Native American Folktales (Background)

Just to brush up on our geography, I thought that I'd post a map of the Pacific Northwest, the part of our country where the Coyote Tales we read came from.  (The map is from Sheppard/Wood Distributors, a commercial warehouse and distribution company from Boise.)

Below is a map of Idaho itself from the Eastern Idaho Interagency Fire Center.


"Coyote and Bull" and "Coyote and the Mallard Ducks" came from the Nez Perce, so I thought I would begin with a little information about this people, but while we are posting maps, I will post a map of the territory held by the Nez Perce in the 19th century.  This map is from the Chief Washakie Foundation's web site.


Adam Kittleson's article from Minnesota State University at Mankato's E-museum is a good place to begin. 

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/northamerica/nez_perce.html

This history is from the Nez Perce tribal government's official website:

http://www.nezperce.org/content/history/nimiipu.htm

http://www.nezperce.org/Official/historyfaq.htm

For more detailed information, see this article by Deward E. Walker, Jr. and Peter N. Jones:

http://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/walker.html

The Nez Perce were also among the many peoples that the Lewis and Clark Expedition met on their way to the Pacific Ocean.

http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/nez.html

The Nez Perce were also known for their Appaloosa horses:

http://www.nezperce.com/npedu13a.html

If you don't know what an Appaloosa horse looks like, here is a picture below. The picture is a public domain photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Chief Joseph (1840-1904) was also one of the most famous Nez Perce.  For his story, see this link:  http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/chiefjoseph.htm

This biography is also interesting:

http://www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/chiefjoseph/chiefjoseph01.htm

The picture of Chief Joseph below is from Wikimedia Commons.  It was taken in 1900, towards the end of his life and long after he had surrendered to the United States.



Here Jeff Head writes about his travels along the Nez Perce trail.  The pictures are beautiful!

http://www.jeffhead.com/magruder/index.htm

On to the Wishram, the people who gave us "Coyote and Eagle in the Land of the Dead."  They once lived along the Columbia River, the border between Oregon and Washington.  At one point, they were relocated to the Yakama Reservation, about 100 miles north of this area.

As you may see from this free map from the Map Company, quite a few groups lived in this area.  The map below shows where the Wishram live now as part of the Yakama Confederation.



Here is a little more information about the Wishram:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_tribes_064_13_33.html

http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/wis.html

For more information about the Yakama Nation, see this site.  Scroll down past the ads for an interesting article.

http://www.ohwy.com/wa/y/yakamana.htm

Below is a Wikimedia Commons picture of Wishram petroglyphs at a site called Wishram Village.  It is now part of a national park near The Dalles, Oregon.


Scroll down for more information about Wishram Village or Nixluidix:

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMYPK

The picture below is from www.waymarking.com. 



The story of She Who Watches is also from the Wishram:

http://www.lensjoy.com/gallery/20.htm

The photo below is by Chris Carvalho.


With the Shoshone and "Wolf Tricks the Coyote Trickster," we return to Idaho.  Finding a map for the Shoshone is particularly difficult since their one-time territory was so large.  The map below is from Boise State University's magazine Idaho Issues Online.  Here are a few pieces to put together, but I will provide only an overview and focus on the Shoshone within Idaho since the story about Wolf and Coyote is from the Lemhi-Shoshone.





For more information about the Shoshone, see these sites:

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lewisandclark/record_tribes_017_11_8.html

This site also includes audiofiles as well:

http://www.wisdomoftheelders.org/program301.html

Lewis and Clark's guide Sacajawea was a member of the Shoshone although she had been kidnapped away from her tribe and sold into slavery.  The illustration below is from the Chief Washakie Foundation's website.

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/sacajawea_001.htm


Here is a web article on Chief Washakie, an Eastern Shoshone chief who lived into the 20th century.

http://www.windriverhistory.org/exhibits/washakie_2/index.htm

Below is a picture of Idaho's Snake River, along which the Shoshone lived.  This picture came from the University of Montana-Missoula's Regional Learning Project.

Leslie Marmon Silko (whose poems I read on Monday) is descended from the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico.  As we learned from reading "Franz Boas' Visit," she also has white ancestry.  The map below is from Prof. S.J. Crouthamel's site for his course, Introduction to American Indian Studies at Palomar College.



