Sometimes, a hunter’s skill derived from having had a close kinship with an animal. A myth of the Mistassini Cree of Quebec tells how a bear adopted a boy and shared with him its diet of porcupine, beaver and partridge. At the approach of winter, they prepared to hibernate in the bear’s lair. However, the bear suddenly heard the boy’s father singing far away, in an effort to locate his lost son. Although the bear tried to drown the sound out with its own song, the father’s voice proved too powerful. As winter progressed, the boy’s father sang again, only this time closer at hand—he was evidently approaching the lair in search of his son. The bear attempted to distract the hunter by hurling into his path various live prey animals that it had hoarded in its lair. Though it tried this ruse several times, it failed to deflect the father from his purpose. In desperation to avoid being located and killed by the vengeful father, the bear lay on its back with its legs in the air and tried to raise a violent storm, but all to no avail.
Finally, realizing that it could not halt the father’s relentless advance, the bear bit off one of its forelegs and gave it to the boy as a memento, exhorting him to keep it safely. At that moment, the hunter broke into the lair and killed the bear. The boy was taken home by his father and grew up to be a successful hunter, with a special understanding of the ways of bears. His skill allowed him to feed his people from his own kills, and he was always able to find bears for other hunters.
Native Americans believe that all creatures are under the control of a guardian spirit, a Master or Mistress of the Animals. This figure is understood either literally, as the father or mother of every animal in a particular species, or figuratively, as the species’ collective spirit, comprising the souls of all its individuals. Occasionally, the guiding spirit may take the form of a gigantic animal, such as the beaver spirit that is believed by the Montagnais of Quebec to be as big as a hut; other peoples, such as the Mistassini Cree, refer to animals as the guardian spirit’s “pets.”
It was widely thought that animals and their spirit owners sacrificed themselves willingly to hunters who accorded them the proper “respect.” However, this was far from straightforward, since correct hunting behavior was fraught with taboos. For example, the Western Apache considered it a grave offense against the Deer Spirit to boil a deer’s stomach or eat its tongue. The Cherokee claimed that when a hunter shot a deer, the chief Deer Spirit asked the dying animal whether it had heard the hunter pray for pardon. If not, the Chief Deer would track the hunter to his tent and cripple him with rheumatism. Hunters who did not know the appropriate prayer had to protect themselves from pursuit by building a fire on the path behind them.
Many peoples believed that an individual or clan could form a special relationship with a particular species, which then ac ted as their guardian animal. The Iroquois re ferred to the animal patron of a clan as a “totem,” and proscribed the hunting of this species. The convention was also widely observed on the Plains, but among Great Basin peoples hunting was allowed if the person meant to assimilate the power of the guardian animal. In many areas of North America, it was the practice to dress up like the animal patron, wear its mask, or keep parts of its body in a sacred bundle.
This inuit wooden carving of a whale was attached to the bow of a hunting canoe in order to attract and assuage the guardian spirit of the whales. respect towards the animals hunted was regarded as essential.
In respecting an animal, the hunter effectively treated it as a person. In a myth of the Thompson (Ntlakyapamuk) Indians, a hunter lost sight of two female goats he was chasing, and then encountered them again in the form of two human women. He married them, but they refused to have sexual intercourse with him until they came into season. When he was about to return to his own people, the goats assured him that he would be a successful goat hunter, provided that he treated the bodies of killed goats with the respect that he would accord people. He was not to kill the females, for they were his wives. Neither should he kill the kids, for they might be his own children. He was allowed to shoot only the adult males, his brothers-in-law. However, he need feel no sorrow, since in perishing they would only be relinquishing the goat part of their being, while the human part of them would return home alive.
Careful disposal of bones was another important way of honoring an animal one had killed. They were often rearranged into complete skeletons, with great care being taken not to mislay a single bone. This ensured that, although the animal had been eaten, it would still be reborn. Bear bones were treated with particular respect.
