Native American Myths and Beliefs

by Tom Lowenstein

  Once the Hopi had emerged from below, supposedly at the confluence of the Colorado and the Little Colorado rivers, Masaw, their guardian spirit, ordered them to travel in the four cardinal directions until they reached the sea and then to retrace their steps to find their true homeland. Not every clan managed to make its way there, but those who did commemorated their great trek in rock carvings. These rock memorials feature two spiral motifs: square spirals to symbolize the turning back at the seas, and round spirals, to show how the people wandered ever closer to their destination. Over Hopi territory such carved spirals are laid out on the land within an overall shape of a cross, or a swastika with broken arms, which represents the sun’s movement. The middle of the cross, Tuwanasavi, represents both the center of the cosmos and the center of Hopi territory. The Hopi have several ceremonial sites (kivas), in the middle of which is an under ground circular opening, representing the hole through which the first people emerged into the world.

  Between 500 and 1,000 years ago prehistoric North Americans incised the white limestone outcrops of Peterborough County, ontario, with sacred images. some North American rock carvings are known to refer to origin beliefs.

  Migration stories describing tribal movements since the mythical emergence also abound in the narratives of many other cultures. Sometimes, the main theme of such legends is conflict among tribes, such as that which broke out between the Tewa of northern New Mexico and the Ute of Colorado. Other stories tell how clans of particular tribes, such as the Zuni and Tewa, were guided at several points by helpful spirits. The sacred landmarks where such spirits dwelt are shown on mythical and historical tribal maps.

  Why the Snake Clan Lives Apart

  Stories such as the migration myth of the Tewa Snake Clan of northern New Mexico explain how groups of people came to revere certain animals—in this case the snake—and to live in particular regions of the country.

  Once, a boy of the Tewa lived by a river. Every day he sat by it, saying to himself, “I wonder where this water is running.” So one day he cut down a tree to make a box and told his parents that he wanted to go downriver. His uncle made prayer sticks. “If you meet any holy being,” said the uncle, “give them prayer sticks.” Next morning, the boy sat in the box with his bundle of prayer sticks, and boated down the river.

  He travelled until he came to a place with a mountain. As he walked around the mountain a girl came towards him. “I am the one who made you come downriver,” she said.

  She led him up the mountain, where he found a house with people inside who gave him food. When he finished eating, he glanced around. His hosts looked human, though their skin was yellow and snake-like. But when they went outside, they became snakes. The boy thanked the headman and handed him prayer sticks.

  The snake folk showed the boy their dances; they sang their songs and invited him to join them. Soon they asked the boy to marry the girl. Years later, after marrying her and siring several children, the boy was told by his father-in-law: “It is time for you to return to your own people. Your parents miss you. Take your family with you.”

  When they reached the boy’s home they were welcomed. All was well until the snake family’s children began to bite the other children in the village. Then, led by the snake woman, the family moved away to the south.

  Soon they met other people. “Who are you?” said the snakes. “We are the Sand Clan,” said the strangers. “Well, you are my people,” said the woman. So they travelled together and met other clans: the Antelope and Tobacco clans, the Lizards, the Bears and the Coyote. That is how the clans of the Tewa met, and some of them joined each other. For example, the Coyote clan and the Antelopes lived together. However, the snakes could not live with other clans, so they settled in the desert.

  This buffalo hide painting by a modern Arizona artist depicts the snake clan’s mythical migration.

  The Great Spirit

  A supreme being—variously known as the “Great Spirit,” “Father,” “Grandfather” or “Old Man”—is for many Native Americans both the creator of the world at the beginning of time and the spirit that presides over and pervades all living things.

  The highly complex belief systems of Plains peoples, such as the Pawnee, the Blackfeet and the Sioux, hold all human life to be sacred. For these societies, every human act is imbued with spiritual significance and pays homage to the omnipresent Great Spirit. This transcendent God—Tirawa for the Pawnee, Napi (Old Man) for the Montana Blackfeet, Wakan Tanka (from the word wakan, meaning “sacred” or “sacred power”) for the Sioux—permeates all people, animals, places and phenomena. And while the other spirits who emanate from, or coexist with, the Great Spirit are also revered, only this supreme deity is regarded as omnipresent and omniscient.

