Midterm Study Guide pt. 1

This study guide will be devoted to our Native American readings.

We began the semester by looking at a number of trickster tales.  See Prof. K.L. Nichols' site for a description of the trickster:

http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html#introduction

Librarian, music teacher, and children's author S.E. Schlosser's site has more of a definition:

http://www.americanfolklore.net/tricksters.html

Note that the trickster is not limited to Native American literature, but in EN 211, we will focus on the Native American tricksters: Coyote (S.W. & N.W. America), Raven (N.W. America as far as Alaska!), and Rabbit (S.E. America). 

We discussed the following stories about Coyote.

Here is a link to  "Coyote and Bull," a story from the Nez Perce tribe.

http://www.ucan-online.org/legend.asp?legend=5913&category=8

"The Origin of Eternal Death" is also known by the Wishram as "Coyote and Eagle go to the Land of the Dead"

http://www.native-languages.org/wishramstory.htm

In this story from the Shoshone, Wolf tricks Coyote:

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/legend_001.htm

Is the Native American Coyote like Looney Tunes' Coyote?  Or are they quite different?

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

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

Or is Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes' Trickster?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvXEElJFR6g



The Raven above comes from the Tlingit, but the story ("Raven and His Grandmother") that we read comes from the Aleut:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore27.html


The picture above is from a retelling of an African story.

Closer to us geographically is "Rabbit and Fox," an Iroquois story:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore40.html

"How Rabbit Brought Fire to the People" is a Creek story:
http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore61.html

We also discussed orality, the features of stories (and other discourse) that arise when a culture has no written language.  These features may include reliance on performance and key phrases, episodic qualities, flat characters who act rather than reflect, and a flexible, pragmatic past.  See this link for Art Bingham's review of Father Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy:   http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html  If you are going to continue with literary studies, I hope that you will be able to read Fr. Ong's book someday!

See this link from the Milwaukee Public Museum for more information about oral tradition, specifically in Native American cultures:

http://www.mpm.edu/WIRP/ICW-14.html



Then we moved on to the creation myth.  The first group of readings were "The Origins of Folk Stories," a Seneca (upstate NY) story, and "How the World Was Made," a Cherokee creation myth.  (The picture above is a sketch of a Seneca longhouse, which I found at SUNY Geneseo's Rochester Young Scholars Academy.  For more information, you may go to this page on longhouses in general:  http://scott.k12.va.us/martha2/longhouses.htm .  It is by Martha Vermillion, a teacher of Virginia history in Scott County.) 

We also watched some videos of storytellers:

First is the video of Len Cabral:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhoYeJPNC88

See this link for DZApache's video of "How Coyote Got His Cunning":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EraMx3PgU4g

You may also enjoy this production of "Coyote and Horned Toad" from a middle school in Arizona:

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

We also watched the following videos from Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=58586975

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=58587247

The basket above is an Akimel O'odham basket that New Mexico's Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian auctioned off recently.

The next group of readings were the Akimel O'odham's "The Story of the Creation" and the Seneca story of "The Woman Who Fell From the Sky." Since "The Woman Who Fell From the Sky" is not in our book, see this link to read it:

http://www.indianlegend.com/seneca/seneca_003.htm

We also discussed the following essay by N. Scott Momaday, a Native American novelist: "The Becoming of the Native Man in America before Columbus."  Momaday is a member of the Kiowa people.  Below is an early 20th c. painting by a Kiowa.

See this link for more background on the various Native American peoples:

http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/125/Native_American_Folktales_Background>Native American Folktales (Background)

Map of Rowlandson's Removes

Link

Above is a link to a map of Mary Rowlandson's journey while she was a captive.  Zeynep found this map.  Below is a map of the Northeast (including New England)  in case you need it.  Hooray for Mapquest and Brewster Academy!

Readings (Trickster Tales)

Here are the Native American stories about Coyote:

Here is a link to "Coyote and Bull," a story from the Nez Perce tribe.

http://www.ucan-online.org/legend.asp?legend=5913&category=8

"Coyote as Medicine Man" is also known as "Coyote and the Mallard Ducks":

http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/Coyote-And-The-Mallard-Ducks-NezPerce.html

"The Origin of Eternal Death" is also known as "Coyote and Eagle go to the Land of the Dead"

http://www.native-languages.org/wishramstory.htm

In this story from the Shoshone, Wolf tricks Coyote:

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/legend_001.htm

Here is another Raven story ("Raven and His Grandmother") from the Aleut:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore27.html

Closer to us geographically is "Rabbit and Fox," an Iroquois story:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore40.html

"How Rabbit Brought Fire to the People" is a Creek story:
http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore61.html

Enjoy!

