Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [230]
But each tribe knew exactly where they were from. And like every other culture throughout history, they had sacred stories to explain their beginnings. Many of the tribes of the Southwest told a story of how the first men had emerged from a sacred hole in the ground. Other traditions tell of races of great animals that lived before man, tricksters that created people, or mother goddesses who brought forth humanity and made earth fertile. But above all, the native people of North America had reverence for the sacredness of earth and everything in it, a primal idea that is found in almost all their myths.
MYTHIC VOICES
Before the creation of man, the Great Spirit (whose tracks are yet to be seen on the stones, at the Red Pipe, in the form of a large bird) used to slay buffaloes and eat them on the ledge of the Red Rocks…and their blood running on the rocks turned them red. One day when a large snake had crawled into the nest of the bird to eat his eggs, one of the eggs hatched out in a clap of thunder, and the Great Spirit, catching hold of a piece of the pipestone* to throw at the snake, moulded it into a man. This man’s feet grew fast in the ground where he stood for many ages, like a great tree, and therefore he grew very old; he was older than a hundred men at the present day; and at last another tree grew up by the side of him, when a large snake ate them both off at the roots, and they wandered off together; from these have sprung all the people that now inhabit the earth.
—Sioux Creation account, from Letters and Notes on the Manner, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians by George Catlin, cited in Parallel Myths by J. F. Bierlein
All the Earth was flooded with water. Iktomi sent animals to dive for dirt at the bottom of the sea. No animal was able to get any. At last, he sent the Muskrat. It came up dead, but with dirt in its paws. Iktomi saw the dirt, took it, and made the earth out of it…. Iktomi then created men and horses out of dirt. Some of the Assiniboine and other northern tribes had no horses. Iktomi told the Assiniboine that they were always to steal horses from other tribes.
—Assiniboine Creation account, cited in Primal Myths by Barbara Sproul
God Isn’t Dead. She’s Red.
—popular bumper sticker
Is there a “North American” mythology?
Whether it is an elegiac Edward Curtis photo of a lone chief on horseback, an action-filled Frederic Remington painting of mounted hunters, or a John Wayne movie in which massed braves on war ponies appear threateningly on a ridge, American Indians and their horses are indelible icons.
But as late as 1700, many North American tribes had no horses. The animal that transformed much of the Native American world arrived in the 1500s with the Spanish, who guarded them carefully, not wanting to surrender the great military advantage they possessed. As historian Jake Page writes in In the Hands of the Great Spirit, “It would not be until decades into the next (18th) century that the horses would almost totally transform the cultures of the Plains and…Southwest, producing some of the finest light cavalry ever known on Earth.”
Native Americans connected in a state of “oneness” with their horses is one of the persistent stereotypes of the American native past. There are others, including Hollywood’s stock images of “Indians” as savage, dangerous, elusive, and untrustworthy characters—” Indian givers”—unless they happen to be Lone Ranger’s reliable sidekick, Tonto. The stereotypes were underscored in pidgin-English dialogue, like “You speak-um with forked tongue” and “We smoke-um peace pipe.” While the worst of this nonsense has been eliminated, there was still Disney’s 1995 Pocahontas. Playing fast and loose with history, Disney turned the story of the mercenary soldier John Smith, who ran