In seasonal rites, one animal could represent the entire catch. An important ritual of the Hupa of northwestern California marked the catching of the season’s first migrating salmon. In preparation, a fire (representing the creation) was lit inside a sweat lodge, which symbolized the cosmos. The first fish caught was cooked over the fire, eaten, and its remains disposed of with great ceremony.
There were many other ways in which hunters and their communities could display humility to -wards animals and avoid offending a species or its guardian. Inuit women butchering a seal on the shore would customarily throw a kidney or bladder back into the water, as a token of thanks and as a votive offering to ward off future shortage. Similarly, hunters were not allowed to boast of their prowess or reveal their intent to kill an animal before a hunt. One Zuni legend concerns a woman who dreamt that a deer offered itself to her. She did not tell her husband her dream, contenting herself with a vaguely ex pressed hope that he might have good luck while hunting. Although she was certain that the hunt would be successful, she dared not say so. Equally, her husband may have guessed the content of her dream, but could not ask her to divulge it.
This Inukshuk – a heap of stones assembled in the shape of a human being – was erected by the iglulik inuit of northern Canada to direct the migration of caribou.
Some hunting societies, such as the peoples of the Plains and the Great Lakes, used the image of the Happy Hunting Ground to express their concept of an afterlife as a reward for good conduct. A myth of the Seneca shows how this realm provided moral lessons. A trickster called Mischief-Maker constantly angered his people with his practical jokes. One day, he was borne aloft on a column of smoke and set down in a land of beautiful people, with fields full of beans and pumpkins and tents stacked with deer and bear meat. After living happily there for a hundred years, he was sent back to his people by the chief of the realm, with instructions to tell them what he had seen. He changed his name from Mischief-Maker to Peace-Maker and told the Seneca that the Great Spirit would guide and protect them if they led righteous lives and shunned evil: “There are spirits in the pumpkin and in the bean, spirits in the water, the fire and all the trees and berries. Remember to thank the Great Spirit for these, throw tobacco in the fire as an offering, and after your death you will live forever, hunting and fishing in the Happy Hunting Ground.”
Hunters Who Married Animal Girls
The union of a mythical hunter with the daughter of the spirit “owner” or “master” of an animal species is the subject of many Native American myths. Two stories from very different areas show how such marriages are the ultimate confirmation of a harmonious relationship between a hunting people and the animals that form its main source of food.
In a myth of the Mistassini Cree of Quebec, a hunter married a caribou girl and learned to see reality from the caribous’ perspective. Whereas other hunters, when shooting a caribou, simply saw the animal fall down and die, he could see its spirit still running away, while its carcass remained behind in the form of a white cape.
A Pawnee myth tells how a young hunter was about to kill a young female buffalo at a watering hole when she suddenly revealed herself as a beautiful young woman. He instantly fell in love with her and gave her a necklace of blue and white beads. They married and set up camp together.
One day the hunter returned to find his wife and camp gone. He searched in vain, finally returning in great sorrow to his tribe. Later, he met a small boy wearing
the same necklace of blue and white beads. The boy, whom he recognized as his son by his buffalo wife, led him back to the land of the buffaloes. The bulls were initially suspicious, and before allowing him to join the herd, challenged him to perform several difficult tasks, including identifying his own wife among the cows.
Once the hunter had passed all the tests, the buffaloes accepted him. He took his wife back to meet his own people, but found them starving. The buffaloes agreed to help by allowing the Pawnees to hunt them. The hunter’s son joined them in the form of a yellow calf, which the hunter warned the humans never to harm or there would be nobody to guide the herd to them each year. But the son said, “No, sacrifice me to the Great Spirit Tirawa Atius. A new calf will take my place each year. Tan my hide, and use it to wrap a sacred bundle containing an ear of corn and a piece of meat. Every hungry season, call upon the calf to lead the herd back to the people, and add a piece of the new season’s meat to the bundle.”
This shoshoni hide painting depicts a dance after a successful buffalo hunt. Peoples of the Plains believed that they had special links with this vital animal.
