Native American Myths and Beliefs

by Tom Lowenstein

  When the people had assembled, the hunter told them: “My father was dissatisfied because I did not do as he had done. His wishes grieved the guardian spirit that helped me. My father said that he had been scarred by an elk. He wanted me to kill more than was needed. The spirit has left me.” With that, he died.

  An elk painted on the side of a Zuni water jar. This animal – also known as the wapiti – was once widely hunted in North America.

  The Vulnerability of Animals

  While Native American myths attribute power and dignity to animals, especially the larger species, there is also an awareness in some narratives of their comparative weakness and their dependence upon human help.

  One of the quintessential Native American symbols of power was the eagle. Its sheer size and majesty, and the proximity to the heavens of both its flight and its nesting places, gave rise to many myths. Yet a Navajo story about an eagle hunt combines a recognition of the bird’s power with a re -minder of its vulnerability.

  Two young men hun -ting deer stopped to watch an eagle. They observed as the bird soared away into the hills. The next day, a party of hunters discovered its aerie at a site known as Standing Rock. The men saw two eagle chicks in a nest on a precipice and decided to capture them, but the only way to reach the nest would be to let a person in a basket down onto the ledge, a perilous under taking that none of the hunters dared risk.

  Living in the village was a scrawny youth called He-Who-Picks-Up, who was chosen for the task. He was given a fine meal of bread, corn and meat, and told: “You will eat like this for the rest of your life, if you agree to get the eagles.” The boy agreed, and he was lowered down to the nest. Just then, the wind spoke to him. “These people are lying. Once they have the eagles, they will abandon you. Get into the nest and stay.” So, when he was close enough, He-Who-Picks-Up climbed into the nest. The other people tried in vain to get him to throw down the eagle chicks to them. The next day they returned and attempted to coax him out of the nest, all to no avail. On the third day, threats and burning arrows failed to dislodge him. On the fourth day they left him to die. Half dead with terror, exhaustion and thirst, He-Who-Picks-Up sat till nightfall, when he heard the adult eagles returning to their aerie. “Thanks, my child”, they greeted him. “You have not thrown down your younger brothers!” And they dubbed the boy Chiefof-Eagles-in-the-Sky.

  An eagle is one of the figures carved on this totem pole in the village of Kispiox in british Columbia.

  In gratitude, the father eagle fed the boy with cornmeal and then, producing from his tail feathers a plant rich in water, quenched his raging thirst. Presently, the boy fell asleep between the parent birds, who had taken off their feathered robes to reveal that they had the bodies of humans. In the morning, other eagles assembled, and resolved to give the boy the same power that they had. They placed forked lightning under his feet, a sunbeam beneath his knees, strips of straight lightning under his chest and his outstretched arms, and a rainbow under his forehead. An eagle took hold of each end of the lightning strips and they soared away from the aerie.

  The Man Who Lived with Bears

  A story told by the Skidi Pawnee people of the Plains shows that an intense feeling of kinship could exist between humans and other species. Such relationships were thought to be reciprocal: in this tale, the kindness shown by a person to a vulnerable bear is later rewarded.

  A man out hunting once came upon an abandoned bear cub. Instead of killing the cub, he tied an offering of tobacco around its neck and blessed it, saying: “May Tirawa (the Supreme Deity) protect you!” After returning to his camp, he described to his pregnant wife what had happened, and when she later gave birth, their son grew up feeling a powerful sense of kinship with bears. So strongly did he identify with them that often, while alone, he would pray to bears’ souls.

  When the boy reached manhood, he was killed and dismembered in an enemy ambush. A male and a female bear found his remains and revived him with the help of supernatural powers. The man was completely restored and lived for a long while with his benefactors. During this time, he came to revere bears as the greatest and wisest of all beings, with the most powerful souls. The bears, however, reminded him of their place in the order of things. Their wisdom, they said, was a gift from Tirawa.

