Native American Myths and Beliefs Read online

  This edition published in 2012 by:

  The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

  29 East 21st Street

  New York, NY 10010

  Additional end matter copyright © 2012 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

  Lowenstein, Tom.

  Native American myths and beliefs/Tom Lowenstein, Piers Vitebsky.

  p. cm.—(World mythologies)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4488-5992-4 (library binding)

  1. Indian mythology. 2. Indian cosmology. 3. Indians—Rites and ceremonies. I. Vitebsky, Piers. II. Title.

  E59.R38L68 2012

  299'.7—dc23

  2011036349

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  CPSIA Compliance Information: Batch #W12YA: For further information, contact Rosen Publishing, New York, New York, at 1-800-237-9932.

  © 1997 Duncan Baird Publishers

  Photo Credits:

  The publisher would like to thank the following people, museums and photographic libraries for permission to reproduce their material. Every care has been taken to trace copyright holders. However, if we have omitted anyone we apologize and will, if informed, make corrections in any future edition.

  Key: t top; b bottom; c centre; l left; r right

  Abbreviations:

  AMNH: American Museum of Natural History

  BAL: Bridgeman Art Library

  BBHC: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming

  JBT/ECT: John Bigelow Taylor/The Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection.

  BM: British Museum

  NMAA: National Museum of American Art

  MNAI: Museum of the North American Indian

  WFA: Werner Forman Archives

  3 WFA/Portland Art Museum; 5 Frans Lanting/Zefa; 6 John Anderson Collection, Smithsonian Institution (44258); 7 WFA/Maxwell Museum of Anthropology; 8-9 The Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Mr and Mrs Pohrt (1988.226); 10WFA/C. Pohrt Collection. BBHC; 11 JBT/ECT (T106); 12 Corbis/Smithsonian Institution (20003881); 14l WFA/Maxwell Museum of Anthropology; 14rWFA; 15l Tony Stone Images /Richard Cooke III; 15r Corbis/Bettman; 16 Library of Congress (LC-USZ62- 602498); 17 Philbrook Museum of Art (1951.8); 18tl Ohio State Historical Society; 18tr Images Colour Library; 18b Hutchison Library; 19t Spectrum; 19bl WFA; 19br Images Colour Library; 20 JBT/ECT (T177); 21 BAL/NMAA; 22 WFA/RL Anderson Collection, BBHC; 23t WFA/Portland Art Museum; 23r WFA/Cleveland Museum of Art; 24 WFA/ Schindler Coll. NY; 25WFA/Smithsonian Institution; 26 Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, New Mexico (P-1A-8); 27 Roland Reed/Kramer Gallery, DBP Archives; 28 Hutchison Library; 29 BAL/MNAI; 30 BAL/NMAA; 31 Peter Furst/Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin; 32 JBT/ECT (T60); 33 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 34 JBT/ ECT (T86); 35 University Museum Archives, University of Pennsylvania (obj: 38736); 36 WFA/BM; 37WFA/Smithsonian Institution; 38 WFA/Haffenreffer Museum, Brown University, Rhode Island; 40 BAL/NMAA; 41 Peter Furst/Smithsonian Institution; 42 Corbis/Library of Congress, Roland Reed (LC-USZ62- 48427); 44t Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 44b Richard Cooke III/Tony Stone Images; 44–45 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (neg EM4); 45t America Hurrah; 45r Stephen Myers/AMNH (3822(2)); 46 Images Colour Library; 47 Images Colour Library; 48 Ohio State Historical Society; 49 BAL; 50 Corbis; 52WFA/Provincial Museum of Victoria, BC; 53 Corbis; 54 BAL/Princeton Museum of Natural History; 55 WFA/AMNH; 56 JBT/ECT; 57 Stephen Myers/AMNH (3837(3)): 58 National Museum of the American Indian (2336); 60 WFA/NMAI; 62 Peter Furst Priv.Coll.; 64 WFA/Museum of Anthropology, University of BC; 65 Burke Museum (117); 66 M. Holford; 68 Peter Furst/The Detroit Institute of Arts; 69 Peter Furst/Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley; 71 M. Holford; 72 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 73 WFA; 74 Corbis/Library of Congress; 75 JBT/ECT (T43); 76 Peter Furst/Priv. Coll.; 78 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 79 America Hurrah; 80l America Hurrah; 80rWheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe; 81WFA/BBHC; 82-83 JBT/ECT (T185); 84 BAL; 84WFA; 86 WFA/Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; 88 BAL; 89 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 90 State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND 12004); 91 Peter Furst/Priv. Coll.; 92 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 93 BAL; 94 BAL; 96 Gordon Gahan/National Geographic Image Collection/Getty Images; 97 Peter Furst/Smithsonian Institution; 98 Tony Stone Images; 99 BAL; 100c Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 100b BAL; 100-101 JBT/ECT (T49); 101t WFA/BM; 101b State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND 941); 102 Robert Harding Picture Library; 103 Paul Macapia/Seattle Museum of Art (91.1.124); 104t Robert Harding Picture Library; 104b Robert Harding Picture Library; 105 Royal Anthropological Institute, London (RAI 2075); 106 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 107 AMNH (41184); 108 Peter Furst/Priv. Coll.; 109 Ohio State Historical Society; 110 Special Collections Division of the University of Washington Libraries (NA3151); 112WFA/Portland Art Museum; 113 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 114 Library of Congress/Edward S. Curtis (LC-USZ62-101185); 115 WFA /Provincial Museum of Victoria, BC; 116 AMNH (42298); 117 Canadian Inuit Art Information Centre, Ottawa (PAN23PR7613); 118 Peter Furst/Priv.Coll.; 119 WFA/Musuem für Völkerkunde, Berlin; 120 Stephen Myers/AMNH (3847(2)); 121 Corbis/Library of Congress; 122 Smithsonian Institution (86-2842); 123 WFA/Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; 124 Bryan & Cherry Alexander; 125WFA/BBHC; 126 WFA/Glenbow Museum, Alberta; 127 Philbrook Museum of Art/Richard West (1949.20); 128 America Hurrah; 130 JBT/ECT (T86); 131 America Hurrah; 132l BAL/BM; 132rc BAL; 132rb BAL; 133tl M. Holford/BM; 133tr BAL/BM; 133b BAL; 134 BAL; 135 BAL; 136 Peter Furst/Priv. Coll.; 137 Tony Stone Images