The Sun Dance
The Sun Dance celebration of the Earth’s renewal was held at the beginning of summer by many peoples on the Plains and in the Northeast. While the Sioux performed the rite annually, some other peoples such as the Blackfeet repeated it only every two or three years. Each people placed a different emphasis on the dance, explained in different myths.
The Sun Dance was a grand public spectacle, involving fasting, banquets, communal games, and healing sessions. It could last for up to two weeks. Participants would im plore the spirits to give them and their families protection. Among peoples of the Great Sioux Nation, the central feature of the dance was a four-day period in which young braves gained spiritual power both for themselves and for their tribe by dancing with their skin pierced by wooden skewers. These were embedded in the warrior’s chest, back or shoulders and fastened to a central pole by leather thongs. Each man would dance for hours around the pole, leaning outwards to put the maximum strain on the skewers until they ripped his flesh, and he fell to the ground in a trance. Some devotees also used the skewers to drag heavy buffalo skulls around the camp circle. Warriors would stand or dance for hours, or even days, staring into the sun. Participants in the ritual gained great prestige, especially among the Sioux, and warriors from the Oglala tribe would display their Sun Dance scars proudly for the rest of their lives.
Although the Sun Dance was traditionally held to ensure the fertility of the buffalo herd and success in warfare, its significance was not confined to hunting or battle. Rather, the ritual lay at the very heart of religious observance, as a form of prayer in which a person offered himself up as a sacrifice for the renewal of the world. Mortification of the flesh was central to the ritual, especially on the Plains, as it signified humility before the Great Spirit, stressing that the only thing that a person had to give was his body.
This headdress was worn by the virtuous figure of feather woman in the blackfoot sun Dance. The blackfoot people trace the origin of the ceremony to feather woman’s love for morning star.
Historical evidence suggests that the Sun Dance evolved slowly. Like the midewiwin ritual of the Ojibway or the Medicine Rite of the Winne -bago, it may have developed as an assertion of tribal solidarity in response to two centuries of European aggression. Its origins and form are explained in a rich body of myths.
One of these, from the Blackfoot, gives the dance a celestial origin. A young girl called Feather Woman was sleeping out of doors in the summer and woke before dawn. She was captivated by the beauty of the Morning Star, who was a young man. Morning Star returned her love, and together they climbed into the sky on a thread from a spider’s web. Morning Star’s mother, the Moon, and his father, the Sun, welcomed Feather Woman. For a long while, she lived happily in the sky with her husband, and she bore him a son, Star Boy.
One day, Feather Woman’s mother-in-law gave her a tool for harvesting roots, but warned her that she should on no account dig up a large turnip that was growing nearby. However, overcome by curiosity, she eventually uprooted the vegetable. The turnip turned out to be the plug closing the hole through which she had ascended into heaven —seen from the earth, it appeared in the sky as the Pole Star. Looking down, she saw her own village far below and was overcome by homesickness. When the Sun came home and saw what she had done, he angrily told her to leave. Morning Star gave her a parting gift of a sacred hat and an elkskin robe, clothes that could be worn only by a pure woman, and with great sadness let her and her son down through the hole.
Shortly afterwards, Feather Woman died, leaving Star Boy an impoverished orphan. He was taunted by the other children, and later spurned by the woman he loved, because of a mysterious scar on his face. One day he learned from an old female shaman that the blemish had been made by his grandfather the Sun, and he was consumed by a desire to visit him. He waited on the shore of the western ocean until sunset, when across the water a shaft of light appeared, and upon this he travelled to the Sun. Although the Sun was initially displeased to see him, he later relented and said to him, “Go back to the Blackfeet and tell them that I will heal their sick if they hold an annual festival in my honor.” Star Boy duly returned to earth and passed on the Sun’s instructions for performing the dance. In memory of Feather Woman, the Blackfeet believe that the Sun Dance must be initiated by a virtuous woman.
