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-