  George Catlin’s early 19th-century painting of the O-kee-pa, the ceremony by which the mandans, who lived in riverside earth lodges, connected with the great spirit and their mythical past.

  The pantheon of deities revered by the Skidi Pawnee, a Midwestern community of nineteen villages whose beliefs and ceremonies were recorded at the turn of the nineteenth century, is typical of Plains belief systems. These proud people, who were often at war with neighboring societies and whose men excelled at buffalo and deer hunting, lived in awe of their creator, Tirawa. As the supreme deity, he lived with his spouse, the spirit of the sky vault, beyond the clouds and played little or no part in the dynamics of earthly existence. Instead, he ruled through a hierarchy of other spirits. Below Tirawa was the Evening Star and below him his four assistants, Wind, Cloud, Lightning and Thunder. Morning Star was next in power, and he was the father of the first human being. Other major forces were the Four Quarters (directions), and the Sun and Moon, the parents of the earth and the providers of such human essentials as hunting equipment. In this cosmos the day-to-day destinies of men and women were determined by animal spirits who came together in sacred lodges to make or mar their fortunes.

  The Skidi Pawnee worshipped Tirawa and the lesser spirits in long annual rituals. They acted out the ways of the animals in dance ceremonies as a form of worship and as a means of affirming their power over them in the hunt. Other ceremonies, which were always conducted in a great lodge built specially for the purpose, involved the sacred bundle that each village kept as a ritual object. Every village owned a unique bundle given to its ancestors by the Great Spirit. In cere monies, the bundle was firstsuspended near the entrance to the lodge and was then taken down for un -wrapping. Vill age chiefs and holy men supervised the rituals and they, along with the rest of the community, took up positions in the lodge that reproduced those of the spirits and stars in the firmament.

  The Munificence of the Great Spirit

  Although the Native American concept of a benevolent, omniscient and omnipresent god complemented European settlers’ idea of one true God, it failed to accord with Wild West propaganda about the savage, heathen Indian. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European Americans were startled by the tender reverence with which Natives—even the haughtiest and most battle-hardened warriors—regarded the Great Spirit.

  The Great Spirit of the Sioux was not summoned at will. Often, his messages were received as powerful visions, or telling dreams, by especially sensitive and responsible individuals.

  One such visionary was Brave Buffalo, a Sioux medicine man from North Dakota. His vision of the Great Spirit, which came to him when he was a boy, never left him: “When I was ten years of age I looked at the land and the rivers, the sky above, and the animals around me, and could not fail to realize that they were made by a great power.”

  Chief Weninock of the Yakimas in eastern Washington State expressed another dimension of the divine spirit, that of a benevolent provider: “God created Indian country, and it was as if he spread out a great blanket. He put Indians on it. And all the animals and plants in that country were for the Indian people.” In times of upheaval and trauma the Great Spirit offered reassurance and guidance.

  This tiny
sioux tipi, made c. 1830, housed the sacred pipe that was used to make contact with the great spirit.

  The Pawnee called their bundles chuh-raraperu (“rains-wrapped-up”). Their contents varied, but all of them held at least one pipe, and most would contain tobacco, paints, sacred bones and feathers, as well as the maize that Pawnee women cultivated. Laid out in front of the chiefs, the bundles would receive ritual offerings both of smoke from a ceremonial pipe and of buffalo tongues. Until 1818, a human sacrifice in the shape of a girl as a mate for Morning Star was among the offerings. Singing led by holy men and chiefs accompanied these rituals, which were intended to show the community’s humility before Tirawa.

  This late 19th-century Lakota headdress incorporates red trade cloth and glass beads as well as such traditionally prized materials as porcupine quills and eagle feathers. such bonnets were the regalia of Plains leaders, whose exploits were numbered in eagle feathers.

