A Brief Guide to Native American Myths and Legends (10 page)

When the white man first came into contact with the Algonquian race it was observed that they held regularly recurring festivals to celebrate the ripening of fruits and grain, and more irregular feasts to mark the return of wildfowl and the hunting season in general. Dances were engaged in, and heroic songs chanted. Indeed, the entire observance appears to have been identical in its general features with the festival of today.

One of the most remarkable of these celebrations is that of the Creeks called the ‘Busk’, a contraction for its native name, Pushkita. Commencing with a rigorous fast which lasts three days, the entire tribe assembles on the fourth day to watch the high-priest produce a new fire by means of friction. From this flame the members of the tribe are supplied, and feasting and dancing are then engaged in for three days. Four logs are arranged in the form of a cross pointing to the four quarters of the earth, and burnt as an offering to the four winds.

The Mandans, a Dakota tribe, each year celebrate as their principal festival the Buffalo Dance, a feast which marks the return of the buffalo-hunting season. Eight men wearing buffalo-skins on their backs, and painted black, red, or white, imitate the actions of buffaloes. Each of them holds a rattle in his right hand and a slender rod six feet long in his left, and carries a bunch of green willow boughs on his back. The ceremony is held at the season of the year when the willow is in full leaf. The dancers take up their positions at four different points of a canoe to represent the four cardinal points of the compass. Two men dressed as grizzly bears stand beside the canoe, growling and threatening to spring upon anyone who interferes with the ceremony. The bystanders throw them pieces of food, which are at once pounced upon by two other men, and carried off by them to the prairie. During the ceremony the old men of the tribe beat upon sacks, chanting prayers for the success of the buffalo-hunt. On the fourth day a man enters the camp in the guise of an evil spirit, and is driven from the vicinity with stones and curses.

The elucidation of this ceremony may perhaps be as follows: From some one of the four points of the compass the buffalo must come; therefore all are requested to send goodly supplies. The men dressed as bears symbolize the wild beasts which might deflect the progress of the herds of buffalo toward the territory of the tribe, and therefore must be
placated. The demon who visits the camp after the ceremony is, of course, famine.

The most highly developed North American festival system is that of the Hopi or Moqui of Arizona, the observances of which are almost of a theatrical nature. All the Pueblo Indians, of whom the Hopi are a division, possess similar festivals, which recur at various seasons or under the auspices of different totem clans or secret societies. Most of these ‘dances’ are arranged by the Katcina clan, and take place in dance-houses known as
kivas.
These ceremonies have their origin in the universal reverence shown to the serpent in America – a reverence based on the idea that the symbol of the serpent, tail in mouth, represented the round, full sun of August. In the summer ‘dances’ snake-charming feats are performed, but in the Katcina ceremony serpents are never employed.

Devil-dances are by no means uncommon among the Indians. The purpose of these is to drive evil spirits from the vicinity of the tribe.

The native American priesthood, whether known as medicine-men,
shamans
, or wizards, were in most tribes a caste apart, exercising not only the priestly function, but those of physician and prophet as well. The name ‘medicine-men’, therefore, is scarcely a misnomer. They were skilled in the handling of occult forces such as hypnotism, and thus exercised unlimited sway over the rank and file of the tribe. But we shall first consider them in their religious aspect. In many of the Indian tribes the priesthood was a hereditary office; in others it was obtained through natural fitness or revelation in dreams. With the Cherokees, for example, the seventh son of a family was usually marked out as a suitable person for the priesthood. As a rule the religious body did not share in the general life of the tribe, from which to a great
degree it isolated itself. For example, Bartram in his
Travels in the Carolinas
describes the younger priests of the Creeks as being arrayed in white robes, and carrying on their heads or arms ‘a great owl-skin stuffed very ingeniously as an insignia of wisdom and divination. These bachelors are also distinguishable from the other people by their taciturnity, grave and solemn countenance, dignified step, and singing to themselves songs or hymns in a low, sweet voice as they stroll about the towns.’ To add to the feeling of awe which they inspired among the laymen of the tribe, the priests conversed with one another in a secret tongue. Thus the magical formulae of some of the Algonquin priests were not in the ordinary language, but in a dialect of their own invention. The Choctaws, Cherokees, and Zuñi employed similar esoteric dialects, all of which are now known to be merely modifications of their several tribal languages, fortified with obsolete words, or else mere borrowings from the idioms of other tribes.

