In the beginning there was no death. Everyone lived until there were so many people that there was no more room on earth. So the chiefs held a council, and one man said that people should die, but just for a while, and then they should come back again. Then Coyote jumped up, declaring that people should die forever. The world was not big enough to hold all those people and if they came back to life, there would not be sufficient food to sustain everyone.
It was decided that the village medicine men should build a grass house facing east and place a black and white eagle feather on top of it. When anyone died, the feather would become bloody and fall over. Then the medicine men would sit in the house and sing: this would call the spirit of the dead person, so that he or she would live again.
After a time, the first feather grew bloody and fell over. The medicine men gathered, and after some days a whirlwind blew in from the west, circled the house and entered it from the east. Once the wind was in the house a fine young man who had recently been killed emerged. Everyone was happy, except Coyote. So next time the feather grew bloody and fell from the roof, and the whirlwind circled the house of grass, Coyote closed the door. The spirit in the whirlwind, finding the door closed, swept on by. From that moment on, death became final.
When Coyote saw what he had done, he was afraid. Since then he has run from place to place, forever glancing behind him to see if he is being chased. And when anyone hears the wind whistle, they say: “There’s someone, a spirit, wandering about!” Now, the spirits of the dead must wander the earth before they find the spirit land.
MYTH AND ART
The rich art of Native North American cultures expresses their connection with the spiritual world, particularly with the animals they regarded as their ancestors and kin. Supernatural spirits, symbols and patterns were carved, painted, woven or sewn onto everyday utensils, garments, house fronts and boats, as well as in sacred and ceremonial objects such as masks, totem poles and pipes. Myth was inseparable from daily routine, and decorations represented, among other themes, thanks to the spirits, protection in warfare, or accompaniment on a spiritual journey.
Spirit journeys are often described in myths and determine the design of objects, such as this Navajo wedding or ceremonial tray. strict ritual requirements demand that a pathway for the spirits be incorporated in the design.
Elaborately carved and painted masks of the Northwest Coast – such as this bold-eyed Kwakiutl head – commemorated the ancestors of clans and families. masked dancers also celebrated victories over a human, animal or supernatural adversary.
This late 19th-century Navajo “steer weaving” blanket is colored in the hues of the earth. The image of the central head was also found in Navajo sand paintings and may represent a god or other sacred being. According to legend, weavers learned their craft from spider woman (see pages 26–27).
A leather mantle, decorated with shell beads, thought to have belonged to the early 17th-century chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas. The deer (right) and the big cat are possibly guardian animal spirits, who are protecting the human figure in the center.
Spirits of the air were often seen as being particularly fierce, like this Tlingit shaman’s grave guardian, carved in wood and found close to the tomb. his open mouth suggests he might be singing, and his hands originally held rattles, to ensure that his ward was not disturbed.
THE SPIRITUAL COSMOS
“The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us...” (Big Thunder, Wabanakis nation, Maine). “The country knows. If you do wrong things to it, the whole country knows. It feels what’s happening to it. I guess everything is connected together somehow...” (Koyukon Indian, central Alaska). “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” (1890, the last words of Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior.)
These words were spoken by men from three very different Indian societies, but they bear eloquent testimony to an awareness of the cosmos that is shared by all Native American cultures. This cosmos recognizes no separation between the spiritual and the material, between the real and the supernatural, or between the animate and the inanimate, because everything and everyone is endowed with spirit power, or “medicine.” When Big Thunder referred to the Great Spirit as a father and the Earth as a mother, he was describing a spiritual kinship, a relationship between humanity and the universe that is not negotiable. The notion of owning anything that comes from the land is as absurd as it is presumptuous. To live on the Earth, to breathe and drink and feed from its resources, and to be among the plants and animals, is to be part of a sacred cosmic unity.
The Earth itself is holy, with a sacred history that explains how the first people came into being and how each tribe came to occupy its particular place on the land. The animals on which humans depend for food and warmth have the same spiritual value as their hunters. They are companion species, and their spirits must be acknowledged and respected, even when they are dead. The sky is a part of the cosmos, and as such it is crowded with spirits, the spirits of the sun and the moon and the stars, the spirits of the wind and the sea. Every natural phenomenon—forests, mountains, rocks, rivers, lakes, plants—has its spirit. Myths tell of the diverse origins of different spirit “personalities”—the behavior of the sun, the rhythms of the seasons, the movements of animals—but cosmic harmony depends on a balance being struck between these. Through stories, rituals and ceremonies, Native Americans reveal and affirm their kinship with the sacred totality.
For the Kiowa of wyoming the shaft of rock known as the Devil’s Tower is linked by myth with the power of the great spirit.
The grand Canyon, Arizona, a natural marvel with sacred meaning in the mythologies of the Pueblo peoples.
