AMERICAN INDIAN MYTHS AND LEGENDS

by Richard Erdoes

  In this volume we offer titles and categories for different tales, but these are, in the end, arbitrary appendages for a reader’s convenience. No child will ask her grandfather to tell the story of the first arrival of winter, but will clamor instead, “Tell me again about Iktome getting caught when he steals food,” or “Tell us about where the girl saved her brother.” The tales can be divided in infinite ways, and we hope the chapters we have selected show both the common elements that run through stories told at opposite ends of the continent and the rich diversity of detail.

  Legends, of course, vary according to a people’s way of life, the geography and the climate in which they live, the food they eat and the way they obtain it. The nomadic buffalo hunters of the Plains tell stories very different from those of Eastern forest dwellers. To the Southwestern planters and harvesters, the coming of corn and the changing of seasons are of primal concern, while people of the Northwest who make their living from the sea fill their tales with ocean monsters, swift harpooners, and powerful boatbuilders. All tribes have spun narratives as well for the features of their landscape: how this river came to be, when these mountains were formed, how our coastline was carved.

  Legends as well as cultures overlap and influence each other, not only when people of different tribes live in adjacent territory, but even when they encounter each other through migration or trade over long distances. Excavations of a pre-Columbian Hohokam site in Arizona uncovered a Mayan-style ball court, a hard rubber ball, copper bells, and exotic parrot feathers, all of which had to have come from central Mexico, more than a thousand miles away. An Aztec-like image of the male face of the sun, surrounded by rays, is found painted and chipped into rock walls of the Southwestern United States as well as in contemporary Pueblo art. Nao’tsiti, the lost White Sister, and Bahana, the White Brother of Hopi prophecy, may embody memories of the Mayan Kukulcan or the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, the white Plumed Serpent god who comes from the east across the Great Water. Images and tokens were carried to faraway peoples along with trade goods; white seashells and abalone shells are mentioned several times in ancient myths as ritual objects in areas five hundred to a thousand miles from the Pacific Coast.

  Yet with all their regional images and variations, a common theme binds these tales together—a universal concern with fundamental issues about the world in which humans live. We encounter again and again, in a fantastic spectrum of forms, North and South, East and West, the story of the children of the sun, of the twin brothers who bring culture, of the sacred four directions, of worlds piled on top of each other, of primordial waters, of perpetual destruction and re-creation, of powerful heroes and tricksters—Veeho, Rabbit, Coyote, and Spider Man.

  History enters the mythic world obliquely, but leaves its definite mark in characters and incidents. Many tales and cycles embody the collective experience of a particular tribe, perhaps compacting into a single dramatic myth migrations, natural disasters, and other major events that occurred over generations and centuries, with mythically transformed references to “historical” episodes—the creation and fall from power of the Iroquois League; first sightings and later encounters with Europeans and other whites, beginning with missionaries and traders, later with armed soldiers; the suppression of religion by the Spanish and the Pueblo uprisings of 1680; the arrival in and displacement from traditional homelands and the accompanying deaths or devastations; the dramatic watershed encounters at Fort Stanwix and at Rosebud, Little Bighorn, and Wounded Knee. By moving often cataclysmic events into the realm of myth or folklore, the storyteller can at once celebrate, mourn, and honor the past—and look ahead to a time when the great heroes may return to their people, bearing powerful medicine to restore former glory.

  But these legends do not merely confront cosmic questions about the world as a whole. They are also magic lenses through which we can glimpse social orders and daily life: how families were organized, how political structures operated, how men caught fish, how religious ceremonies felt to the people who took part, how power was divided between men and women, how food was prepared, how honor in war was celebrated. The images that transmit certain timeless concerns are resonant: in one account of the conflict between the sexes, men and women decide to live in separate camps, divided not only by anger and a brooding sense of injustice, but by a mighty river as well. Anthropological accounts seem pale in comparison.

  In the end, however, these legends are not told merely for enjoyment, or for education, or for amusement: they are believed. They are emblems of a living religion, giving concrete form to a set of beliefs and traditions that link people living today to ancestors from centuries and millennia past. As Bronislaw Malinowski said, “Myth in its living, primitive form is not merely a story told but a reality lived.”

  A Note on How These Stories Were Selected

  Many of the stories were collected by the authors themselves over a period of twenty-five years. Some of these have never appeared in print before; others which have been circulating for years appear here in a new form as narrated by today’s storytellers, freshly translated into English where necessary. Some of the Plains Indian tales were jotted down at powwows, around campfires, even inside a moving car. Most of them were taped, and a few have been edited so that they are understandable in this form.

  A second group of tales are classic accounts, which appear here in their original form. A third group come from nineteenth-century sources which, while containing the nuggets of the original tales, were also embellished in the somewhat artificial style typical of the period. The authors have retold these tales to restore them to a more authentic and less stilted form.

  * An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962.

  † “The Native Races,” Myths and Languages, vol. 3, A. L. Bancroft & Co., San Francisco, 1883, p. 305.

