A History of American Literature

The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 5

which the third world was made. “Someday there might be a fourth world,” the

Creating Power thought. Then he rested.

Beginnings and endings in these tales are sometimes linked to the coming of the

whites: in this case, the ending of peace and primal unity and the beginning of loss

and division. “In the old, old days, before Columbus ‘discovered’ us, as they say,” one

White River Sioux story goes, “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 ani-

mals.” These are common refrains in Native American tales: the vitality and unity of

creation (“The earth was once a human being,” one Okanogan story goes. “Earth is

alive yet.”), the vital thread of language that once connected humans and animals and

the equally vital thread of being that still links them, the belief that this is a universe

of metamorphosis, motion, and mutuality. What gives stories like that of the White

River Sioux an extra edge is this conviction that the white man ruined things, at least

for the time being. To the claim of Columbus that the New World was the earthly

Paradise, the implicit response is, yes it was but you spoiled it. So, in one story told by

the Papago, or Bear People, of the Southwest, the Creator or “Great Mystery Power” is

imagined punishing his people by sending “the locust flying far across the eastern

waters” to summon “a people in an unknown land” whose “face and bodies were full

of hair, who rode astride strange beasts, who were encased in iron, wielding iron

weapons” and “who had magic hollow sticks spitting fire, thunder, and destruction.”

In another, Kiowa tale, the buffalo who “were the life of the Kiowa” finally leave

because of “war between the buffalo and the white man.” Threatened with extinction

at the hands of white soldiers, hunters, and developers, the buffalo retreat into a “green

and fresh” world inside a local mountain “never to be seen again.” “The buffalo saw

that their day was over,” the tale relates; and, since “everything the Kiowas had came

from the buffalo,” the unspoken message is that so too is the day of the Kiowa people.

Stories of apocalypse like this one may rehearse themes and figures common to

Native American tales of many ages – creation from the water, the holy mountain, the

trickster-prophet – but they do clearly pivot on one significant moment of historical

encounter. They are about the time when Columbus “invented America.” Many other

stories are less bound to a specific time and place – although, of course, they are

meant to explain the times and places in which the storytellers live – and among these,

notably, are the stories of origin and emergence. These are often complex, symbolic

narratives that characteristically project the tribal understanding of the origins of the

earth and its people, confirm the fundamental relationships between the different

elements of creation from the sun to the humblest plant, define the roles and rituals

of the tribe, account for the distinctive climate and terrain of the homeland, and

describe the origins of various social processes and activities. In short, they reveal the

grounds of being for the storyteller and his audience: they explain the who, what, why,

where, and how of their existence. “In the beginning the earth was covered with water,”

begins a tale of origins told among the Jicarilla Apache. This is a common theme.

“And all living things were below in the underworld.” This Jicarilla Apache tale, in fact,

GGray_c01.indd 5ray_c 01 .indd 5 8 8/1/2011 7:54:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 53 AM