  Eventually, the time came for the man to return to his people. As he took his leave, the male bear embraced him, pressed its mouth to the man’s lips, and rubbed him with its paws and fur. The touch of the fur gave the man power, while the kiss gave him wisdom. He became a great warrior and established the Bear Dance among his people.

  A Plains medicine man of the blackfoot tribe is shown wearing a bearskin in this 1832 painting by george Catlin. shamans from many peoples invoked the power of the bear’s spirit in healing the sick.

  ON THE WARPATH

  In warfare between tribes, warriors were granted their strength in battle from the spirit world that is described in myth. Power came to warriors in visions, and battle plans were often laid according to how a chief’s dreams were interpreted. Ceremonies to ensure success were sometimes performed by shamans. Even the garments of war, decorated with symbols and patterns, were thought to offer protection, and headdresses were made from the feathers of sacred birds of prey. Each bird had different attributes—swiftness, vigilance, keen eyesight. When the white man’s conquest of the continent was almost complete, Native American devotees of the Ghost Dance tried to ward off bullets with sacred shirts.

  This battle shield combines elements of the supernatural with the real, giving its owner strength and protection in battle. real warriors would sometimes become the source of legends.

  Warriors were highly esteemed for their spiritual powers and brought honor to their people, although tribal battles were not often recorded in myth. This depiction of a bloody combat is reproduced in Karl bodmer’s Travels into the Interior of North America, 1832–34.

  This beadwork on a sioux sleeveless leather jacket portrays a fight between a white soldier, armed with a gun, and a Native American. spirit forces were believed to endow the warrior with invulnerability, even to bullets.

  A painting on muslin showing the legendary sioux chief sitting bull being dragged from his cabin and arrested for his support of the ghost Dance in 1890. revered by his people, sitting bull was a fearless warrior and brilliant military tactician who conducted several successful campaigns against us forces from the early 1860s onwards.

  This colorful Lakota hidepainting, made in around 1880, records the Lakota and Crow at war. The warriors’ battle regalia, especially their headdresses, were believed to lend them physical and spiritual strength and grant them protection against the enemy.

  Totems and Clans

  Native American societies on the fertile and prosperous Pacific Northwest Coast were structured according to a system of clans—groups of related families—arranged within an elaborate hierarchy. Each clan traced its origin to an animal spirit, or totem. Prominent clans would proclaim their status and sacred lineage by erecting huge carved poles outside their communal houses, decorated with the animal crests of the families who dwelt within.

  Northwest Coast peoples such as the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit, who inhabit an area now covered by Washington State, British Colum bia and southeast Alaska, have always been favored by an abundance of edible flora and fauna. Because it is sheltered by mountain ranges from the Subarctic interior to the east, and because the sea is warmed by the Japan Current, this narrow coastal region enjoys a rainy, temperate climate that makes it very fertile.

  There was an enormous variety of sea and freshwater fish, marine mammals and land animals available to the hunter-gatherer societies that flourished along this coast, reflected in the region’s mythology and art. Moreover, the extensive forest habitats of the bear, deer, elk and moose yielded abundant timber for housing, tools and artifacts; red and durable yellow cedarwood were the favored materials.

  The most striking examples of Northwest Coas
t art are the totem poles that served both as signs of clan affiliation and as ancestral monuments. These towering sculptures were visible from both sea and land and embodied the spiritual heritage of their owners in a number of different ways. The largest structures were freestanding memorial poles that were erected in honor of a dead chief; these began to be carved only in the nineteenth century, as Northwest Coast tribes acquired machine-made metal tools from their trade with whites. However, these were only the last flowering of a carving tradition that reached back some 1,200 years. The first examples of such work were found on the interior posts and frontal poles of large communal dwellings.

  An elaborately carved and painted totem pole in vancouver, british Columbia. The principal figure at the top of this pole is Thunderbird, the fearsome spirit that brings rain, thunder and lightning.

