A History of American Literature

4 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Native American Oral Traditions

If Columbus thought some of his Indians were close to Paradise, then some of those

Indians thought they came from heaven. Or so Columbus said. Some of the native

inhabitants themselves tell a different story. Among some Native Americans of

the Southeast, for example, there was the legend that white people came across the water

to visit them. Treated hospitably, the whites then disappeared, leaving behind them only

“a keg of something which we know was whiskey.” The people began smelling it, tasting

it, then “some went so far as to drink a little,” whereupon “they began to reel and

stagger and butt each other with their heads.” It was then that the white people came

back for their real purpose: trade. Other Native Americans related the Europeans to

their own myths of origin. Among the inhabitants of the Southeast, the Yuchis were

not unusual in calling themselves “offspring of the sun.” If they were from the sun,

then, the Yuchis felt, the whites clearly originated from the sea. “It was out upon the

ocean,” Yuchi legend goes. “Some sea-foam formed against a big log floating there.

Then a person emerged from the sea-foam and crawled out upon the log.” This was a

white man. “Another person crawled up, on the other side of the log.” This was a white

woman. After meetings on sea and land, many more white people came “with a great

many ships.” They told the Yuchis “that their land was very strong and fertile” and

asked them “to give a portion that they might live on it.” The Yuchis agreed, the tale

concludes, “the white people came to shore, and they have lived there ever since.”

When we read Native American texts, with all due acknowledgment that what we

are reading is a text and a translation, certain themes and preoccupations tend to

recur. There are stories of world creation and the evolution of the sun, moon, and

stars; there are tales of human and cultural emergence, involving the discovery of ritu-

als or resources such as corn, buffalo, horses, salt, tobacco, or peyote vital to the tribe.

There are the legends of culture heroes, sometimes related to history such as Hiawatha,

sometimes purely mythic like the recurring figures of twin brothers; and, not unre-

lated to this, there are stories of tricksters, such as Coyote, Rabbit, and Spider Man.

There are, invariably, tales of love and war, animals and spirits, mythic versions of a

particular tribal history and mythic explanations of the geography, the place where

the tribe now lives. Along with myths of origin, the evolution of the world out of water

and primal mud, there are also myths of endings, although very often the ending is

simply the prelude to another beginning. In one tale told among the Brule Sioux, for

example, the “Creating Power” is thinking of other endings and beginnings even while

he is creating our present world and telling the people “what tribes they belonged to.”

“This is the third world I have made,” he declares. “The first world I made was bad; the

creatures on it were bad. So I burned it up.” “The second world I made was bad too. So

I burned it up.” “If you make this world bad and ugly,” he warns the men and women

he has fashioned out of mud, “then I will destroy this world too. It’s up to you.” Then:

The Creating Power gave the people the pipe. “Live by it,” he said. He named this land

the Turtle Continent because it was there that the turtle came up with the mud out of

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