Dr. Szlyk

More Creation Myths

We will start off EN 211 with some Native American creation myths, so I thought that I would post a few sites that my students in last semester's mythology class found.  Not all of these myths are from the Americas, however.

The picture above is of Bill Reid's sculpture of Raven and the First Men, a creation myth from the Haida nation, a people from Canada's Pacific Northwest.  The sculpture is now in Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology.

Let's begin with an overview from Worldhistory.net, a British site.  This overview will give you the differences and the similarities between various creation myths (Greece, Japan, The Bible's, and so on).

http://historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab83

Wikipedia's overview is more extensive with many more examples. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth

In fact, you may find the Haida's creation myth here, explaining the sculpture above & below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth#Haida


You may also enjoy this creation myth from Hawaii:

http://www.mythome.org/hawaiicreation.html

Here is a picture of the goddess Pele from Twisted Cocktail Party Physics, a blog.

These Cherokee myths recount the origins of various parts of creation like game animals, corn, and medicinal plants.

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore80.html

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore82.html

Being a New Englander, I have to include the Mik'Maq's creation story:

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore21.html

As a point of comparison to the Native American creation myths, here is a link to a retelling of the Greek creation myth.  The article was originally posted at Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080424092313/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths_16.html

In addition, here is a link to a retelling of Genesis' creation myth, also originally from Williams College's web site.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080430155831/http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths
/myths_15.html

The picture below is one of British poet and artist William Blake's illustrations from Paradise Lost.  In this illustration, Satan is spying on Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  This picture is from Wikipedia, and the illustration itself is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Or you may prefer to read the Japanese creation myth of Izanagi and Izanami, a story that my student found to be beautiful yet tragic.

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Iz-Le/Izanagi-and-Izanami.html

Below is a contemporary illustration of this story by Gospodar Svemira, which I found at Wikipedia.

To put these stories into perspective, you may want to look at what Joseph Campbell and others have had to say on myths and sacred tales:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/perspectives1.html

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 (Spring 2008) -- part 4b (poetry in English & song)

And then there are the poems written in English...I'm not sure where the poems from the Nuyorican anthology would fit, and I forget whether Michael Ondatjee wrote his poems in English or another language.

We began our unit on poetry, discussing some Romantic poets and their poems (excerpts from Lord Byron's mock-epic Don Juan, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Keats' beautiful "Eve of St. Agnes"--the image above is Holman Hunt's painting of a scene from that poem).  In the section of "Don Juan" that we read, Juan has landed on an island where he and Haidee, the daughter of a pirate king, will fall in love.  Juan is no innocent as he is escaping from his (discovered) affair with an older woman.  Byron plays with the conventions of the epic, especially as he goes off track, discoursing on "wine and women, mirth and laughter."  We also discussed Coleridge and Keats' narrative poems.  Although I did not mention it that day, the concept of medievalism is important here.

We moved onto Walt Whitman's poetry from Leaves of Grass, a collection that he revised throughout his adult life (Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892).  Two poems that we looked at were "I Hear America Singing," for its inclusiveness (that Ruben Dario later plays on) and  "O Captain!  My Captain," a more conventional eulogy to Abraham Lincoln.  We discussed whether or not these poems could be sung with accompaniment.  (We had just watched the tape of Coleman Barks' performance.)  "O Captain!  My Captain!" also seems like it would be easy to memorize!

For a contrast, later, we looked at poems by Native American writers Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko.  These seemed to be harder to read, and it became harder for us to say what was poetic about them.  These poems were Gunn Allen's "Pocahontas, to her English Husband, John Rolfe" and the ironic "Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins" (about the poet's taking a guest to see her mother and her grandmother at their high rise apartment) as well as Marmon Silko's excerpt from The Storyteller in which she retells a Coyote tale told by her white great-grand father.  This time Coyote is not a male trickster but a female victim of another figure's trickery, and her pups die of thirst because of this trickery.  As I reflect on these poems, I remember Ngugi wa Thiong'o's essay on the importance of writing African literature in African (i.e., native) languages.   Should Leslie Marmon Silko or Paula Gunn Allen write their poems in Keresan (the language of the Laguna Pueblo)? 