The Pueblo is a much larger group, but I thought I'd begin with an overview.

  http://www.cabq.gov/aes/s3pueblo.html

Writing in 1932, James Paytiamo explains how the Laguna Pueblo came to be and were named.

http://southwestcrossroads.org/record.php?num=508

This history is more formal and less anecdotal:

http://southwestcrossroads.org/record.php?num=665

Here is a picture of the Laguna Pueblo from teacher Nancy Lopez's site at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque, NM.


This profile essay on Leslie Marmon Silko also gives you a little background on the Laguna Pueblo.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/woman.html

Here is an extended interview with Ms. Marmon Silko:

http://www.altx.com/interviews/silko.html

The Laguna Pueblo are also known for their pottery:

http://www.clayhound.us/sites/laguna.htm

The picture below is also from www.clayhound.us .


I will finish up with information about the Anishinaabe, Gerald Vizenor's background.  This people lives in the upper Midwest, in Minnesota.  Specifically, Vizenor is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation (see the map from Native Wiki further below).

For more information about the Minnesota Chippewa, see the site below:

http://www.mnchippewatribe.org/a_brief_history.htm

This site has quite a bit of information about the White Earth Reservation:

http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/mn/whitearth.htm
With our current interest in biodiversity and local food, the wild rice has become more and more important:

http://www.savewildrice.org/history

A branch of the Anishinaabe are based in Canada.  Anishinaabe-Canadian Norval Morisseau's work is depicted below.  I found this image at virtualmuseum.ca , an online collection of images from Canada's museums.

 

Study Guide for Final (Summer 2009) -- part 2

(The picture above is from Lore and Saga, a British site for teachers and museum educators.)

Monday we covered the folktale, a part of world literature that draws on orality, local traditions, and the art of storytelling.  We looked at European and Native American folktales.  The European folktales were Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin" (1697 -- long 18th century) and the Brothers Grimm's "All Kinds of Fur" (1819 -- 19th century).  The Native American folktales were "Coyote and Bull" and "Coyote and the Mallard Ducks" (Nez Perce) as well as "Coyote and Eagle Go to the Land of the Dead" (Wishram) and "The Wolf Tricks the Coyote Trickster" (Shoshone).  We also discussed Gerald Vizenor's "Shadows" (1994), a literary short story that examines storytelling (Bagese's game of wanaki and her mistrust of writing) and I.B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" (1945), a short story that one might mistake for a folktale.


Here are the videos that I would have liked to have shown in class!
Here are links to the videos I wanted to show today. The first is a link to one of the more politically correct Bugs Bunny cartoons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM5Gwzk3Vfc

The next pits Bugs against Wile E. Coyote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr47amcDU4I

Now here are videos of the storytellers. The first is Len Cabral, a New England storyteller whom I've seen perform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhoYeJPNC88

Robert Clements' performance also includes music and song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beYSvSOe1K0

Here is a video from the Manchester Museum in the UK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQXOR-KZxO4

Gregg Howard is a Cherokee storyteller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlHtzU133NI

A schoolteacher videotaped a shadow play that he put on for his students. BTW, he said that the Coyote Tales were for the winter time only. Was that why we had our computer problems today?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjUlyarH9F0

How do these videos help you understand Monday's folktales more?

Below is a picture of a Lakota storyteller, Kevin Locke.  He also performs the hoop dance and traditional Lakota flute songs.  He is based in South Dakota, and the picture below is from The South Dakota Arts Council's web site.


Below is a picture of Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce chief who figures in US History.  The picture is from the website of Dr. Daniel N. Paul, a journalist and historian from the Mi'Kmaq.


Tuesday we watched two of the storytelling videos in class (Len Cabral and the shadow play).  The shadow play was held at a school on the Navajo reservation, so it adds another culture to our mix.  The Navajo, by the way, were raiders...kind of like their Coyote.

We then moved on to poetry, focusing on masculinity and femininity.  The poems we discussed included the excerpts from Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino, Anne Sexton's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Bettina Judd's very recent "Gender Bend/Sankofa," Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," and Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz."  We also listened to Anne Sexton's "Her Kind":

 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15297

I wish I could find a picture of Anne Sexton with her backup band, "Her Kind"!