The Cheyenne stage a similar dance, but base it on a different myth. This legend tells how they were suffering a great famine. Crops withered and animals died. To seek help, a young man known as Rustling Corn decided to go on a pilgrimage to a distant sacred mountain. He secretly persuaded the chief’s beautiful wife to accompany him, but was careful to abstain from sexual intercourse with her until they had safely completed their Mission and were on the return journey. On the mountain, they were received by the Thunder Spirit and the god Mayun, who gave them detailed instructions about how to perform the Sun Dance. Mayun gave Rustling Corn a cap of buffalo skin with two horns and renamed him Upright Horns (“Tomtivsi”). Mayun told him, “Follow my instructions accurately, and then, when you depart from here, all of the heavenly bodies will move. Roaring Thunder will awaken, the sun, moon, stars and the rain will bring forth fruits of all kinds…Take this horned cap to wear when you perform the ceremony that I have bestowed on you, and you will control the buffalo and all other animals.”
In this painting of a Cheyenne sun Dance ceremony, a dancer hangs by rawhide thongs from the tree at the center of the lodge. bison skulls attached to his back add to his weight.
A Cheyenne muslin tent covering showing the sun Dance ceremony. in front of a line of tipis, women and children are pictured as they observe the ritual. under a canopy specially erected for the purpose around a central tree, participants are seen assembled for the dance.
The pilgrims returned home, and as they did so, the Earth sprang to life again. Upright Horns instructed the Cheyenne in the ritual of the dance, and the sacred buffalo-skin cap was handed down to all future generations.
Every major element of this myth is reenacted in the way the Cheyenne perform the Sun Dance. The pledge to hold the ceremony is often made by a person or community in distress, as in the original famine. The pledger’s wife represents the mythical companion of Upright Horns, and the couple must refrain from sex until the dance is over. Priests officiating at the ritual, themselves former pledgers, represent Mayun and the Thunder Spirit. The participants are collectively referred to as “the ones who bring back to life.”
White Buffalo Woman
Plains peoples looked upon the buffalo as an intermediary with the Creator. According to the Sioux, it was a buffalo in human form that brought them many important rites, including the Sun Dance.
A myth of the Lakota Sioux tells how the supreme spirit, Wakan Tanka (“Great Mystery”), once sent as an emissary a beautiful woman clad in a white dress.
The w
oman brought with her a two-piece pipe, which she gave to the Sioux as a sacred object, explaining that, once assembled, it represented the entire universe. Its circular stone bowl signified the Earth and all its creatures, while the wooden stem, rising from the center of the bowl, indicated a direct link between the Earth and the sky. Its smoke also performed a dual function, both carrying prayers to the spirit ancestors as it drifted upwards and imparting strength to the smokers of the pipe. After she had given the Sioux the pipe, the woman transformed herself into a white buffalo calf and disappeared.
Along with the sacred pipe, White Buffalo Woman also imparted to the Sioux seven rites that are central to their religion. These included the vision quest, the rites of purification in the sweat lodge, funeral rites that ensure that the soul of the deceased returns to the Great Spirit instead of wandering the Earth as a ghost, puberty rites for girls and the Sun Dance.
However, another legend places the origin of the Sun Dance much later than the other rites. According to this account, the ritual was introduced because the Sioux had become negligent in their respect for the sacred pipe. A man called Kablaya received a vision referring to a new form of prayer that would help to restore the strength and the faith of the people. This was the Sun Dance.
A page from the historical record (“winter Count”) of the brulé sioux shows white buffalo woman inside a circle of tipis. The sacred pipe is depicted immediately above the animal.
In the nineteenth century, along with the rest of Plains culture, the Sun Dance came under threat from white settlement. The US Govern ment saw it as a focus of resistance, especially among the Sioux, and outlawed it in 1881. This was a devastating blow for the Indians, for, without the Sun Dance, they thought that the world would not renew itself. Some Indians therefore continued to perform it in secret, while others turned to another ritual, the Ghost Dance (see page 130). When this in turn was suppressed in 1890, Shoshoni and Ute shamans, guided by dreams, shifted the focus of the Sun Dance towards healing.
Native American Myths and Beliefs Page 16