Native American Myths Tales

by Sam D. Gill (Foreword)

This new selection of myths offers a broad insight into the nature and lifestyle of the ancestral lands of the Native American tribes that once stretched from the tip of Alaska, down to the Bay of Mexico. Hundreds of languages, with traditions and folkore, grew independently across the continent, flourishing in deserts, mountains and lush valleys of a vast land. The loss of such ancient traditions is a reminder of the damage humans can wreak through ignorance, desperation and greed, as settlers from Europe swept imperiously across the newly discovered, but long-populated lands of the so-called New World.

From ‘The Great Deeds of Michabo’ to ‘The Legend of Hiawatha’, from trickster creator-deities, heroes and supernatural beings to epic voyages and an affinity with animals, there is so much to discover in this comprehensive new book. It’s the latest addition to Flame Tree’s Epic Tales series of deluxe anthologies and brings together a thoughtful selection of myths and tales from across the ancient plains of North America.

Genres: Mythology, Fiction, Anthologies, Native American, Short Stories, Fantasy

480 pages, Hardcover

Published September 22, 2020

About the author

Sam Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Native American religions were the focus of his work for twenty-five years. He regularly hung out in cultures in the American Southwest—Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Zuni—to observe ritual and dancing. Since the early 1990s Sam has been an enthusiastic student of dancing in cultures around the world including travel to observe and study dancing to Bali and Java, Thailand and Nepal, Ghana and Mali, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Sam has taught courses on many topics related to dancing notably a yearlong course “Religion and Dance” that covered over thirty dance traditions and included weekly dance studios taught by artists from the relevant cultures. In the late 1990s Sam founded, with his daughter Jenny, a dance and music school, Bantaba World Dance & Music. For many years he has taught salsa dance in high schools, in his classes at CU, and in the community including a performance group. He has developed an extensive catalog of salsa dance instructional videos. Sam’s insatiable interest in various fields of study—movement, dancing, play, masking, perception and the senses, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, gender issues, fitness, gesture, aging—interweave and shape his current work. Since retiring from teaching in 2017 he has published at least a book a year including an Award Winning book "The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith" and most recently "Religion: A Contemporary Perspective."

Reviews

[Pearljamaholic · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection was a big disappointment.

Stories are presented multiple times, which would be fine if the stories were sectioned by tribe or region, then there would cultural differences and similarities to understand. Instead the book is grouped by categories so the same story gives no value to the reader. Sometimes only the names are different, and all other events and sequence are identical. A good 50 pages of redundancy are in this book. Some stories appear 3-4 times, some only twice. Other times sections of shorter stories appear as pieces of the longer ones.

I was really hoping to find a story about the wendigo, but there isn't one. But I did get at least 2 stories about White Feather racing stone giants, I guess that makes up for it.

The editing is poor at best. Dialogue is kept in paragraphs all too often. Vague usage of 'he' and 'they.'

The stories themselves could give this book 4/5 if things were treated better, these stories deserved better treatment than what they get in this book.

[Julia Dwyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Editor needs to be fired. Also why take the time to talk about the inaccuracy of the word “Indian” as used to describe Native Americans, and then use the word “Indian” throughout the rest of the book??? Stories repeat. There seems to be no organization. Wish I could tell you where each story originated from but they didn’t provide that information

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories weren't really designed to sit on the pages of a book - they evolved out of an oral tradition - so 500 pages of them was quite a dense read. With little indication of where all the stories came from (except where it's made obvious in the narrative), when they were written down, or how they came to be written down it was hard to understand their context. There were some recurring characters and themes, and I wasn't sure if that was because the tales they appeared in were from a particular group/area, or because those motifs were widely spread.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed being exposed to some unfamiliar tales and being pushed to reflect on what they say about interactions with the world (especially the natural world). The introduction also did a good job of providing some context.