NATIVE AMERICAN MYTHOLOGIES

                                 AND

                   WHRE MY BELIEFS COME FROM

     This blog and/or paper concerns the North and South American continents, from the Canadian arctic to the south Texas Plains. These are lands of great contrast – frigid tundra, cool and scorching desserts, vast grasslands and forests, lush woodlands, vast jungles, and immense mountain ranges.

The native peoples’ mythologies, as diverse as the landscapes, will be explored in three sections, starting with North America and the linguistic and tribal groups of Canada and the United States, whose legends reflect the ways of life based variously on hunting and gathering, agriculture and fishing. The section on Mesoamerica (broadly, Mexico and the countries of the isthmus to the south) includes the great Aztec Empire in the uplands and the Maya states to the south and east, as well as their predecessor cultures. The South American section covers cultures from Columbia to Chile and from the Pacific coast across the high Andes to the Brazilin rainforests – including the Inca Empire and its progenitors.

Humans entered America when it was joined to Asia by an ice bridge over what is now the Bering Strait, migrating south and east, along the coasts and into the interior, reaching Tierra del Fuego by 9000BC or earlier. The first people were nomads: gathering, fishing and hunting in seasonal rounds. By 5000BC, some people had discovered how to cultivate some of the plants they gathered and how to domesticate some of the animals they encountered. Tending these involved settling in one place; then – as trade in surplus food began to develop in the ensuing millennia – villages were able to support specialist craftsmen who produced objects and services over and above the barest necessities of life. Some societies became yet more complex, and towns developed, ultimately growing into city-states, kingdoms and empires, with powerful dynastic rulers and organized priesthoods.

But most cultures did not evolve steadily from nomad group to empire, or abandon their natural spirituality to, focused on earth and sky, for great corporate religions intertwined with the power structures of a state. In some environments – too harsh, remote, impenetrable or infertile to support the denser populations from which complex societies could develop – the inhabitants continued to gather, fish and hunt, or work small garden plots near their camps or villages, or tend animals. And some complex societies developed too far – collapsing as they exhausted the environment that had sustained them – while others fell to climatic change or natural disaster, or were conquered by neighbors.

Yet each of these diverse cultures had one thing in common: the need for a mythology to explain not only the vastness and the power of the cosmos and the wonders of nature, but also the mysteries of the human mind, with its desires, its fears and its capacities for good and evil, creation and destruction, and selfishness and altruism. This mythology enabled these cultures to find meaning, balance and a sense of place in the world they inherited; it embraces all of what we now call religion, science and philosophy (natural, moral and metaphysical). It asks fundamental questions – how the world began, how it will end, where humans fit in and how they can influence it, and how individuals and communities should interact. Since the questions are the same, we see common threads running through the mythologies described here: heavens above and nether worlds below; the critical importance of the sun, moon, and the stars; gods, heroes and monsters creating, transforming and destroying successions of nascent worlds; the sacred significance of the landscape itself, and of particular elements within it.

Even so, answers to these questions vary with the societies that ask them. The Choctaw ancestors, emerging out of the hill of Nanih Waiya from their previous world, looked out on a green landscape very different from the ones that greeted the first Aztecs leaving the caves of Chicomoztac, or Manco Capac and the Inca ancestors appearing from Tambo Toco mountain. In the fertile Mississippi Valley, the Choctaw became sun-worshipping agriculturists; the Aztecs left harsh Aztlan for the Basin of Mexico and built an empire fuelled by war (and sacrifice) to garner from elsewhere the resources they needed; and from highland Peru the Inca Empire, America’s largest, redistributed the wealth of the Pacific coast, the high pampas and the dense rainforest fringes of the Andes along a fantastic network of roads. Yet, similar myths can appear in the most diverse of societies and environments: the “bird nester” theme ( one of two competitors persuades his rival to make a perilous climb to gather birds’ eggs, then removes the ladder and maroons him) is found among the Yurok of the California coast and the Kayapo in the Brazilian rainforest; the common prominence of serpents and jaguars in religious imagery throughout Mesoamerica and South America; or the popularity of the trickster coyote among many North American and Mesoamerican peoples. It is these contrasting threads of similarity and difference, confirmation and contradiction, and the search for basic truths about lives, that make the fabric of the mythology of the Americas so fascinating.

