rote reiterations of dogma. They anable the habitus to remain vital, capable of adapting itslf to bonth enviornment changes (for example, shifts in climate or the diappearance of traditional food sources) and to societal transformations, such as those produced by war of effects of epidemic discease, or contact with other peoples with diffenent cultural practices. Indians telling of crucial origins simultaneously re-empower both the sacred potency of the natural wold and a particular form of civilization.

Cherokee (A)

This Cherokee story about the animas tring to capture fire identifes markings and beharioral characteristics of diverse creatures, condluding with a defining distiction between two related species of water spiders. Such stories are characteristically lightheared, but also teypically convey some oral insight: It would be foolish to acorn the little female insect who accom;olises what flashy male birds and large animal could not.




From Native American Storytelling: A Reader of Myths and Legends by Karl Kroeber. pp. 45-

A Syllabus on Native American Literature

English 201 Introduction to Narrative: Native American Literature - Laura Arnold - Reed

Course Description:
This course is designed to introduce students to narrative theory through an exploration of contemporary Native American literature. We will pay particular attention to the native cultures of the Pacific Northwest, as well as literature from the Plains, the Southwest, and the Midwest. For each region we will consider contemporary literary production (novels, short stories, autobiographies, or essays) in light of both the oral tradition and the artistic and cultural traditions of the tribes living in that region.

Readings:
Sioux (Great Plains

God is Red by Vine Deloria

NAAL - Beginnings to 1700 - Overview

Note: The “new world” that Columbus boasted of to the Spanish monarchs in 1500 was neither an expanse of empty space nor a replica of European culture, tools, textiles, and religion, but a combination of Native, European, and African people living in complex relation to one another.

Overview: Columbus’s voyage to the Americas began the exploitation of Native populations by European imperial powers, but we need not think of the intellectual exchange between the two hemispheres as being entirely in one direction. A Taino Indian whom Columbus seized and trained as a translator, and renamed Diego Colón in Spain, had as much to say to his people upon his return to the Caribbean in 1494 as Columbus did to Ferdinand and Isabella after his triumphant first expedition. The “new world” that Columbus boasted of to the Spanish monarchs in 1500 was neither an expanse of empty space nor a replica of European culture, tools, textiles, and religion, but a combination of Native, European, and African people living in complex relation to one another. After early wonder and awe at their unexpected discovery of inhabited land, Europeans used their technological edge in weaponry (gunpowder and steel) to conquer the region. They were aided in this task by the host of diseases they had brought from the Old World, against which early Americans had no immune resistance. Smallpox, measles, and typhus decimated Native populations, and in response to the lack of a local labor force the Spanish began importing Africans to take their place, thereby compounding genocide with slavery. But by no means were Natives merely helpless victims. Many adopted European weapons and tactics to defend themselves from invaders, and while some collaborated with Europeans, as did some Aztecs with Cortés’s Spanish force against their king Montezuma, or the Narragansetts and Mohegans with the New Englanders against the Pequots, they did so not out of submission or gullibility but to gain a temporary upper hand against their Native rivals—truly, a resourceful response to an impossible situation.

NAAL - Volume A, Beginnings to 1820.

Preface to the Seventh Edition

"Beginnings to 1700," edited by Wayne Franklin, continues to feature narratives by a range of early European explorers of the North American continent. Along with a cluster on the much-recounted story of Hannah Dustan's captivity - which intensified European fear of Native populations and was used to rationalize stern measures against them - the section adds material from The Bay Psalm Book, Roger Williams, Edward Taylor, Robert Calef, and The New-England Primer, and retains the complete text of Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative. The heightened attention in this section to the combined religious and territorial aspirations of the 'Anglo settlers gives students a fuller sense of the conflicts that ensued when the North American continent was perceived, by Europeans, as a "New World." We note, too, the important role of the experiences of, and narratives by, women in the early European settlement of the future United States.

In an innovation new to the Seventh Edition, each editor has gathered short texts that illuminate the cultural, historical, intellectual, and literary concerns of the period. The resulting cluster bring together markedly diverse voices - 48 new to the anthology - in selections that highlight the range of views on a key issue or topic.

