Bad News: The Predicament of Native American Mythology

Abstract

This article holds that native American communities generally did not produce and maintain stories of white and Indian relations, in other words, the sort of stories that loom large in the writings of ethnohistorians. What the communities traditionally produced instead were myths and mythologies about an ancient Edenic time before normal human procreation and marriage. The article also holds that the main influence on the content of mythologies was neighboring mythologies, such that each people's telling of ancientness was a parody, but a compassionate one, of its neighbors' tellings. The commitments to parody and to Edenic content hamper these mythologies in today's cultural world. The tellings were wonderful, but now they are past.

The Story of Colonialism, or Rethinking the Ox-Hide Purchase in Native North America and Beyond

“…While Bahr's essay is a complex, interwoven whole, I have here space to touch only on the point of greatest overlap with my concerns. This does an injustice to Bahr's complex, multi-faceted argument and might mistakenly suggest that I disagree with every aspect of his position (Bahr 2001).…”

“…This is so because, while beautiful creations, mythologies face a new challenge in the modern world-to defend themselves against the charge of being untrue. To complicate their fate further, to serve in modern contexts, he argues, mythologies must address themselves to Native-White relations, which, in his experience, they largely do not do (Bahr 2001).…”

Monsters, Disaster, and Organic Balance: Digesting History Through Oral Traditions

“…Paiute stories explain how things came to be the way that they are, and thus have a singular historical purpose, but also serve to represent the reality of things and peoples of the world, and how to behave in relation to them. Scholars have long debated the historical function in Native American verbal arts (Lowie 1915;Bahr 2001), often questioning it on the grounds of validity. More recent studies have challenged the denial of historical validity in myth, beginning with Jan Vansina's analytical monograph Oral Tradition as History (1985).…”