Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [211]
They must be good servants and very intelligent, because I see that they repeat very quickly what I told them, and it is my conviction that they would easily become Christians, for they seem not to have any sect. If it please our Lord, I will take six of them that they may learn to speak. The people are totally unacquainted with arms, as your Highnesses will see by observing the seven which I have caused to be taken in. With fifty men all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire.
—CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, from his diary, October 12, 1492*
The tribe has no belief in God that amounts to anything; for they believe in a god they call Cudouagny, and maintain that he often holds intercourse with them and tells what the weather will be like. They also say that when he gets angry with them, he throws dust in their eyes. They believe furthermore that when they die they go to the stars and descend on the horizon like the stars…. After they had explained these things to us, we showed them their error and informed them that Cudouagny was a wicked spirit who deceived them, and that there is but one God, Who is in Heaven, Who gives everything we need and is the Creator of all things and that in Him alone we should believe. Also that one must receive baptism or perish in hell….
—French explorer JACQUES CARTIER(1491–1557), describing the Hurons of eastern Canada
How did Native American myth go up in smoke?
What is “civilized”? What is “savage”? To the “civilized” Europeans who came to the Americas in the 1500s, the answer was simple. “Civilized” meant clothes-wearing, literate, European Christians. The word “savage” meant “Indian.” Led by medicine men smoking pipes, having visions, curing with herbs, and rejecting the white man’s “salvation,” the native tribes were, in the European view, doomed souls. Unfortunately, that view dominated from the sixteenth century on.
Maybe that is why the public today is still largely in the dark about Native American mythology and beliefs. The Europeans—and later, Americans—didn’t just crush the Native American “savages.” They composed the diaries and letters, painted the artwork, took the photographs, and wrote the first histories that either ignored or demeaned a conquered people. They suppressed native mythologies and languages to near-extinction, allowing them to go up in the smoke of burning villages. Church schools, missionaries, and government agencies like the notorious Indian Affairs Bureau added to the catastrophe, forcing native children to accept “Anglo” names and denying them the right to speak their mother tongues or learn their ancestral sacred stories. Sacred native places were built over and renamed—a process still going on as a Wal-Mart outlet goes up near Teotihuacán in Mexico, or an astronomical observatory is placed on a mountain sacred to the San Carlos Apaches in the state of Arizona.* People who shrug this off might see the issue differently if Native Americans secured rights to build a gambling casino atop Arlington National Cemetery.
But there is more to the story. As the authors of The Encyclopedia of Native American Religions write, “Indian country in North America is still home to hundreds of religious traditions that have endured, despite a long history of persecution and suppression by government and missionaries…. Native American sacred beliefs are as dignified, profound, viable, and richly faceted as other religions practiced throughout the world. Native sacred knowledge has not been destroyed or lost but in fact lives on as the heart of Native American cultural existence today.”
What is known of these sacred traditions today comes largely through efforts during the past century to interview native survivors who preserved an oral tradition. These survivors included Black Elk, whose 1932 memoir, Black Elk Speaks, records the visionary recollections of an Oglala Sioux holy man who witnessed the nineteenth-century spiritual revival called the “Ghost Dance” and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Memories such as his have been added