  Among other Plains Indians, the Great Spirit manifested himself in paradoxical ways. The Old Man of the legends of the Blackfeet, for example, is a curious mixture of wisdom and folly, a Trickster figure who is unpredictably benevolent or mean. He also plays pranks and is tricked in turn by puny creatures such as squirrels and mice. In one tale Old Man is playing around a campfire with squirrels; in the course of his game, he gets burned, eats up all the squirrels, fights a lynx and finally inflicts the gashes on the birch tree that it bears to this day. In his more exalted form, Old Man im parts wisdom to animals and humans.

  Like many spirits of Native American worship, the Great Spirit is sometimes represented as a person. But this personification is often vague, and the deity almost always disappears from a people’s myth after the act of creation. In Hopi myth, the first divinity was Taiowa. At the beginning of time, he created Sotuknang “as a person, Taiowa’s nephew.” It was Sotuknang who would make “life in endless space, and lay out the universes in proper order.” Sotuknang proceeded to create nine universal kingdoms, and everything in space and time emerged from his hand. Meanwhile, after the first great act of creation, Taiowa himself retired to one of the worlds made by his nephew and played no further part in mythology. Similar “vanishing creators” feature among the deities of the Navajo, Pima, Apache and other southwestern peoples.

  One of the most beautiful accounts of the Great Spirit and of the myths and rituals of the Oglala Sioux comes from the medicine man Black Elk (c. 1860–1950). Black Elk, who had known such towering figures as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, was a veteran of two crucial historical events: the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, when General George Armstrong Custer’s regiment was wiped out, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The nature of the Great Spirit Wakan Tanka is revealed in his story of the visionary experience of two Sioux hunters.

  It was dawn as the two men stood on a hill, and towards them came a beautiful young woman dressed in white buffalo robes and with a bundle on her back. When one of the men showed lustful intentions towards the woman, she reduced him to a pile of bones. This wakan woman then ordered the other man to return to his village and instruct the chief, Standing Yellow Horn, to build a ceremonial lodge with buffalo skins and twenty-eight poles. After these orders had been carefully carried out, the woman reappeared. Removing the bundle from her back, she said to Standing Yellow Horn, “Behold this bundle and always love it. It is lela wakan (“very sacred”), and you must always treat it as such. No impure man should ever be allowed to see it, for within this bundle there is a very holy pipe. With this pipe you will send your voices to Wakan Tanka, your Father and Grandfather, during the years to come. With this sacred pipe you will walk upon the Earth, for the Earth is your grandmother and mother, and she is sacred. Every step that is taken upon her should be as a prayer.” The woman then explained that the stone bowl of the pipe, with its carving of a buffalo calf, represented Earth and all the four-footed animals that walked upon it. Its wooden stem stood for all growing things. Twelve Spotted Eagle feathers that hung from the pipe represented all birds. “Whenever you smoke this pipe,” the woman said, “all these things join you, everything in the universe: all send their voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. Whenever you pray with this pipe you pray for and with all things.”

  The ceremonies of the Lakota Sioux enacted the wakan woman’s injunction to revere the Great Spirit. The pipe ritual was performed in two stages. A dried herb was lit from fire that burned in the center of the lodge, and the first smoke passed through the pipe stem and up to heaven. In this way Wakan Tanka was the first to smoke. The pipe was then filled with tobacco and offered in the six sacred directions: west, north, east, south and to heaven and earth. As Black Elk explained: “In this manner, the whole universe is placed in the pipe.”

  All the components of the pipe ceremonies pointed symbolically to Wakan Tanka as the unifying power of the universe. The ceremonial lodge was constructed to represent that universe. The twenty-eight supporting poles represented the lunar month, and each of the days of this month was sacred: “Two of the days represent the Great Spirit. Two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven are for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one is for fire; one for water; one for rock; and, finally, one is for the two-legged people.” “The ceremonial lodge,” Black Elk explained, “is the center of the Earth; and this center, which, in reality, is everywhere, is the dwelling place of Wakan Tanka.”