“The Earth is My Mother”
Native American stories about the origins of the Earth are as various as the peoples, but from the east to the west coast, and from north to south, there is unanimous agreement on the sanctity of the Earth. Within the extended family of kindred spirits that constitutes the Native American cosmos, the bountiful Earth is often likened to a mother. The numerous myths and rituals that surround this figure bear witness to an ancient and indissoluble sense of kinship.
Every phenomenon and every aspect of creation within the Native American cosmos has a spiritual dimension, but the Earth, which is home to all living and growing things, is regarded as having special sanctity.
Stories show this mythical Earth Mother as having many faces, as numerous as her diverse landscapes, and all of her children affirm their kinship with her. Early in the nineteenth century, the visionary Shawnee chief Tecumseh tried to rally a number of tribes against the white men’s incursions. In 1811, he declared: “The sun is my father, and the Earth is my mother; on her bosom I will rest.” Tecumseh saw himself as an Indian first, and a Shawnee second, and when he spoke of the Earth as his kin, he was speaking on behalf of every Native American.
The great serpent mound, a huge coiling earthwork, was built over 2,000 years ago by an ohio valley culture. it has been seen as affirming the Native tradition of reverence for the earth.
Many stories about the Earth’s creation explain how this came to be so. In Algonquian tradition, the Earth was created by Gluskap, a mythic hero who made the whole known world from the body of his own mother. Similarly, the Oglala Sioux, who often speak of the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, as the grandfather of all things, also speak of the Earth as the grandmother of all things. Some mythologies provide this female Earth with a mate. For the Yuma people of the southern California desert, the Earth’s husband is the sky. After a primal embrace between the earth woman and the sky man, the Earth conceived and gave birth to twin sons. As their first task, the twins rose up from their mother’s body to lift up the sky.
Away from the desert, the divine geometry of the world is less r
eadily imagined as a division between Earth and sky. In the myths of the Algonquian peoples of the northeastern woodlands, the cosmos is pictured as a sequence of realms. Flat Earth is surmounted by a world of winds and clouds. Above it is the circle of the upper sky, where the Great Spirit dwells. But the sky is only the floor of the topmost heavenly world, which contains representations of all the things that exist beneath it. And the Earth below is the roof of an underworld, from which emerge the waters and plants that sustain life.
As they saw the immigrants’ frontier creep ever farther west, Native Americans defended the integrity of their sacred Earth against alien ways. In the 1850s, Smohalla, the Wanapum holy man whose prophecies anticipated the Ghost Dance movement of the Plains (see page 130), reminded his people of their sacred pact with the Earth. To save themselves from ruin, Smohalla’s followers had to refuse the white men’s ways. When the white men plowed and mined and fenced the land, they were not simply destroying Native American habitats, they were murdering a cherished body. “You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell and be rich like the white men! But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?”
The Sacred Home of the Choctaw
This story from the Lower Mississippi tells how the Choctaw people, when they had to move their village, not only established a new connection with the Earth, but were guided in their search by the Earth itself.
The Choctaw elders gathered, and at length they chose two men, twins, who would lead them forward into new territory. But first a shaman told these men to cut a young, slender tree, and to strip it down until it was a pole. Then the shaman painted it and set it in the earth. “Whichever direction the stick points in the morning,” said the holy man, “there you must travel.” The following day, the stick was leaning towards the southeast and so the people began their journey in that direction, taking the pole with them. For years they travelled. Children were born, and people died. And the remains of those who died on the way were carried in pots to their future settlement. Every night the people set up the pole, and every morning they consulted it. One morning, the pole stood upright, so then the people knew they had reached the land where they should settle.
A painting by Paul Kane (1810–71) of an indian village. spiritual concerns influenced the choice of a camp site.
“And where,” they wondered, “shall we leave the remains of our loved ones?” “Let us place them in this sacred mound of earth,” the twins said. “The place of the Fruitful Mound is our home forever.”
That was how the Choctaws’ sacred place came to be at Nanih Waya—at least until the whites took their land by the River Beyond Age, the Mississippi.
A similar anguish caused the leader of another people, Young Chief of the Cayuses in Washington Territory, to ask: “I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I hear what the ground says. The ground says, ‘It is the Great Spirit that placed me here. The Great Spirit tells me to take care of the Indians, to feed them properly.’ The water says the same thing. The grass says the same thing. ‘Feed the Indians well,’ the ground says, ‘the Great Spirit has placed me here to produce all that grows on me, trees and fruit.’ In the same way the ground says, ‘It was from me man was made. The Great Spirit in placing men on earth, desired them to take good care of the ground and to do each other no harm…’”.
Again and again, the Native American belief in the indivisibility of land and human existence is proclaimed. In 1900, nearly a century after Tecum seh’s testimony, Big Thunder of the northeastern Wabanakis nation declared: “The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground, she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise. If we are wounded we go to our mother to lay the wounded part against her to be healed.” History rode roughshod over the landscape of Native America, but in the myths and ritual that continue to tell of its sacred past, the Earth lives on as the ultimate cosmic gift.