                      TRANSFORMATIONS

A human life is so brief that the face of the earth seems absolute and unchanging. No living being has seen the billions of years of tectonic shifts, overwhelming seas and ice ages that have scarred the land, so the idea of a decaying world is almost unimaginable. Someone with super human power must have made the rivers, as we might trace a line in the sand. And someone must have given us the gift of nature that we use to sustain our lives. In aboriginal thought, the time when powerful beings transformed creation’s dark, empty lands into the familiar, sheltering earth is only just out of reach of memory. Life at that time was fluid. Those first ancestors shifted and changed forms at will between humans, animals and objects as they carried out their formative tasks – bringing daylight and fire, hewing out the shape of the land and creating stuff of their cultural life. Raven, coyote and the other transformers are not the prop of a simple animal worship, but emerged from the elders’ awareness that the super naturals had withdrawn from the world they created – just as the knowing raven and the sly coyote circle on the edge of society today.

Transformation was not only a spiritual concept, but also a practical necessity, especially before the introduction of the horse. In prehistoric times, hunters had to stalk game on foots, so they often adopted the guise of animals in order to move close enough to shoot them with their bows and arrows. A familiar landscape transformed from a featureless world is a great story that is preserved in the contours and features of the earth. Raven created the Queen Charlotte Islands, the land of the Haida, because he was tired of flying and had no place to rest on the primordial waters. He created land by dropping rocks in the waters or, in another version, by splashing the water and turning the spray into stones. A shaman needed to make contact with the spiritual forces of nature to ensure the health and wellbeing of a tribal society. To contact, control or entice these forces, shamans sought out worldly objects with special qualities that gave them great medicine power.

                                            THE LIVING SKY

The sky must be the realm of gods. Well beyond the reach of even the highest mountains, the greatest powers live there – light and darkness, the changing seasons, furious storms and life-giving rains – and it is the source of many creations.

Some remote creators used the dark cosmos as a staging ground for their work, but in most narratives the sky was a world with its own physical and social dimensions, not an airless void. In an Iroquois version, for example, a young woman fell through a hole in the sky world, and the birds and the animals had to create dry earth to support her. The heavens may also be a final resting place for supernatural beings that are transformed in to stars. The sky is crucial to cultural identity, because it defines the land and sets the rhythm of the world. The cycles of the sun, moon and stars evoke a sense of time, marking the passage of human life. As a measure of space and time, the sky therefore unites the mythical and the actual in an eternal flow of darkness and light.

The moon mask of the Tlingit shaman reflects the common perception of the moon as a being with human attributes. For the Tlingit and other Northwest Coastal tribes, the significance of the moon was not simply in its cosmological origins, but in its controlling of the rising and falling tides crucial to life on the edge of the Pacific coast. The mask, carved in cedar, enabled the shaman to draw some of the power of this great sky being. The fury of the storms shows the overwhelming power of the being in the sky world. The idea of thunder and lightning as the work of a giant thunderbird makes sense in an animate universe. The Pleiades known to astronomers as Messier 45, is an open star cluster approximately 410 light years way from earth. It plays an important role in many tribal mythologies, often as 7 maidens, one of which (the dimmest star) is veiled or has fallen to earth. For the Pawnee, these stars symbolize unity. The granite ceiling of an Algonquian shaman’s caved near the Lake of the Woods, in northwestern Ontario is painted with red ochre images of stars and forms that may represent celestial kings. In prehistoric times, the night sky was crucial as a knowledge resource – a device for thinking about history and the world of the spirit. 