  Creation myths deal with both how the physical world as we know it came to be and how the many features of specific cultures originated. While the tales in Parts Two and Three will deal with the first theme, the stories here grapple with those permanently vexing questions about the human condition. How and when-did gods and humans become separated? Where did Indians get certain important elements in their daily life—foodstuffs like salt or corn, animals like the buffalo or horse, religious artifacts and ceremonies? Why are men and women different, and when did the separation take place? Where did the different races come from? How did evil enter the world? What is death and how does it move in and out of life?

  These legends of human creation and the bringing of culture reflect in myriad ways a common belief that people are living part of a natural world, brother and sister to the grain and the trees, the buffalo and the bear. Some Great Lakes tribes recount how they were originally made by the Great Sun or (with the Ojibway) Great Mystery. According to numerous others, the first woman was impregnated by (in the Southwest) a sunbeam, (in the Northwest) a salmon, or as the Iroquois say, by the west wind, giving birth to twin heroes who perform famous deeds. The creation myth of the Great Lakes Algonquians focuses on the wanderings of the god Glooscap, who tames the winds, obtains food and water for the people, and fashions various features of the landscape. He eventually goes off to the west to live in another world, where he makes arrows in preparation for the battle of the last day.

  The first human child is often endowed with supernatural powers; it outshines and outwits adults, grows up overnight, or performs great magic like a full-fledged medicine man. His mischief does good, too; disregarding his parents, he wanders away from the camp, perhaps meets and slays a monster or two, receives a token of magic or power, and often encounters an old woman (perhaps his nurse) who puts an ogre in his path to rid herself of his powerful presence. The results of these adventures are significant watermarks in the creation of a culture; before Stone Boy was born, the Sioux had no sacred ceremonies or prayers to guide them. Their spiritual development began when a pile of rocks instructed Stone Boy to buil
d a sweat lodge for purification, for life, for wichosani, health.

  On the other hand, the Brule Sioux say it was an old woman who was chosen to show her people the way to Grandfather Peyote, the sacred medicine that bestows health and power. Another heroine, White Buffalo Woman, was a spirit who took the form of a beautiful maiden in shining white buckskin. She gave the tribes great herds of buffalo and taught them how to worship, how to marry, and how to cook. Her task completed, she walked away, stopped and rolled over, and turned into a black buffalo, a brown one, a red one, and finally into the sacred white buffalo calf.

  Other culture heroines include Changing Woman of the Navajo, Turquoise Woman, White Shell Woman, and the Cheyenne’s Little Sister, who calls the buffalo and feeds the people. The attributes of these heroines are often associated with fertility, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Corn maidens bring the all-nourishing maize and the knowledge of planting. They also invent pottery and basketry, as their association with seeds and grains is also with containers and storage. Women are often in charge of the flint which sparks the first cooking fire.

  The origins of the grand medicine lodge is a prominent part of the creation myth of the Great Lakes region, which features (like many others) a central set of twins, children of the west wind. When Wolf Brother is drowned by evil manitous as he crosses an icy lake, he is brought back to life by the lamentations of Manabozho, White Rabbit, which become the foundation of the lodge. This particular myth has an important characteristic in common with creation stories from further west: the culture hero (or heroes) is at the same time a trickster and a fool. He may breathe life into humans and be responsible for giving them important features of their daily life. But he may also have the lustful or thieving urges that give him his life. “All living things,” one Sioux elder says, “are tied together with a common navel cord”—the tall mountains and streams, the corn and the grazing buffalo, the bravest hero and the deceitful Coyote.

  [WHITE RIVER SIOUX]

  This is a story of Rabbit Boy; in some tribes it is called the story of Blood Clot Man. “As you know,” Jenny Leading Cloud said, “we Indians think of the earth and the whole universe as a never-ending circle, and in this circle man is just another animal. The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers; the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest ant, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find—they are all relatives. We end our prayers with the words mitakuye oyasin—‘all my relations’—and that includes everything that grows, crawls, runs, creeps, hops, and flies on this continent. White people see man as nature’s master and conqueror, but Indians, who are close to nature, know better.”

  In the old, old days, before Columbus “discovered” us, as they say, we were even closer to the animals than we are now. Many people could understand the animal languages; they could talk to a bird, gossip with a butterfly. Animals could change themselves into people, and people into animals. It was a time when the earth was not quite finished, when many kinds of mountains and streams, animals and plants came into being according to nature’s plan.

  In these far-gone days, hidden from us as in a mist, there lived a rabbit—a very lively, playful, good-hearted rabbit. One day this rabbit was walking, enjoying himself, when he came across a clot of blood. How it got there, nobody knows. It looked like a blister, a little bladder full of red liquid. Well, the playful rabbit began toying with that clot of blood, kicking it around as if it were a tiny ball.

  Now, we Indians believe in Takuskanskan, the mysterious power of motion. Its spirit is in anything that moves. It animates things and makes them come alive. Well, the rabbit got into this strange moving power without even knowing it, and the motion of being kicked around, or rather the spirit of the motion—and I hope you can grasp what I mean by that—began to work on the little blob of blood so that it took shape, forming a little gut. The rabbit kicked it some more, and the blob began to grow tiny hands and arms. The rabbit kept nudging it, and suddenly it had eyes and a beating heart. In this way the rabbit, with the help of the mysterious moving power, formed a human being, a little boy. The rabbit called him We-Ota-Wichasha, Much-Blood Boy, but he is better known as Rabbit Boy.