Mary also brought in some of Billy Collins' poems as well as reading one of her own.  (Her poem, by the way, is in the Advocate.  Congratulations!!)

We also looked at the relationship of poetry and music/popular song, figuring in the concept of orality and the effect of print culture.  Songs that we listened to included three from Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music (the medieval "Sumer is Icumen In" [also parodied by Ezra Pound at one point], the 18th century ballad "Bonnie St. Johnstone," and a cover of Britney Spears' "Oops...").  Here are links to the lyrics of the first two songs:

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/song_o_matic.asp?id=428

http://www.richardthompson-music.com/song_o_matic.asp?id=586

We also listened to English-language and Spanish-language songs by Los Lobos.  Here is a link to the lyrics of the English-language song, "One Time, One Night" from 1987:

http://www.lyricsmania.com/lyrics/los_lobos_lyrics_5296/by_the_light_of_the_moon_lyrics_16979/one_time_one_night_lyrics_196225.html

These are the Spanish lyrics of their version of "Volver, Volver":

http://www.lyricsdir.com/los-lobos-volver-volver-lyrics.html

We also listened to songs by The Mighty Sparrow, a famous calypso singer from Trinidad.  Is he a trickster or an acute social observer?

Here is Billboard.com's catalog entry for Early Flight, the album that I brought in.  (We listened to "Sailor Man," "Dear Sparrow," and "Russian Satellite.")

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/discography/index.jsp?JSESSIONID=DK1KH51JV1XMm1zXTgqTHdYFLnWy1bXQPTmY9b4pm0hdvLTzxy1d!87636624&pid=3875&aid=742126

I will let you look for his videos on YouTube!  Good night!

Coyote (and Other Tricksters)

Native American literature is known not only for creation myths but also for trickster figures such as Coyote, Raven, and Rabbit. The picture of the coyote above is from Wikimedia Commons.

To begin with, here is the site where I found the Mayan tale "Coyote and The Hen" and the story of "Coyote's Adventures in Idaho" as well as stories about the other tricksters.  I really like that this site notes where a number of tales come from. 

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/loreindx.html

To find out which stories come from our area, here is a map.  Click on each state to find out which tribes, for example, lived in Maryland.

http://www.native-languages.org/states.htm

On the other hand, this page lists the names of the tribes. 

http://www.native-languages.org/languages.htm#alpha

Here a professor from Pittsburg State University in Kansas discusses the trickster in Native American culture.  This site also contains links to various tribes' stories about Coyote. 

http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html

The author of this site from the College of the Siskiyous in California discusses Native American traditional prose narratives in general:

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/index.htm

(The picture above is from Trinity University's online journal on trickster studies.)

For more detailed information, see Wyman P. Meinzer's contribution to a 1995 symposium on the coyote in the American Southwest:

http://texnat.tamu.edu/symposia/coyote/p30.htm

Here are a few more stories about Coyote:

http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/wa.html

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/legend_001.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/flood.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/coyote.htm

  

Other trickster figures are Raven and Rabbit.  As you will see below, different tribes in different regions had their tricksters.  The picture of Raven is from the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation's website:

For more information about Gordon Miller's watercolor, see this link below: 

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/nwca/nwcam11e.shtml

In the Southeastern U.S., Rabbit was the trickster.   The picture below is from Professor Tina L. Hanlon's web page on Appalachian Animal Tales/Native American Tales from Appalachia at Ferrum College in Virginia.

Here is a link to Professor Hanlon's article: 

http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/tales/rabbitotter.htm

Then once you move to Africa and the Caribbean, the trickster is Anansi the Spider.  In South Carolina, this figure is called Aunt Nancy.  I wish that I could find a picture of her!

Tricksters appear in other cultures' stories as well.  Reynard the Fox, a figure from French folktales, is depicted below.  (The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons, but it originally appeared in a children's book from the 1860s.)