Week 9 Reading Diary: Mississippi Valley/Great Lakes

This week, I am reading tales from the Native American tribes of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes area. I chose this unit because I originally hail from the Great Lakes area and grew up with knowledge of the tribes that were there, but had never really read much of their stories and folklore. I am interested to see the themes present in this unit and how they relate to the cultures that I have learned about in the past.

The Earth Maker: This account of the creation of the Earth from the Winnebago tribe was intriguingly abstract. At times, I had to stop to re-read sentences because, though the language is simple, the ideas are hard to visualize. In a sense, the process of the creation of the Earth is similar to that detailed in the Bible: at first, there was nothing, then the land was created. After that, the creator made plants to grow upon the earth and creatures to roam the land. I was confused when the story said that the creator made a man and called him Tortoise, then later created the "two-legged walkers." Was this creature a man in the sense that we know the word, i.e., a human being, or was he actually a tortoise? If he were a human, I wouldn't think that he would be separated from the other two-legged walkers for any reason. I will look into Winnebago lore further to explore this.

Creation: It is interesting to compare stories about the same types of events and ideas between different tribes. This tale comes from the Chitimacha tribe from present-day Louisiana. The first paragraph describing the Creator of All Things certainly paints an odd picture: if its body were to become visible, one would probably see a headless body that could see and hear. The rest is fairly straightforward; this seems like a storytelling strategy that people have passed down through the ages: using folklore to explain certain events and behaviors, such as why the tribe hunts animals (to punish them for past transgressions) and why the Sun shines brighter than the Moon (because the Moon "forgot the sacred bathing").

Gifts of the Sky God: In the same didactic tone, the Chitimacha describe how humans received different gifts from above. What I don't fully comprehend is how these gifts correspond with the animals that brought them (or if there is even supposed to be a correlation). This is another aspect of culture I will have to investigate further.