  The rabbit took him to his wife, and both of them loved this strange little boy as if he were their only son. They dressed him up in a beautiful buckskin shirt, which they painted with the sacred red color and decorated with designs made of porcupine quills. The boy grew up happily among the rabbits. When he was almost a man, the old rabbit took him aside and said: “Son, I must tell you that you are not what you think you are—a rabbit like me. You are a human. We love you and we hate to let you go, but you must leave and find your own people.”

  Rabbit Boy started walking until he came to a village of human beings, where he saw boys who looked like himself. He went into the village. The people could not help staring at this strange boy in his beautiful buckskin clothes. “Where are you from?” they asked him. “I am from another village,” said Rabbit Boy, though this was not true. There was no other village in the whole world, for as I told you, the earth was still in its beginning.

  In the village was a beautiful girl who fell in love with Rabbit Boy, not only for his fine clothes, but also for his good looks and kind heart. Her people, too, wanted him to marry into the village, wanted a man with his great mystery power to live among them. And Rabbit Boy had a vision. In it he was wrestling with the sun, racing the sun, playing hand games with the sun—and always winning.

  But, Iktome, the wicked Spider Man, the mean trickster, prankster, and witch doctor, wanted that beautiful girl for himself. He began to say bad things about Rabbit Boy. “Look at him,” Iktome said, “showing off his buckskin outfit to us who are too poor to have such fine things.” And to the men he also said: “How come you’re letting him marry a girl from your village?” He also told them: “In case you want me to, I have a magic hoop to throw over that Rabbit Boy. It will make him helpless.”

  Several boys said, “Iktome is right.” They were jealous of Rabbit Boy on account of his strange power, his wisdom and generosity. They began to fight him, and Spider Man threw his magic hoop over him. Though it had no effect on Rabbit Boy, he pretended to be helpless to amuse himself.

  The village boys and young men tied Rabbit Boy to a tree with rawhide thongs. All the time, the evil Spider Man was encouraging them: “Let’s take our butchering knives and cut him up!”

  “Friends, kola-pila,” said Rabbit Boy, “if you are going to kill me, let me sing my death song first.” And he sang:

  Friends, friends,

  I have fought the sun.

  He tried to burn me up,

  But he could not do it.

  Even battling the sun,

  I held my own.

  After the death song, the villagers killed Rabbit Boy and cut him up into chunks of meat, which they put in a soup pot. But Rabbit Boy was not hurt easily. A storm arose, and a great cloud hid the face of the sun, turning everything into black night.

  When the cloud was gone, the chunks of meat had disappeared without a trace. But those who had watched closely had seen the chunks forming up again into a body, had seen him going up to heaven on a beam of sunlight. A wise old medicine man said, “This Rabbit Boy really has powerful medicine: he has gone up to see the sun. Soon he will come back stronger than before, because up there he will be given the sun’s power. Let’s marry him to that girl of ours.”

  But the jealous spider, Iktome, said, “Why bother about him? Look at me: I am much more powerful than Rabbit Boy! Here, tie me up too; cut me up! Be quick!” Iktome thought he remembered Rabbit Boy’s song. He thought there was power in it—magic strength. But Iktome did not remember the words right. He sang:

  Friends, friends,

  I have fought the moon,

  She tried to fight,

  But I won.

  Even battling the moon,

  I came out on top.

  They cut Iktome up, as he had told them, but he never came to life again. T
he spider had finally outsmarted himself. Evil tricksters always do.

  —Told by Jenny Leading Cloud in White River Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 1967, and recorded by Richard Erdoes.

  BLOOD CLOT

  [SOUTHERN UTE]

  Unlike the previous tale, here the baby is born from a clot of buffalo blood and derives his power from the mighty buffalo tribe.

  Long ago a very old man and his wife lived alone and hunted for game, but it was scarce and they were hungry. One day the man discovered some buffalo tracks and followed them to the place where the animal had stopped. There he found only a big clot of blood, which he wrapped in his shirt and carried home.

  The old man told his wife to boil the blood, and she put it into the kettle with water from the creek. But before it came to a boil over the fire, they heard cries inside the kettle. The man ran up to it and pulled out a baby, a little boy, who had somehow formed out of the blood clot.

  The old couple washed the baby and wrapped him up. By the next morning he had grown much larger, and that day he continued to grow until he could crawl about by himself. The second day he was able to walk a little; by the third day he was walking with ease. The couple called him Blood Clot and came to treat him as their son.

  The old man made little arrows so that the child could learn to shoot. Soon Blood Clot needed larger arrows, and with them he began to hunt birds and other small game. He never brought the game home himself, but sent the old man for it. One day Blood Clot returned from hunting and said, “I have killed something with a striped back.” The man went out and fetched an animal a little bigger than a mouse, which he cooked for the three of them. The next day the boy announced, “I have killed a white short-tailed animal.” It was a cottontail, which the man also cooked.