Christopher Columbus

Reading: Christopher Columbus, Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage

Biography
Born near the port city of Genoa, Italy, Christopher Columbus embarked on a career at sea as a young man. The Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, supported him in his quest to locate a commercially viable route to Asia, and between 1492 and 1504 he sailed across the Atlantic four times. Although Columbus's first voyage, to Hispaniola, was colored with the wonder of discovery, subsequent expeditions were marred by political charges against him, settlers' rebellions, and the brutalities of colonization. Several documents Columbus wrote about his explorations have survived, including his Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage (1493), which became the basis for the first printed description of America, and his Letter to Ferdinand and Isabella Regarding the Fourth Voyage (1503), in which he reflects upon his mounting difficulties in the colonies and in the royal court.

Explorations
We encounter Christopher Columbus through the effects of time, of translation, of cultural difference between our own historical moment and his. In thinking about the letters included in NAAL as part of the American literary heritage, we also need to consider the Columbus myth: its golden age in the early nineteenth century, its continuing presence, and the vigorous reaction against it. In the early years of the American republic, as the new nation sought out founder-heroes, writers such as Joel Barlow and Washington Irving represented Columbus as an Aeneas for the New World, or even as its Moses. Irving closes his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) this way:

What visions of glory would have broken upon his mind could he have known that he had indeed discovered a new continent, equal to the whole of the Old World in magnitude, and separated by two vast oceans from all the earth hitherto known by civilized man! And how would his magnanimous spirit have been consoled, amid the afflictions of age and the cares of penury, the neglect of a fickle public and the injustice of an ungrateful king, could he have anticipated the splendid empires which were to spread over the beautiful world he had discovered; and the nations, and tongues, and languages which were to fill its lands with his renown, and revere and bless his name to the latest posterity.

A generation earlier, Barlow's The Vision of Columbus (1787) -- an epic-style poem rarely read today -- imagined the explorer as blessed, at the end of his life, with a Mount Pisgah-like vision of an American promised-land future. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, cities, universities, rivers, and a country were named for him -- and in pious and prophetic robes, he is memorialized with countless statues and courthouse frescoes.

1. Describe the experience of reading the translated words of the actual Christopher Columbus. These are the words of a native-born Italian, writing in Spanish five hundred years ago, amid civilities and belief systems very different from our own. Can we imagine a temperament for this writer? If we describe the self in terms of conflicts, can we observe any in these letters? If we recall that Ferdinand and Isabella, to whom one of these letters is addressed (1503), were the monarchs who drove the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and who expelled the Jewish population in that same year, how might the religious and patriotic fervor of that time affect what Columbus says to them and to Santangel (1493), and how he says it?

2. Since John Smith, a hundred years later, became a legendary hero like Columbus, compare the tone and content of Smith's Farewell to Virginia to the self-justifications contained in Columbus's letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. What differences do you sense between these writers? What contrasts do you see between the two historical situations?

Beginnings to 1820

Notes: (From W.W. Norton)

• Christopher Columbus left Palos, Spain, on August 6, 1492 and sighted the shores of the Bahamian island that he and his crew named San Salvador at two in the morning of October 12. There, he seized seven Taino Indians and took them to Spain, where he renamed them and baptized them as Christians. When Columbus returned to the Americas in November 1493, Diego Colón, one of the Taino Indians, spoke of the “marvels” he had seen in Europe. Four others died during the voyage. Later, other Europeans arrived to colonize the Americas, so that the fortresses, churches, horses, and new foods about which Colón spoke soon became part of the landscape.

• European colonists brought textiles, tools, and institutions of the church and state, such as slavery, to the Americas.
• Native American literatures originated in oral performance, which were offered to audiences as dramatic events in time and language for the ear.
• More than any European nation, Spain aggressively colonized the Americas.
  Columbus’s letter to the court of Luis de Santagel, narrating his voyage to the “West Indies,” became a means to stir individual imaginations and national ambitions in Europe, but “early American writing” by Native Americans and European colonists served numerous other purposes.
• Although English later became a useful lingua franca for the thirteen British colonies and the literary medium of choice, other languages remained actively in use for both mundane and expressive purposes.
• Texts that documented the cross-cultural relations of European colonists and Native Americans were prolific.

Sioux

(Sioux is now the commonest general name for peoples often identified by other tribal names such as Lakota or Dakota. Also Nakota.)

Many Indian stories focus on complex interpersonal dynamics of common relationships. These stories often begin with a situation of socio-psychological instability: here a family unit of one man with two wives, his brother with none. The imbalance opens the initiating actions to a variety of interpretations. The story does not aim at a singular meaning, but instead generates a diversity of possible meanings. This encourages retelling, which is the "same" narrative only in regard to some elements of content - features of social situation, event, character, etc. This is why a modern reader needs to remember that normally a story was familiar to Indian listeners. The heard a narrative with an awareness (unavailable to us) of its history, of different meanings developed from it by previous tellers. That awareness was fostered by a narrative structure built upon schematic patterns of parallelism and contrast, an artifice not controlled by natural time sequences.

