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The Storytelling Stone: Traditional Native American Myths and Tales
Creation and death, the wily trickster, wolves, magic, and passion -- these are part of a rich heritage of Native American mythology and folktales. From tribes that vanished long ago, as well as from great tribes like the Ojibwa and Zuni that proudly remain, here are the powerful ancient beliefs with which North American tribal societies bring order to the universe and understanding to the heart.
Editor Susan Feldmann has assembled this introductory anthology of oral literature around themes that allow comparison of the many ways different tribes explained similar concepts. The result is a magnificent journey into the Native American cosmos and a chance for us to experience everything from the beginning of time to the passage through death with the first people of our land.
Editor Susan Feldmann has assembled this introductory anthology of oral literature around themes that allow comparison of the many ways different tribes explained similar concepts. The result is a magnificent journey into the Native American cosmos and a chance for us to experience everything from the beginning of time to the passage through death with the first people of our land.
271 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
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June 10, 2017I picked this up mostly to get familiar with the stories and the kinds of things they contained, but also with two historical theses in mind. First, that stories are objects of evolution by natural selection, can be fitted to a phylogeny, and, with sufficient data, a timeline and common ancestry can be inferred. The second is that stories contain and propagate valuable information about living in a landscape--whether that's ecological, material culture, or social.
It doesn't seem very meaningful to evaluate these as stories per se. They're removed from the storytelling context they were made for, and it's hard to know how much that accounts for their skeletal quality. They all feel like plot synopses, lists of events without much tone or setting or character. Nonetheless, many of them are totally bizarre and awesome and I'd love to see them realized for contemporary audiences. In an alternate timeline there's a Zuni Studio Ghibli and FROM Software using these incredibly grotesque and wondrous tropes and stories and mixing them with other traditions to create some wonderfully weird media. The Zuni stories are quite distinct from the rest and stand out for their horrific (or some would say puerile) sensibilities and ecological imagination. But all of them have great things to bring to the modern cultural dialogue and it's a shame, for many reasons, that the peoples who carry them on are not in a place to do that work.
As for phylogenies, while this is far from a complete dataset, it's impossible to miss the repetition here. Many of these stories echo each other extensively and are clearly cousins. There's even a couple of Eurasians stories recognizable here, including Chicken Little, Pandora, and Polyphemus (the last of which Julien d'Huy has shown empirically to be related to Eurasian iterations of the tale). There are probably more I'm just not recognizing. It does make me wonder where the Zuni stuff came from, because it seems like they aren't part of the same folkloric tree here.
The narrative-as-foraging-aide question is much more vexing. I was pretty skeptical when I first read this hypothesis, but I actually found a lot of evidence in these stories that could potentially support it, much more than I was expecting. There are not a lot of setting details in these stories, but sometimes they will go out of their way to say how many feathers to fletch and arrow with or the specific cardinal directions a mythical figure traveled to reach a good flint outcrop. Coming in with this theory in mind, details like this stand out like sore thumbs and feel heavy-handedly didactic. There's even one odd story in here that feels like nothing more than a mnemonic for a series of numbers. But I still find it hard to buy into. There's so much information involved in successfully living in these landscapes that goes so far beyond the basic details contained in these stories that it's hard to imagine it being useful to encode them. If you have been taught all the skills involved in making arrows and hunting game, do you really need a story remind you to put three feathers and not four? On the other hand, it's a hard claim to evaluate because in theory much of this information could be indirect both narratively and ecologically--maybe a story about mythical Bear gives some useful framing for how to harvest salmon.
It doesn't seem very meaningful to evaluate these as stories per se. They're removed from the storytelling context they were made for, and it's hard to know how much that accounts for their skeletal quality. They all feel like plot synopses, lists of events without much tone or setting or character. Nonetheless, many of them are totally bizarre and awesome and I'd love to see them realized for contemporary audiences. In an alternate timeline there's a Zuni Studio Ghibli and FROM Software using these incredibly grotesque and wondrous tropes and stories and mixing them with other traditions to create some wonderfully weird media. The Zuni stories are quite distinct from the rest and stand out for their horrific (or some would say puerile) sensibilities and ecological imagination. But all of them have great things to bring to the modern cultural dialogue and it's a shame, for many reasons, that the peoples who carry them on are not in a place to do that work.
As for phylogenies, while this is far from a complete dataset, it's impossible to miss the repetition here. Many of these stories echo each other extensively and are clearly cousins. There's even a couple of Eurasians stories recognizable here, including Chicken Little, Pandora, and Polyphemus (the last of which Julien d'Huy has shown empirically to be related to Eurasian iterations of the tale). There are probably more I'm just not recognizing. It does make me wonder where the Zuni stuff came from, because it seems like they aren't part of the same folkloric tree here.
The narrative-as-foraging-aide question is much more vexing. I was pretty skeptical when I first read this hypothesis, but I actually found a lot of evidence in these stories that could potentially support it, much more than I was expecting. There are not a lot of setting details in these stories, but sometimes they will go out of their way to say how many feathers to fletch and arrow with or the specific cardinal directions a mythical figure traveled to reach a good flint outcrop. Coming in with this theory in mind, details like this stand out like sore thumbs and feel heavy-handedly didactic. There's even one odd story in here that feels like nothing more than a mnemonic for a series of numbers. But I still find it hard to buy into. There's so much information involved in successfully living in these landscapes that goes so far beyond the basic details contained in these stories that it's hard to imagine it being useful to encode them. If you have been taught all the skills involved in making arrows and hunting game, do you really need a story remind you to put three feathers and not four? On the other hand, it's a hard claim to evaluate because in theory much of this information could be indirect both narratively and ecologically--maybe a story about mythical Bear gives some useful framing for how to harvest salmon.
August 31, 2008
Toothed vaginas...need I say more.
October 7, 2014
Some very good stories from our national heritage.
July 18, 2022
Interesting stories, but I find the language a little stilted.
October 10, 2024
Some of the stories were nice, but there was so much repetition that made no sense. Took me a while to finish this book.
January 27, 2012
. The Storytelling Stone: Traditional Native American Myths and Tales edited by Susan Feldmann is a collection of the oral literature representing tribes from Nova Scotia to California. “The great themes present in ancient myths around the globe – the great flood, struggle between life and death, acquisition of fire, beginnings of humankind make the stories familiar and thought provoking.” (back cover)
February 11, 2008
Great mix of Indian myths, including the adaptation of myth over time in response to colonialism.
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September 9, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14713036
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14713036
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews