Bri Fidelity’s Reviews > The Storytelling Stone: Traditional Native American Myths and Tales > Status Update

'The Piqued Buffalo-Wife' opens thusly: 'Once a young man went out and came to a buffalo-cow fast in the mire. He took advantage of her situation. After a time she gave birth to a boy.' At no point in this story - not when the boy goes to camp and identifies his father from a line-up; not when the cow is transformed into a woman with a voice and agency - does anyone speak out against the man's act of bestial rape.

European folklore is notably lacking in tragicomic heroines with fanged, biting vaginas: 'He whispered to his brother, "Tell the girl I want to marry her." The Salmon boy told the girl, who smiled, and said, "He must not marry me. Whoever marries me must die. I like him, and I do not wish to kill him[.]"' Maybe it's there in the subtext.

All the joy has gone out of reading this since the cover came off in my hand. I'm used to 60s paperbacks being indestructible! Oh, the guilt.

A Zuni version of 'The Sky Has Fallen'! Not a fox in their version, of course; Coyote.

'Hare was sent by Earthmaker to teach the people on Earth a better life. [...] The reason why he called the people his uncles and aunts is because his mother was a human being. [...] As his mother was a virgin he could have no other relatives except those uncles and aunts. All the hares are sons of all the women and the nephews of the men.'

Before the Earth was modified to make it slightly less lethal for humans, mosquitoes were great landbound things that could split small trees in two at a gallop ('The Woman Who Fell From The Sky'; Seneca) and frogs were eerie taunting things with long sharp teeth that kept their prey awake all night with threats to trail them with dogs and crush them in their mouths ('Hare's Adventures'; Winnebago).

'The Mississippi is a spirit-village, and the river is its main road.'

According to the Onondaga, the Pleiades are a band of dancing children, who grew so light-headed from hunger during their impromptu cardio that they floated up and away and never came back. One, who looks back during the process - Douglas Adams-like - becomes a falling star.

'Their grandmother said to them, "Do not go to the south, there are owls there. They are dangerous." "All right." The next morning the Ahaiyute went to the south. In their house there were great owls sitting in rows and rows. They never winked. They sat staring straight ahead. [...] The Ahaiyute came in. The owls said "sit down by the fire."'

This is the book that taught me how to spell 'penis' (I assumed it was a plural word and, embarrassingly, asked my mother what 'they' were). But if I ever read it all the way through, I can't remember it now.