Prof. Bruce Harvey

Prefatory Lecture for Native American Culture and Stories

QUICK HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS

--probably came across Bering Strait around 30,000 years ago

--at least 2 million in North America by the time Columbus arrives; some 10,000 by the end of the 19^th century

--some 250-500 culturally distinct tribes, with different languages and customs, although some tribes shared traits in common with neighbor tribes:

Southeastern groups=Cherokee

--some small bands, primarily nomadic hunter/gatherers

--some sedentary agriculturalists

--some part of tribal confederacies, or nations as large as 20,000

--many tribes = difficult to form united front against invaders

--considerable movement/ invasion of other Indian groups’ territory (so complicated patterns of intermixed/interlocked belief systems)

QUICK HISTORY OF THE CHEROKEES

--Cherokees, in Georgia/western Carolinas/Eastern Tennessee, were sophisticated farmers and had settled villages

--by 1827 had established a constitutional form of government

--fraudulent land-acquiring treaties were imposed upon them in the 1830s

--1835 treaty (by a small-tribal faction) sold 7 million acres and required removal westward

--primarily because South needs land to settle for ever-burgeoning plantation system

--majority repudiated treaty, but forcibly marched to Arkansas and Oklahoma in 1838-39

--about 4000 of 15,000 died of disease and exposure

--lost tribal land in the new territories when they sided with the South in the Civil War

--more tribal land was opened for white settlement in the 1880s

--all pushed onto reservations

--in the 1980s 43,000 persons of Cherokee descent live in eastern Oklahoma, 15,000 full-blooded

SEVEN POINTS TO KEEP IN MIND AS YOU READ THE STORIES

1)  Try to envision oratorical setting: facial expressions/physical gestures simulate characters' reactions or personalities; locations might be drawn in the sand, etc.

2)  Forget Western culture's notions of a well-sculpted plot: no character biographies, rising action, etc.  The audience already knew who the characters were.

3)  Forget your Judeo-Christian-Classical preoccupation with major character flaw/sin: stories aren't usually about some individual's angst (there are no Indian Hamlets), and there is little emphasis on individual characters working out their destiny/salvation.

4)  Keep in mind stories may be about sacred stuff, social dynamics, entertainment all at the same time: we make distinctions between the Bible, the novel  The Great Gatsby, and How to Win Friends and Influence People; Indians may not have, as it were.

5)  Keep in mind that how you "interpret" them--what keeps them from being just zany--may be culturally valid in respect to Native Americans but not necessarily how Native Americans themselves would interpret the stories.  Ponder how a child, an adult, an anthropologist from Mars, or a U.S. sociologist, all might differently interpret a narrative of Halloween. 

6)  Don't sentimentalize: Indians had "respect" for nature, but did not romanticize it (you need to be separated from nature to do the latter).  For Indians, nature was neither a commodity (property) nor a pastoral refuge; they might revere forces associated with nature, and see it ha densely populated with powers and as being marvelously alive--yet the latter can also lead to considerable paranoia.

7)  Stories you read are impure (because of translation, complete story not being told to outsiders, because of Christian editing).



Interpretive Possibilities
 

EXAMPLE OF ENVIRONMENT/SURVIVAL INTERPRETATION: STONEMAN

--Stoneman/cannibal creatures are associated with winter

--menstruating women = taboo = bad for hunting (sometimes) but also powerful

--in winter (archaic memories of migration from North?) fear of starvation=threat of cannibalism=remember spring when fertility returns=snow/stoneman melts

EXAMPLE OF CULTURAL "UNCONSCIOUS" INTERPRETATION: YOUNGER BROTHER

--1st, get sense of basic episodes—this is what professional ethnographers do (comparing variations of a tale within/between tribes)

--2nd, go to sociological explanations

--watch out for women: some might be witches

--kinship relations can get violent and complicated               

--3rd, go for physiological/sexual

--boys/men worried about women/sexuality (whether sex is aggressive, etc.)

--vagina dentata=widespread image in many cultures' folklore

--4th, try to link all elements (food, inside/outside, engulfment, mothering/witch) into one master antithesis of the archaic/collective unconscious (or of male collective unconscious?)

--fear of mother becoming cruel/castrating witch

--or just look at it as a eat or be eaten story

--sounds wacky: but think of "Aliens" and all the themes of mothering/ingestion, etc.: not dissimilar