  After instructing the Sioux people in their sacred ceremonies, the wakan woman walked around the lodge in a clockwise direction. What the lodge-dwellers witnessed as she left confirmed her sanctity: transforming herself into a buffalo, she made a bow in each direction before vanishing from sight.

  A 19th-century ceremonial sioux pipe. The rising smoke from such a pipe was thought of as a path leading to the great spirit.

  The Origin of the Sun, Moon and Stars

  Stories concerning the birth of the sun, moon and stars abound in Native North American mythology. In their cosmologies, different Native American peoples emphasized different celestial bodies.

  Among the Blackfeet of northwestern Montana and the Navajo of the southwestern deserts, the sun is seen as much more than just the giver of light: all living and growing things require the energy that is provided by the mighty sun deity. The Cherokee and other south eastern peoples also worship and propitiate this vital celestial body. By contrast, in the cosmology of the Inuit, as well as among the Tlingit and Tsimshian peoples of the Northwest Coast, the sun is relatively unimportant. As confirmation of this status, the sun is a female in these cultures and plays a comparatively minor role in myth and belief.

  Many of the myths of the Northwest Coast that describe how daylight was created also explain how the stars and moon came into being. These stories usually focus on two main characters, a raven Trickster and a being who hoards the light craved by all living creatures.

  A Tlingit myth tells how Raven, part bird, part human, tricked his way into the light hoarder’s house by magically making the man’s daughter give birth to himself. And this is how, once he had been born, Raven managed to see the bundles that hung on the walls of his grandfather’s house. As the growing raven-baby, he crawled around, weeping and pointing at the bundles. This lasted for some days, until the grandfather cried: “Give my grandchild what he is crying for!” With that the boy was given a bag containing the stars. Rolling it about on the floor, he suddenly released his grip on it and let it float up through the smoke hole of the house. The stars rose through the sky and scattered, arranging themselves as they have always been since. Raven then repeated his ruse, and the next bag contained the moon.

  This painted rawhide hand drum probably belonged to a member of the ghost Dance religion, which swept through the Plains in the 1890s. it is decorated with stars and dots that symbolize the spirits of the wider cosmos. Through their ceremonies, ghost Dancers revered the sacred
spirits of the sky, whom they saw as allies in the struggle to undo the white men’s destruction and restore Native American ways of life.

  Daylight, the grandfather’s prize possession and the prime object of Raven’s desire, was kept in a securely bound box. Knowing by this time that a supernatural force was attacking his household, the grandfather reluctantly ordered the box to be untied. When the raven-baby had the box in his hands and let the daylight out, he uttered his raucous raven cry, “Ga!”, and flew up through the chimney. This was how daylight, or sunshine, arrived on the Northwest Coast, together with the moon and the stars.

  A Spider’s Quest for the Sun

  A Cherokee story from the Southeast begins in the shadowy gloom of primordial myth time. In their quest for light, the people are aided by a succession of brave animals.

  At first there was no light anywhere, and in the darkness everyone kept bumping into each other. “What we need in the world is light!” they all agreed, and so they convened a meeting. The red-headed woodpecker made a suggestion: “People on the other side of the world have light, so perhaps if we go over there, they will give us some.”

  After much argument, Possum said: “I’ll go and get light. I have a bushy tail and can hide the light inside my fur.” So he travelled east, screwing up his eyes against the brightness. When he arrived on the other side of the world, he found the sun, grabbed a piece of it and hid it. But the sun was so hot it burned all the fur from his tail, and when he came home, he had lost the light.

  Next, Buzzard went on the quest. On reaching the sun, he dived out of the sky and snatched a piece of it in his claws. Setting it on his head, he started for home, but the sun burned off his head feathers, and Buzzard also lost the light. When Buzzard returned home bald, everyone despaired.