It was, however, as healers that the medicine-men were pre-eminent. The Indian assigns all illness or bodily discomfort to supernatural agency. He cannot comprehend that indisposition may arise within his own system, but believes that it must necessarily proceed from some external source. Some supernatural being whom he has offended, the soul of an animal which he has slain, or perhaps a malevolent sorcerer, torments him. If the bodies of mankind were not afflicted in this mysterious manner their owners would endure forever. When the Indian falls sick he betakes himself to a medicine-man, to whom he relates his symptoms, at the same time acquainting him with any circumstances which he may suspect of having brought about his condition. If he has slain a deer and omitted the usual formula of placation afterward he suspects that the spirit of the beast is actively harming him. Should he have shot a bird and have subsequently observed any of the same species near his dwelling, he will almost
invariably conclude that they were bent on a mission of vengeance and have by some means injured him. The medicine-man, in the first instance, may give his patient some simple native remedy. If this treatment does not avail he will arrange to go to the sufferer’s lodge for the purpose of making a more thorough examination. Having located the seat of the pain, he will blow upon it several times, and then proceed to massage it vigorously, invoking the while the aid of the natural enemy of the spirit which he suspects is tormenting the sick man. Thus if a deer’s spirit be suspected he will call upon the mountain lion or the Great Dog to drive it away, but if a bird of any of the smaller varieties he will invoke the Great Eagle who dwells in the zenith to slay or devour it. Upon the supposed approach of these potent beings he will become more excited, and, vigorously slapping the patient, will chant incantations in a loud and sonorous voice, which are supposed to hasten the advent of the friendly beings whom he has summoned. At last, producing by sleight of hand an image of the disturbing spirit worked in bone, he calls for a vessel of boiling water, into which he promptly plunges the supposed cause of his patient’s illness. The bone figure is withdrawn from the boiling water after a space, and on being examined may be found to have one or more scores on its surface. Each of these shows that it has already slain its man, and the patient is assured that had the native Aesculapius not adopted severe measures the malign spirit would have added him to the number of its victims.

Should these methods not result in a cure, others are resorted to. The patient is regaled with the choicest food and drink, while incantations are chanted and music performed to frighten away the malign influences.

The priestly class is not given to levying exorbitant fees upon its patients. As a rule the Indian medicine-man strongly resents any allusion to a fee. Should the payment be of a perishable nature, such as food, he usually shares it with his
relatives, brother-priests, or even his patients, but should it consist of something that may be retained, such as cloth, teeth necklaces, or skins, he will carefully hoard it to afford provision for his old age. The Indian practitioner is strongly of opinion that white doctors are of little service in the cure of native illnesses. White medicine, he says, is good only for white men, and Indian medicine for the red man; in which conclusion he is probably justified.

In many Indian myths we read how the
shamans
, singly or in companies, seek the Spirit-land, either to search for the souls of those who are ill, but not yet dead, or to seek advice from supernatural beings. These thaumaturgical practices were usually undertaken by three medicine-men acting in concert. Falling into a trance, in which their souls were supposed to become temporarily disunited from their bodies, they would follow the track of the sick man’s spirit into the spirit-world. The order in which they travelled was determined by the relative strength of their guardian spirits, those with the strongest being first and last, and he who had the weakest being placed in the middle. If the sick man’s track turned to the left they said he would die, but if to the right, he would recover. From the trail they could also divine whether any supernatural danger was near, and the foremost priest would utter a magic chant to avert such evils if they came from the front, while if the danger came from the rear the incantation was sung by the priest who came last. Generally their sojourn occupied one or two nights, and, having rescued the soul of the patient, they returned to place it in his body.