Sunset glows over the marshland of bosque del Apache National wildlife Park in New mexico. The Native American attitude to the natural world is highly complex. Landscapes and skyscapes are not merely suffused with beauty; they also form part of the spiritual cosmos.
Old Man Arranges the World
Some myths describe how the Earth’s sacred identity derives from the fact that the creator was once physically present. The mountainous western landscape of the Blackfeet bears the imprint of Napi, “Old Man,” the mythical creator of the Earth.
The Blackfoot origin story tells of Old Man moving through primal territory, creating the features and inhabitants of the rugged, mountainous land that was to become the cherished homeland of the Blackfoot nation.
All animals of the Plains at one time knew Old Man. He came from the south. He made the mountains, prairies, timber and brush. So he travelled, arranging the world as we see it today. Everywhere that Old Man went, he made new things. And all these things were connected to each other and were mutually useful. Old Man covered the Plains with grass for the animals. And when things were not quite right, he was prepared to adjust them. The prairies, for example, didn’t suit the ways of the bighorn. So Old Man took those animals by the horns and led them to the mountains. “This is the place that suits you,” he said. He did the same when he made the antelope, leading them down from their first home in the mountains to the prairie. In this way, particular terrains and the creatures living upon them became suited to one another.
As he went about his primal, earth-moving and animal-arranging labors, the Old Man of the Blackfeet was often challenged by other great spirits, such as those of the sun and thunder, but his engaging and agreeable personality won out. He liked to rest from his labors every now and then, and he had a keen sense of humor. A lighthearted episode in the Blackfoot origin story describes how the creator sat on a steep hilltop and surveyed with some satisfaction the country he had made. “Well, this is a fine place for sliding,” he mused, “I’ll have some fun.” He promptly began to slide down the hill; the marks he made while doing so can still be seen today at Old Man’s Sliding Ground in Montana.
The Circle of Heaven
The celestial world of Native American belief systems is alive with spirits, which manifest themselves as night and day or as changes in the weather and the seasons. Many myths reveal the origins of these sky spirits, their place in creation and the parts they play in life on Earth.
The mythical firmament of Native North America has a variety of “geographies.” For Californian peoples, the sky is like a roof, supported by pillars of rock that sometimes collapse with age and wreak havoc on earth, whereas for the Ojibway and the Pueblo peoples, the upper world is a sequence of layers, one above the other.
The Pawnee people of the Plains have a highly detailed conception of the firmament. The sky world that is described in their myths consists of three layers, or circles. At the level of the clouds is the “circle of visions.” Above that is the “circle of the sun;” and highest of all, is the circle of Tirawa, or “Father Heaven.” Tirawa, the Great Spirit who created and in forms every other spirit, is the husband of the fe male spirit who presides over the vault of the sky.
Before he made people, Tirawa specified the place and purpose of each heavenly body. The sun and the “Great Star” of morning (Venus) were placed in the east; the moon and the “Bright Star” of evening (again, Venus) were located in the west. The pole star, in the north, was ordained by Tirawa as the “Star Chief of the Skies,” while the “Spirit Star” (Sirius), which was designed to be occasionally visible, was placed in the south. The four stars of the quartered regions— northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest— were positioned so as to hold up the heavens. Tirawa’s stars were also required to manage other phenomena—the spirits of clouds, winds, lightning and thunder. Having given these forces their roles, Tirawa dropped a pebble into their midst. It rolled
about in the clouds, and then the waters of the lower world appeared. It was from these waters that the Earth itself emerged.
The Pawnee conception of a balanced hierarchy of cel es tial spirits contrasts with the dense sky world of the Chero kee. Cherokee myths tell of a sky made of rock, above which live the spirits of thunder.
The sun, as in Pawnee myth, lives in the east, the moon in the west. Above the sky vault dwells the Great Thun derer and his two Thunder Boys, beautifully garbed in lightning and the rainbow. Other thunder spirits inhabit the moun tains and cliffs of the sky; they travel on invisible bridges from mountain to mountain where they have their houses. Some of these auxiliary thunder spirits are benign, responsive to prayers and appeals from people, but other weather spirits are less sympathetic. According to some Cherokee storytellers, the moon is a ball that was thrown into the sky in a mythical game. Long ago two villages were playing against one another when the leader of one team broke the rules that forbade contact between hand and ball, and he picked it up. Trying to throw it into the goal, he tossed it so high that it hit the solid sky and stuck there as a reminder not to cheat.
This Tsimshian mask has a moon face. The moon is important in all Native American mythologies, but in those of the Tsimshian and other peoples of the Northwest Coast it is understood to be the major source of light.
The War with the Sky Folk
According to this story, which was told by the Kathlamet people of the Northwest Coast, the unruly spirits who lived in the primal sky plagued the first inhabitants of the Earth with destructive storms. Eventually, their victims decided to retaliate.
Native American Myths and Beliefs Page 6