                         

                                          Landscapes of Memories

The heroic events of creation and transformation do not depend on the recollection of ancient tradition. They live on in the shape of the land itself: every towering rock or twist in a river records the acts of these cultural heroes who changed the earth as they lived on it. I n some places the marks of creation are still fresh. Thus, the Choctaw can still gaze upon the very they emerged, a mound called Nanih Waiya, near present-day Philadelphia, Mississippi. Other land forms preserve individual super natural acts The Penobscot; for instance, can speak of a time when Gluskap killed a moose at Moose-tchick, for the bones and entrails of this giant creature are still visible around Bar Harbor, Maine. The story-teller’s landscape also provides an effective mental map of a tribal homeland, colored and textured with the places where supernatural events occurred (the ability to visualize environmental detail was crucial for people who often had to travel great distances over vast, trackless environments during their seasonal rounds). Since aboriginal people intertwine oral tradition and geography in this way, they still have a spiritual hold on their lost lands, a bond that they can verify and renew as long as those lands exist.

Ancient rocks seem to wear the weight of eternity on their weathered heads the rocks that form the skeletal structure of the earth age alive, as they have distant shapes and substance, exhibit change and decay, and hold within them the memories of the events of creation. A great Serpent was fashioned over 2000 years ago by the people o =f the Adena or Hopewell cultures on a narrow promontory overlooking Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. The mound, built up with yellow clay and stones, is 400 yards long. The serpents’ tail is coiled, and it appears to be holding an egg in its mouth. Serpents figure in mythologies across the world, as they have the extraordinary power, reflected in their unique locomotion on the physical plane, to move between the earth and the underworld abodes of the spirits. A place with great spiritual power may be marked by something startling, unexpected, that seems to remove it from the surrounding landscape. In the broad, flat prairies of Saskatchewan, there is an island of golden sand that rises into dunes covering 470,000 acres. Here in the Great Sandhills, the Plains Cree believe that the Memekwecitwak, or little people, dwell, making the chipped-stone artifacts that people still find along its margin.

                                            

                   Spirits of The Earth

The earth is infused with spiritual energy. When supernatural beings shaped the land during the age of transformation, all living things had the choice to live as humans and animals do. Because of this legacy, aboriginal thinkers see the earth as a living spiritual realm where supernatural spirits still reside. Every territory has its special area. A large hill, near the Snake and Grand Ronde rivers (in present day Idaho), for example figures prominently in a Nez Perce fire story. Of the supernatural protagonists, Cedar, old and half dead, remained on the top of this hill for generations around the turn of the twentieth century. The visual impact of this tree, craggy, ancient, and etched against the sky, created a spiritual link that many other sacred places share. High mountains and prominent rock formations, caves and crevices, waterfalls and springs are all spirit dwellings. Whether the earthly spirits live, ever watchful, above the land or are ever hidden away, to be suddenly encountered on a path or waterway, they always remain powerful, even dangerous, in their abodes.

A tall block of sediment stands like a sentinel on the border of Alberta and Montana. Because of its solitary, commanding prominence, its known as Chief Mountain. The Blackfoot consider it a very sacred place, where people may seek dreams, visions, and draw spiritual power. The dark opening of Danger Cave overlooks the salt flats in Utah. The first humans to live here, 11,000 years ago, walked through grasslands and pine forests but, several thousand years later, the land became too inhospitable to support them. To natives these type places are sacred as they contain the ancestors that once lived there.

                                  The Dark Side

Monsters exist in mythology to give shape and meaning to the unknown, the dangerous and the unwanted. Many story-tellers describe  how, when the earth was still young, terrible creatures raged across the land, threatening the fragile harmony of human and animal beings in the new world. By the act of destroying these monsters, supernatural beings created the heroic, defined the limits of good and evil, and established supernatural power as an overwhelming force. But, while cosmic beasts disappeared, other dangerous beasts retreated only to the margins of the world, lurking just beyond familiar horizons, in the darkness or deep underwater.  Some of these are fearsome apparitions and the stuff of nightmares: bodiless heads or hideously deformed animals. Others, including many of the ”little people” that travelers encounter, cause accidents and other irritations in daily life. Still others, such as the great horned serpents who live under lakes and rivers in Algonquin territory, have the capacity for positive as well as negative acts. This acknowledgement of life’s dark side resolves the fundamental contradiction of nature – that it is at one time both a nurturing and a destructive force.