  How Raven Helped to Make Clans

  Myths of the Tlingit trace the origin of their clan crests back to the beginning of time. At that period, the great deity Raven-at-thehead-of-Nass lived in darkness at the mouth of the Nass River, hoarding the sun, moon and stars in wooden boxes.

  The sister of Raven-at-the-headof-Nass gave birth to a son. This was the Trickster Raven (see pages 78–79), one of whose exploits was to steal the box of daylight from the deity.

  After taking the box, the Raven Trickster offered it to people in exchange for food. But, meeting with only scorn and derision because they did not believe that it contained light, he opened the lid. With a roar, the sun burst out and rose into the sky, and the terrified people scattered in all directions.

  The advent of daylight transformed creatures into the physical forms they have today. People who were clad in the skins of otters, beavers and seals turned into those animals. Those who were wearing nothing when the light arrived remained as human beings, and they selected their clan crests in memory of their transformed companions.

  The myth of raven’s theft of the sun is shown in this Taku Tlingit headdress. Daylight is represented by the inlaid mirror, and the disk of the sun rests between raven’s ears.

  Similar poles were made for the ashes of dead chiefs or other noblemen. The tops of these poles had a recess or casket that contained their cremated remains. The erection of a memorial or mortuary pole was an important ceremonial occasion.

  The intricate designs on totem poles were far more than simple ornament. They derived from two interrelated sources, in human society and in the realm of myth. Northwest Coast societies were organized hierarchically into clans, each with its own chief and its separate domestic and ceremonial center. Every clan traced its lineage back to an encounter in mythical time with a particular animal spirit, who had endowed the group with his power and bestowed on it his image for use as a heraldic device. Thus, in southeast Alaska, Tlingit society was composed of two major moieties, or divisions: the Raven and the Eagle (though, among the southern Tlingit, the Eagle was replaced by the Wolf moiety). Within each moiety were further family subdivisions, with their own animal crests. Apart from the raven itself, crests of the Raven moiety showed the hawk, moose, sea lion, whale, salmon and frog. And, in addition to the principal animal, Eagle and Wolf moiety crests in -cluded images of the brown bear, killer whale, dogfish and halibut. All artifacts, however great or small, from house posts and totem poles to bowls, spoons, ladles and woven ceremonial blankets, were densely covered with a multitude of animal designs associated with the owner’s clan.

  A community house (left) and Thunderbird totem pole from the southern Kwakiutl settlement of Alert bay on vancouver island. featuring on both exterior poles and on numerous carved posts within the communal dwellings, animal motifs stressed the clan’s affiliation.

  Given their vital role in conveying information from generation to generation about a clan’s supernatural provenance, crest designs were jealously guarded by those who owned them. If they were lost, whether captured as war trophies or surrendered as compensation for the murder of another clan member, clans spared no effort or expense to redeem them.

  Northwest Coast Ceremonies

  Among Northwest Coast peoples there were secret societies of shamans, whose ceremonies invoked the powers of patron spirits. The social functions of the clan and the society were quite different: whereas clans emphasized the hierarchical divisions between people, societies cut across these groupings, and their rituals stressed common ancestry.

  In most Northwest Coast cultures, elaborate winter ceremonies were conducted, both in order to ex -press and reinforce lineage traditions and to display clan crests. For example, each year the Hamatsa (or Cannibal) Society of the Kwakiutl (see page 122) reenacted in a ceremony the ancient encounter between their ancestors and Bax bax walanuxsiwe, the “Cannibal-at-the-North-End-of-the-World.” Initiates derived power from their patron spirit in a ser ies of dramatic, frenzied dances.

  Many of these events included potlatch ceremonies marking a rite of passage, at which tribal chiefs, as a sign of their material wealth, would donate (or even burn) food, skins, blankets and other possessions.

  The haida village of Ninstints in the southern Queen Charlotte islands. As well as crest poles and tall memorial poles, mortuary poles surmounted by chests containing ancestral remains can be seen. shortly after this photograph was taken, in the late 19th century, the village was devastated by diseases.