Hazardous conditions of physical survival made Sioux listeners aware that even small issues of interpersonal relations might be of life or death significance in a small community. To them, the account of the brother's refusal of his sister-in-law's request for the owl would have suggested multiple explanations. There are the obvious alternatives of interpreting the request whither as a command or a sexual invitation, but beyond these are other questions, for example, might the hunter's refusal originate in selfishness or jealousy? Deciding among such alternatives requires the listener to evaluate how this first episode will relate to subsequent one, regardless of their sequential order. For Indian listeners who knew the story, "suspense" consisted primarily in how a teller, through manipulations of parallelism and contrast between various events, would create a particular moral-psychological meaningfulness to the narrative. The reduction of the importance of temporal sequence and escape from direct cause-effect relations free an auditor's imagination to engage in an exploration of new perspectives and diverse and complex possibilities of the meaning of the story's actions. We who read silently to ourselves must remember an Indian heard the story in company with others. She heard it retold by someone with whom she had listened to it before. Later, she would hear other retellings; perhaps retell it herself. For her, the story was not a detached, fixed text, but a set of specific social experiences involving a variety of people exchanging ideas, opinions, convictions, and experiences. "The" story for her is a long-term series of social negotiations, which over time refine and subtilize its form and complicate its significance so that, despite its brevity, it is packed with meaning inseparable from actual interpersonal relationships.

We can't recover the processes of this communal activity of storytelling, but we can recognize that it bears some resemblance to our pleasure in stories we value the most, what we call classics, which are narratives that we enjoy rereading. That may encourage us to seek reward in grappling imaginatively with problems posed by such an Indian story as this, finding for ourselves possible ethical and psychological connections between episodes apparently unrelated by progress of the plot. for instance, we may find it worth assessing the significance of the story's final event, in which the tribal group is destroyed through an over-killing of buffalo by the man who refused his sister-in-law a single owl.

Another difficulty for us, however, is that most of the actions are grotesquely exaggerated and fantastically violent - especially in representing women as threats to men. It may help in understanding this characteristic narrative extremism to recognize its connections with the formulaic "If he had not done so-and-so," conditions would be different from what they are now. The tale evokes imagining of actions and impulses which accepted cultural practice suppresses or condemns. The storytelling frees listeners to imagine communally emotions and impulses subjected to the strongest social controls. This story, for example, magnifies to sensational imaginative visibility Sioux men's unspoken fears of women's sexual potencies. Unrealistic exaggeration allows depiction of common psychic attitudes that one doesn't offer openly for either private or communal evaluation. What seems at first glance to be extreme, excessive, and bizarre represents the terrific and terrifying power of our hidden emotions and the strain we feel in accommodating them to our social ideals. Sioux men were brave hunters - consider carefully if you would have what it takes to kill a buffalo with a bow and arrow (so you control your horse only with your knees) as you ride bareback in the middle of a stampeding herd of two hundred huge animals. Sioux were also extraordinarily courageous warriors: they paid highest tribute to those who "counted coup" - in the midst of a battle, touched an enemy without killing or wounding him (which, of course, puts your own life at the highest risk.) Most of them also were loyal husbands and responsible members of the tribe. These impressive qualities were achieved by self-application of cultural ideals to the instincts, anxieties, and fears that all human beings experience. It is not difficult to guess the kind of relief such men might feel in hearing a story that articulates feelings they have had so persistently to control. It seems likely that, in different ways for all Sioux listeners, the extreme fantasies of this story were sustaining to them both as individuals and as members of their community. To Sioux women, who both told and listened to such stories, the bringing into imaginative openness of the psychic pressures felt by their men must surely have been helpful. We must not forget that these people, in the harsh and unforgiving conditions of the high plains, had built a special way of life of which they were intensely proud. And justifiably proud, for it has been admired by virtually every Westerner not bent on genocide who has encountered it, in actuality or in historical reports. It was a culture founded upon and continually renewed by this kind of "exaggerated" storytelling that is perhaps the only way of telling both the private and public truth about any people's profoundest feelings and ideals.

From Clark Wissler, "Some Dakota Myths II," Journal of American Folklore 20 (1907), 195-206, 197-9.

A man lived with his two wives and a brother. One day the brother went out to hunt, and as he was coming back he shot an owl, which he brought home with him.