Not only was the
shaman
endowed with the power of projecting his own ‘astral body’ into the Land of Spirits. By placing cedar-wood charms in the hands of persons who had not yet received a guardian spirit he could impart to them his clairvoyant gifts, enabling them to visit the Spirit-land and make any observations required by him.

The souls of chiefs, instead of following the usual route, went directly to the sea-shore, where only the most gifted
shamans
could follow their trail. The sea was regarded as the highway to the supernatural regions. A sick man was in the greatest peril at high water, but when the tide was low the danger was less.

The means adopted by the medicine-men to lure ghosts away from their pursuit of a soul was to create an ‘astral’ deer. The ghosts would turn from hunting the man’s soul to follow that of the beast.

It cannot be said that the religious sense was exceptionally strong in the mind of the North American Indian. But this was due principally to the stage of culture at which he stood, and in some cases still stands. In man in his savage or barbarian condition the sense of reverence as we conceive it is small, and its place is largely filled by fear and superstition. It is only at a later stage, when civilizing influences have to some extent banished the grosser terrors of animism and fetishism, that the gods reveal themselves in a more spiritual aspect.

* * *

Native American creation myths fall into two broad categories, of which the primeval flood myth is the most widespread, being found everywhere but Alaska and parts of the Southwest. In this, standardly myth a water creature – such as the Algonquin’s Muskrat – plunges to the depths of the sea and returns with a mouthful of mud that becomes the earth, this often supported on the back of a Giant Turtle. Since ‘the Earth Diver’ myth also exists in Asia, it can be hypothesized that the Native American versions are echoes of the ancient Asian originals.

Meanwhile, some Plains tribes, as well as the Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the Southwest have a concept of creation in which life emerges from the earth, not unlike a plant sprouting from the
ground. In the Navajo emergence story it is related how insects climbed up from the Red World to the Blue World, where the birds lived. When this world became too crowded, the insects and birds flew up to the Yellow World, where they found people and animals. When food became scarce, the people, animals, birds, and insects flew up into the Black and White World of night and day. There they found people already created by the gods, and these people taught the newcomers how to farm and to survive. Meanwhile, in the Hopi emergence myth Spider-Woman, a powerful earth goddess, sang a duet with Tawa, the sun-god; Spider-Woman was able to weave the Tawa’s thoughts into solid form, creating fish, birds and other animals, including humans. Spider-Woman then divided the humans into groups, and led them to their homelands, after which she disappeared back into the earth, down through a whirlpool of sand. Among the people of Acoma Pueblo, it is told that the sisters Iatiku and Nautsiti emerged from a hole in the ground, Sipapu, and when Nautsiti was tempted away by the evil Snake, Iatiku bore many children, each of which became an Acoma clan. In the religion of the Pueblo tribes, the emergence myth is physically reincarnated in the construction of the kiva, a sacred underground chamber for worship.

The absence of a primeval flood in the cosmology of the Hopi and Navajo is not difficult to account for. Little about the arid Southwest would ever suggest that a deluge could swamp the earth. Equally, the inclusion of a diluvian motif in the creation myths of the Apache – the Jicarilla, for instance, believed humans emerged from underground on to an earth almost wholly covered by water – despite sharing the same desiccated environment as the Pueblo peoples is easily explained. The Apache were Athapaskan-speakers who had only moved to the Southwest from Canada in the 1500s.

It is important to register that, because it cannot be reconciled with their creation myths, many Native Americans deny the Bering Strait migration theory.

Several Native American mythologies, that of the Apache included, have a high deity, who is creator of the world. Where such a creator ‘Great Spirit’ exists he/she rarely, however, does the full
work of creation alone, but disappears to heaven, and allows lesser gods to complete the project and supervise the workings of the planet. These secondary gods are often personifications of natural forces and elements, such as the wind. In the mythology of the Iroquois people, for example, the thunder-god Hunin is a warrior who shoots arrows of fire.