A thunderbird sits atop a Kwakiutl totem pole. The association of thunder and lightning with great birds may come from the way a thunderstorm soars across the sky, spreading dark squall lines across the horizon under a dark central mass, pierced by flashing lights.

Mishipizheu, the great horned serpent is painted in red ochre on a sheer granite cliff overlooking Agawa Bay, Lake Superior. Travelers appeased this powerful Manitou with prayers and offerings so that he would keep the waters calm as they passed.

A plumed serpent rises from the granite rocks of the Galestio Basin, south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Tewa people inhabited this region from the late 13^th century until the Great Pueblo Revolt in 1680. Their abundant rock art still speaks of the powerful spiritual forces in the desert landscape.

Palraiuk the sea monster, gorged with the partly dismembered remains of one unfortunate victim, chases a kayak, seeking more prey. This is inscribed into a Yupik walrus ivory, expresses the wariness of the Inuit whale hunter in the unpredictable arctic sea.

The image of a mountain lion is etched into a slab of sandstone in Northeastern Arizona’s Painted Desert by an unknown prehistoric artist. The most dangerous animals in the spiritual world usually took the form of the most dangerous animals in real life.

                                   The Trickster

The creative beings responsible for the complex texture of North American cultures established methods for living that enabled people to thrive over thousands of years. Yet humans must always face the tensions between appropriate and inappropriate thoughts and actions, reflecting the vagaries of a natural world that both sustains life and takes it. Mirroring this reality, transformers and cultural heroes were quixotically human, with the same lusts, desires and foibles as the people they would create. Raven brought daylight to the Timshian, for example, by tricking an old chief who kept it in a box on the Nass River. Raven became a spruce needle, entered the chief’s daughter bin a drink of water, impregnated her, was born, and then, as a small child, took the box at an unguarded moment, quickly changing back to his original self and flying off with his prize. This was no altruistic act: he released the daylight in anger, after some fishing people refused him a feed of oolichan (a smelt-like fish, very high in fat). By giving the tricksters human capacities and imperfections, and by treating creation as the incidental acts of great beings pursuing their own agendas, the story-tellers wisely create realistic parallels between life as it is lived and its origins.

                                       The Strangers

Events that shake up the world are preserved in oral traditions. The Micmac tell of a strange floating “island” that suddenly appeared in the sea. From a distance, the people could see animals climbing in the branches of several trees. When the island drew close enough the animals became men, and soon a shore party arrived, that included a man in the long robes of a priest. These strangers had other wonders in store, such as guns, iron and copper kettles, and woolen blankets. Despite the European origin of such things, each tribe developed stories to explain them within its own traditions. So the Navajo thank their Creator for bringing them horses, cattle and sheep from the Spanish in Mexico. As Europeans became more numerous, story-tellers absorbed them into their tales – for example, involving them in the antics of the Coyote and other tricksters. But it was the deadly impact of these invaders, and the heroic resistance of the native people, that preoccupied the story-tellers. Thus, the Kiowa culture hero Saynday tricked Smallpox, the bringer of death, into first visiting their traditional enemy, the Pawnee. Before Smallpox could return, Saynday created a ring of fire to protect the people from this terrible scourge.

A military expedition in 1874, led by George Armstrong Custer , discovered gold in the Black Hills in Dakota Territory, a land very sacred to the Sioux. The predictable flood of the prospectors and miners on to Sioux lands precipitated a series of bitter conflicts with the military that, despite treaty obligations, defended white interests. On 25 June, 1876, Custer’s 7^th Cavalry attempted to put down a group of Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho warriors along the banks of the Little Big Horn River. Famously, they failed, and were completely wiped out .

