Reading Notes - Native American Tales (Reading A)

For this week, I read the Marriage Tales from the Native American unit. I really liked these stories because the tone was so oddly casual. There were wild things happening in every story and it was all so wonderfully understated. In "The Piqued Buffalo-Wife," a man had a child with a buffalo and the child came looking for him, and there was no description of what he looked like until the end of the story. Was he more human? Or more buffalo? No one reacted to the fact that the man had had a child with a buffalo either--they just helped the buffalo-child look for is dad. 

Also, the Native American myths remind me of the African myths in a lot of ways. First, there is the trope of "You Had One Job." In a lot of these stories, there is a character who gets a really sweet deal, and all they have to do is not break one rule. In "The Piqued Buffalo-Woman," the man married the buffalo, both she and their child become fully human, and she tells him not to swing at her with fire. Seems pretty simple and easy to avoid, right? Wrong. Like all the "You Had One Job" stories, the person breaks the one rule over something stupid. The wife didn't want to cook food for the man and all his friends, so he swung at her with a log from the fire and she and the child both become real buffalo and run away...which leads to the man being trampled, through a series of unfortunate events. In "The Bear-Woman," an insane older sister who was once the wife of a bear (who was killed by her father and brothers) plays 'Bear' with her little sister and brother, but tells them not to touch her where her kidneys are. The younger sister forgets, touches the older sister in the kidneys, and the sister turns into a bear and kills a lot of people in the camp...which leads to the older sister being shot in the head by her siblings, through a series of unfortunate events. It is worth noting that both of these stories are from the Blackfoot tribe. 

"Hunting Buffalo" by Alfred Jacob Miller
via Wikimedia Commons

Another thing that I noticed about Native American myths, which a little reminiscent of African myths as well, was the incorporation of casual yet impossible phenomena to anthropomorphize the animal characters. In my Native American philosophy class, we learned that "Natural Democracy" is the equal consideration of all being on Earth, and it is a prominent feature in many Native tribes' philosophy. For example, in the "The Woman Stolen by Whale-Killers," the whales steal a man's wife and drag her underwater. Her husband follows, somehow neither of them drown, and the whales have a large fire going in their home. The Shark, who is helping the man to reclaim his wife, helps the fire to get out of hand, and then all the fish are bringing buckets of water to put out the fire...that's underwater. Animals, rocks, and plants can be helpers and/or villains in Native American stories, like in "Splinter-Foot Girl." This theme is keeping with the Native American tradition of Natural Democracy: nature doesn't just exist in a separate/lower level from humanity, but we are all coexisting--antagonizing each other and helping each other, like one big family.