Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [212]
More recently, the effort to preserve Native American traditions has been invigorated by a generation of scholars far more sensitive to their subject. In September 2004, more than 20,000 members of some 500 Native American tribes gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian. Built at a cost of more than $219 million, the museum housed the Smithsonian Institute’s hundreds of thousands of Native American objects.* There is also a revival of interest in tradition among young Native Americans, who hope to save something of their past as a complement to their heightened political activism in both the United States and Latin America. Award-winning poets, short-story writers, and novelists such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie have joined in the rescue effort with creative works such as Ceremony, Love Medicine, and Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven, which explore tribal mythic traditions and their impact on contemporary Native Americans. Finally, archaeology and other scientific research have also added immensely to a picture that has been rescued from the ashes of the Native American holocaust.
MYTHIC VOICES
You said that we know not the Lord of the Close Vicinity, or to Whom the Heavens and earth belong. You said that our gods are not true gods. New words are these that you speak; because of them we are disturbed, because of them we are troubled. For our ancestors before us, who lived upon the earth, were unaccustomed to speak thus. From them we have inherited our pattern of life, which in truth they did hold; in reverence they held, they honored our gods.
—Aztec scholars to the first Franciscans in Mexico City, 1524
Is there an “American” mythology?
Vast differences distinguish the many cultures and people once lumped together as “Indians.” The Cherokee farmers of the Southeast were very different from the Great Plains Sioux who followed the buffalo herds that sustained them. The democratic Hodenosaunee (or Iroquois) of the long houses in the Northeast had little in common with the Pueblos in their adobe “apartment buildings” in the Southwest. And none of these native people could be confused with the city dwellers of Mexico and Central America, or the resilient oceangoing fishermen of the Northwest and Arctic. But there are common patterns among the beliefs of many Native Americans, which, some scholars think, may stretch all the way back to shared prehistoric origins in Asia. These characteristics include:
A “Great Spirit.” A supreme god with ultimate power who both has created and oversees the universe is a common feature in Native American mythology. Often male and usually related to the sun, the great spirit goes by many names, as David Leeming and Jake Page point out in The Mythology of Native North America. “Usually this supreme god—the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery, Father Sky, Old Man, Earthmaker, or one of several other names—is the prime creator.”
To the Huron of the Northeast woodlands, the Creator god is Airsekui, to whom the tribe offers the first of its fruits and meats each harvest and slaughter time. To the Incas of South America, he was Inti, the godhead who also founded the Inca dynasty. To the Sioux, Osage, and other tribes of the midwestern plains, the Creator god is more of a force than a personalized deity, and is called Wakonda or Wakan Tanka. Wakonda is the force behind all life and creation, wisdom, knowledge, and power. Sometimes envisioned as a large bird, Wakonda sustains the world and gives authority to the medicine men. For