The introduction of the horse was responsible for the transformation of Great Plains culture. Because of the vast distances across the grasslands, most groups living in the region were river-bound horticulturists. When hunting and gathering tribes from the south, the Great Lakes region and the western mountains obtained horses, however, they were able to move across the plains and hunt the buffalo.

The Micmac were skilled sea hunters who pursued whales and porpoises in canoes specifically designed for ocean travel. When the French and English introduced sailing vessels in the region, the Micmac adopted them to their own use, very easily. Micmac fishing and hunting along the shores of Lake Kejimkujik, in south-central Nova Scotia, engraved the smooth slate shoreline rocks with images of their culture

                                                             New Gods

When the first Christian missionaries set foot on the North American continent, they found peoples they could not fit into the biblical history of the world. While these aboriginal cultures had millennia of wisdom and experience, the newcomers saw them as primitive, virtually non-human and in need of correction. As the Europeans explored and occupied native lands, the flood of alien ideas and material goods they generated quickly overwhelmed native cultures already decimated by invasion, the spread of foreign diseases and forced removal from their homelands. These depredations caused drastic changes in their world view. No longer intertwined with their own earth and sky, the natives of the land listened and learned – sometimes avidly, but more often helplessly – about a single god and a morality fashioned on a distant continent. In some places they were also prey to conflicting ideas, as missionaries of different faiths competed for converts. Some groups resisted by creating new narratives to counter Christian teachings. Others attempted to avoid the total loss of thei mythologies by appropriating Christian elements (This is where I get mad at the Christian religion and its missionaries! They go in and destroy the mythologies and belief systems of aboriginal peoples, because they have wealth and power to back them up against natives who are perfectly fine living a stone-age existence!), especially a Jesus-like transformer who took the place of traditional cultural hero. But, even though more than 400 years of aggressive missionary work has forever altered oral traditions, the spiritual remoteness of the Christian drama allowed the survival of fundamental native beliefs about the spiritual essence of the landscape and its knowing creatures.

                                        New Mythologies

Native North Americans must fight to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of their ancestors in a world dominated by Western culture. But thousands of years of adaptation have also taught them to look ahead to the welfare of future generations. Ritual practices once confined to specific tribes and culture areas, such as the sweat lodge and the Sundance (Which I have the scars to prove I have done) spread across the continent, helping to reinforce the spirits of peoples threatened by extinction. New religions such as the Native American Church, have rights that seem to resonate with the ancient past (and are on the HLS terror list), while admitting some elements of Christianity. These groups give strength to native identity and provide a natural path towards future. Many other native peoples are Christians, and, although some of their churches accommodate traditional beliefs and practices, others resolutely reject any non-Christian symbolism, ritual paraphernalia or ceremonies. For all that, the spirits of the earth are alive outside organized religion (and this is where Jimmy “Red Back” Powell fits into spirituality), since the rich narrative tradition thrives in the creative arts. Native artists, dancers, writers and musicians use modern media as a new form of story-telling, one that shows respect for the old and yet gives life to the new. This creative energy is helping to change the face of native culture, yet it is in keeping with the ancients (I draw and write). Mythology is a way of expressing the rich and wondrous texture of life as it is lived, and so it is appropriate that the old culture heroes live on in new worlds of expression.

I hope this has brought a new light as to my religious beliefs and why I have them. My Father’s mother’s family is Minniconjou Sioux and his father’s family were Brule Sioux. So I am Half Sioux on the paternal side.

On my mother’s side: my mom’s mom was full-blooded Cherokee. While her father’s side had come from Scotland to Jamestown, in 1614. So when I say I am an American I believe I can say it with no doubts in my mind.      

 Peace and prosperity to all who have read this