Recently, Ms. Sexton has been the subject of an opera.  For more information about this opera, see the blog entry below:

http://www.scene4.com/karrenlalondealenier/2007/04/transformations_an_opera_that_1.html

We won't be able to listen to Walt Whitman reading "I Hear America Singing," but here are a few links to others reading it.  The first reader is Garrison Keillor.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2002/07/04

The other is poet Billy Collins.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100010968/default.html

The picture below is Thomas Eakins' painting of Walt Whitman.  I found it at Washington College's web site.



Here are links to the versions of Snow White that we looked at.  The first version is from 1812.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html#snowwhite

The other is from 1857.

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html

Finally, here is a synopsis of Disney's Snow White (1937).

http://www.filmsite.org/snow.html

The illustration below is from 1911, predating Disney's film by a few years.  It is from Heidi Anne Heiner's site, SurLaLune Fairy Tales.



By the way, after doing a little research, I found out that Okot p'Bitek's mother's name was Lawino and that she encouraged his interest in Acholi culture.  Below is a picture of an Acholi courtship dance from John Paul Aporu's web site.  Mr. Aporu is a Ugandan currently studying in Austria.



If you would like to learn more about Okot p'Bitek's life, here are a few good sites:

http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/pbitek.htm

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pbitek.htm

By the way, both of his daughters are writers as well.  In 2008, Jane Musoke-Nteyafas interviewed his younger daughter, Juliane Bitek.

http://ugpulse.com/articles/daily/Literature.asp?id=997

The picture below is from the web site of Robert de Beaugrande, a linguistics professor, most recently at a university in Slovenia.



Wednesday we continued discussing poetry, focusing on representations of childhood as well as on form and content.  When focusing on representations of childhood, I asked the following questions:

-- what light do representations of childhood shed on the author's culture?

-- what light do representations of childhood shed on the author's time period?

-- what light do representations of childhood shed on genre? 

The poems covered in class were Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night" (a villanelle), Gwendolyn Brooks' "the rites for cousin vit" (a sonnet), Philip Levine's "M. Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit 1942," Charles Simic's "The Prodigy," William Blake's "Holy Thursday" (from Songs of Experience), and E. Ethelbert Miller's "Looking for Omar."  For more information about the villanelle, see this link:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796

For more information about the sonnet, see this link:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html

And if you'd like to see an example of Edgar Degas' work, here is his Ballet Dancers in the Wings (1900), which I found on Wikipedia.  The medium is pastel rather than paint.



In addition, we watched two presentations.  Tiffany's topic was Taiwan and its culture; Julie's was Cambodia.  The first picture is of a night market in Taipei, also from Wikipedia.



Below is a picture of Angkor Wat, Cambodia's capital during the Khmer Empire.  This picture is also from Wikipedia.


Thursday was our last day.  For the most part, it was devoted to preparation and presentations.  James and his cousin gave a presentation on Liberia, specifically its civil war and its effects on the nation.  Here is a link to the video that they showed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMyo2SUm4Y

As James mentioned, this video covers both sides of the conflict: the rebel army (LURD) and President Charles Taylor's.  Individuals from both sides are interviewed, and you get to hear the child soldiers psych themselves up.

The picture below is from Every Day Should Be Saturday, which is generally a blog about football.  The blog's author, Orson Swindle (aka Spencer Hall), however, works in International Affairs, which probably explains the photo from Liberia.


Young presented on A Doll's House, focusing on Ibsen's career and introducing us to a new modern adaptation.

 
Then Xirui and Ming presented on Chinese Wu Shu or martial arts.  The schools that they focused on were Nanquan, Tong Bei Quan, O Mei Quan, and Tai Chi Quan.  They also discussed Wuxia, a type of fiction about martial arts adventures and showed us clips of theatrical and film adaptations of these works.  The picture of a graphic novel illustration below is from Wikipedia.




We also discussed Ruben Dario's poems "To Roosevelt" and "Walt Whitman."  Note that he wrote "Walt Whitman" much earlier.  The painting below is of Theodore Roosevelt, and it is also from Wikipedia.