  Dances and dance pantomimes played an especially important role in ceremonial events. Every detail of the choreography and the accompanying songs told genealogical stories. The dances of the Kwakiutl, perhaps the most intricate and spectacular of these ceremonies, gave rise to one of the richest forms of Northwest Coast art—the dance mask (see pages 82–83). Usually covering the whole face or just the forehead, these wooden masks sometimes incorporated movable parts or faces within faces that were revealed at critical moments. While woodcarvers from other cultures in the region tended to decorate their work in one or two restrained colors, Kwakiutl artists employed a rich palette of dazzling combinations. These pigments, together with the use of inlaid stone and shell and undulating fibrous materials, produced dramatic effects in the firelight that illuminated the vast, crowded communal houses in which the ceremonies took place.

  A Tlingit wooden frog clan hat of about 1820, decorated with inlays of abalone shell. each woven ring represents a potlatch, or gift-giving feast, that the owner of the hat has sponsored.

  In the guise of their lineage animals, performers would take to the floor, mimicking the call and movements of their particular ancestral creatures. The dancers wore masks representing different birds, animals and imaginary beings. Of all the many masks, those depicting the legendary beasts were the most striking: among them were the fearsome sea-monster Sisiutl, the Thunderbird, and Hokhokw, a supernatural bird with a massive beak that could split men’s skulls.

  In addition to dancing, important rituals and initiations were undertaken during the winter ceremonies. For example, among the northern Kwakiutl, a supernatural wolf required that masked members of its lineage should enact wolf-spirit possession. This entailed wild and alarming behavior in and around the village. Similarly, the Nootka of Vancouver Island enacted a wolf ritual that recalled the initiation by a wolf of their lineage ancestor. Dances, songs, masks and special whistles used during the ceremony were all based around this ancestor’s visionary experience. Like the Kwakiutl ceremony, the Nootka rite was long, vivid and complex. It began with the blowing of special whistles outside the village, at which point wolf society novices, usually children, were carried off to a secret place where they were taught dances, songs and other clan lore. When they reappeared, led by masked wolf clan initiates, they were dressed in new ceremonial costumes and family crest masks and were called upon to demonstrate what they had learned during their initiation.

  Intriguingly, the Nootka were virtually the only Northwest Coast people to hunt whales. In common with other whaling societies, the Nootka observed elaborate rituals that were intended both to lure the whales and to propitiate the souls of t
hose harpooned and killed. Together with other peoples of the region, they believed that the spirits of the wolf and the whale were closely related. The grounds for this belief have become obscured by time, but it was widely held that reverence to the wolf would also please the whale. Therefore, the wolf rituals of the Nootka made explicit reference to the whales that would be hunted, under conditions of strict taboo and long ceremonial preparation, later in the year. Whale lineage crests were never used by these people, however.

  The spirit-helpers who aided both sha -mans and laity and who permitted their like -nesses to be used as clan crests (see pages 103–4) were almost in variably non-prey animals or creatures that were only marginal to subsistence. Important crest animals included the raven, killer whale, grizzly bear, octopus and frog. For a variety of reasons both practical and spiritual, hunters would avoid killing these animals. For example, not only was the raven inedible, it was also too highly regarded in its role as a creator-hero (see page 78). The killer whale was regarded with reverential fear, while the grizzly bear was not hunted on account of its having a highly dangerous and unpredictable character.

  A Tlingit myth describes the spirit origin of the frog crest. In the middle of a lake near Yakutat was a marshy reed bed where frogs used to sit. One day the daughter of the chief of the town made offensive remarks to the frogs about their sexual behavior. That night a young man appeared to her and asked if she would marry him. The young woman had hitherto rejected every other suitor, but was instantly captivated by this handsome man—who was in fact a frog in human form. Pointing to the lake, the frog-man said: “My father’s house lies just over there.” “How fine it looks,” replied the woman. As she and her new spouse approached the lake, it appeared to her as though a door in the house were opening to let them in; in reality, however, they were sinking below the waters of the lake.