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Native American Myths & Legends
This book is a beautifully presented collection of the fascinating stories told by the indigenous peoples across the continent of North America. The exciting adventures of trickster figures like Glooscap, Raven and Coyote are combined here with classic legends of creation. These legends span the width of the continent with tales from the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region to the Inuits of Alaska. Together, these carefully chosen tales show the sheer diversity of the First Nations of Canada and the United States but for all their differences, certain common themes weave through all the tribes' tales. It makes for an excellent introduction to the myths and legends of North America.
272 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2019
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Various
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If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 20, 2026
Reviewing this because I largely finished it except the last couple stories, but had to return it to the library. This was a decent little collection to read as fairy tales, or as a reference, but if I had one complaint it's that the categorization was pretty unhelpful to me as a reader without a ton of background knowledge on the traditions and tribes of each area.
First of all, the book was just split into Creation Myths vs. Tricksters and Heroes, which felt a little broad for me. I appreciated that they seemed to try to group the stories by some logic (e.g. the creation myths seemed somewhat grouped by location, or the trickster ones grouped by trickster) but as it crossed so many different cultures the stories still felt a little untethered and contextless. Some of this may have also flowed over from the fact that the other book I've been reading about a similar topic also combined vast swathes of North America (although that one tries to provide a bit more context), but I would have really liked to get a better picture of the whole story of a single tradition at a time. This also wasn't helped by the fact that some of the stories felt like they were cropped from a previous story - some entries were incredibly short and started like they were continuing on from the previous story or assumed some context that wasn't included.
I suspect that many of these came from Native American storytellers telling many stories verbally to a European man at some point, and may have summarized or dumbed things down due to language and/or time limitations. I also suspect that a lot of these anthologies cut up the stories in an attempt to make them more like fairy tale books or Greek/Norse myths books, but it ends up losing a lot of the context we need. I don't have proof or anything, but this was my idea for why the stories feel so adrift. Sure, you can read in creation myths about how Glooscap came to be, but then half a book later after a bunch of stories from unrelated traditions, you finally come back to his adventures.
Another issue this book was really bad about was that it included a lot of names and terms from the original languages, but was terrible about consistently defining what or who those were. I assume these made sense to the people whose story it was, but to a reader who may not already be familiar, it made some stories incredibly confusing. This also tied back to my feeling that some of these stories were originally told as part of one longer continuous story session, because sometimes characters would just appear with no explanation of who they were, almost as though they had already been explained earlier by the storyteller, but then that earlier bit got chopped or moved to its own story when compiling this book.
And a final complaint: the book calls these "myths and legends" but literally one of the stories (the Yosemite one) is about a real person who had been alive around the time these were written. The story isn't even particularly fantastical, it literally just feels like a valid biography of a powerful chief. I actually enjoyed this story, and it was cool to discover it was a real person, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed that the book doesn't seem to understand this, or feel the need to clarify this for readers. I am not really an expert in the cultures in this book, so it seems like maybe some storytelling traditions treat things like creation myths and exploits of recent awesome guys as being on the same playing field? But either way I think it would be useful to know that some of these are about actual verifiable real people (and who).
Anyway, despite my gripes, I still largely enjoyed the stories and it was passable as a first experience with stories from this part of the world.
That said, I would love to see a serious text written by a Native American person about the storytelling tradition of their people, with full context of their understanding of their own gods and heroes. I feel like sometimes I read European/American interpretations of my ancestral stories and they always feel slightly foreign and removed from full context (I swear this is how we got the late 2010s push of weird "moon goddess" stuff and the awkward Asian-American YA), so I'm always interested to hear what other people have to say about their own traditions.
First of all, the book was just split into Creation Myths vs. Tricksters and Heroes, which felt a little broad for me. I appreciated that they seemed to try to group the stories by some logic (e.g. the creation myths seemed somewhat grouped by location, or the trickster ones grouped by trickster) but as it crossed so many different cultures the stories still felt a little untethered and contextless. Some of this may have also flowed over from the fact that the other book I've been reading about a similar topic also combined vast swathes of North America (although that one tries to provide a bit more context), but I would have really liked to get a better picture of the whole story of a single tradition at a time. This also wasn't helped by the fact that some of the stories felt like they were cropped from a previous story - some entries were incredibly short and started like they were continuing on from the previous story or assumed some context that wasn't included.
I suspect that many of these came from Native American storytellers telling many stories verbally to a European man at some point, and may have summarized or dumbed things down due to language and/or time limitations. I also suspect that a lot of these anthologies cut up the stories in an attempt to make them more like fairy tale books or Greek/Norse myths books, but it ends up losing a lot of the context we need. I don't have proof or anything, but this was my idea for why the stories feel so adrift. Sure, you can read in creation myths about how Glooscap came to be, but then half a book later after a bunch of stories from unrelated traditions, you finally come back to his adventures.
Another issue this book was really bad about was that it included a lot of names and terms from the original languages, but was terrible about consistently defining what or who those were. I assume these made sense to the people whose story it was, but to a reader who may not already be familiar, it made some stories incredibly confusing. This also tied back to my feeling that some of these stories were originally told as part of one longer continuous story session, because sometimes characters would just appear with no explanation of who they were, almost as though they had already been explained earlier by the storyteller, but then that earlier bit got chopped or moved to its own story when compiling this book.
And a final complaint: the book calls these "myths and legends" but literally one of the stories (the Yosemite one) is about a real person who had been alive around the time these were written. The story isn't even particularly fantastical, it literally just feels like a valid biography of a powerful chief. I actually enjoyed this story, and it was cool to discover it was a real person, but I can't help but feel a little disappointed that the book doesn't seem to understand this, or feel the need to clarify this for readers. I am not really an expert in the cultures in this book, so it seems like maybe some storytelling traditions treat things like creation myths and exploits of recent awesome guys as being on the same playing field? But either way I think it would be useful to know that some of these are about actual verifiable real people (and who).
Anyway, despite my gripes, I still largely enjoyed the stories and it was passable as a first experience with stories from this part of the world.
That said, I would love to see a serious text written by a Native American person about the storytelling tradition of their people, with full context of their understanding of their own gods and heroes. I feel like sometimes I read European/American interpretations of my ancestral stories and they always feel slightly foreign and removed from full context (I swear this is how we got the late 2010s push of weird "moon goddess" stuff and the awkward Asian-American YA), so I'm always interested to hear what other people have to say about their own traditions.
Displaying 1 of 1 review