  Contents

  THE INDIAN WORLD

  The First Americans

  A Tapestry of Peoples

  Picture Essay: Sacred Places

  EARTHDIVERS AND CREATORS

  Earthdivers

  Of Seasons, Seals and Cereals

  From Darkness to Light

  The Search for Home

  The Great Spirit

  The Origin of the Sun, Moon and Stars

  The Details of the Universe

  The Peopling of the Earth

  How Old Age and Death Began

  Picture Essay: Myth and Art

  THE SPIRITUAL COSMOS

  “The Earth is My Mother”

  The Circle of Heaven

  Watery Realms

  The Sun, Moon and Stars

  Spirits of Nature

  Thunder, Lightning, Fire and Rainbow

  The Society of Animals

  Animal Souls and the Afterlife

  Soul Theory and Spirit Flight

  The Next Life

  KEEPERS OF ORDER

  Tricksters: The Unpredictable Spirits

  Raven and Hare

  Coyote, a Sly Wild Dog

  Heroes of Myth and History

  Demons and Monsters

  Sacred and Terrifying Creatures

  Humans and Animals Animal

  Spouses and Guardians

  The Vulnerability of Animals

  Picture Essay: On the Warpath

  Totems and Clans

  Northwest Coast Ceremonies

  A WEB OF CEREMONY

  Shamans and Medicine

  Soul Flights, Dreams and Vision Quests

  Sacred Societies

  Hunting Ceremonies

  The Sun Dance

  Revivals and Cults

  Picture Essay: The Alien Eye

  THE NATIVE AMERICAN LEGACY

  Glossary

  For More Information

  For Further Reading

  Index

  A wooden mask from the Pacific Northwest
Coast.

  THE INDIAN WORLD

  For decades, the Lakota Sioux of South Dakota had fiercely resisted white encroachment on their ancestral homelands, but by the harsh winter of 1890 they were becoming increasingly beleaguered. Three years earlier, the US President had been granted wide-ranging powers to “detribalize” Native Americans, and in 1889 the break up of the Great Sioux Reservation began. The proud nation that had crushed Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 was faced with disaster.

  In the midst of such depredation, just one desperate hope of salvation remained: in 1889 a Paiute holy man named Wovoka had prophesied the deliverance of the Indians from white domination. The people’s dead ancestors would bring this about, so to ensure their resurrection Wovoka had instituted a ceremony known as the Ghost Dance. A revivalist movement based on it found fertile ground among the demoralized Sioux and other nations of the Plains. So zealous were its followers that they even donned special shirts, believing them to be impervious to bullets. The Sioux chief Sitting Bull had been skeptical at first, but later lent his support. Feared by the whites, the veteran leader had thus become the figurehead of a ritual that he never personally took part in.

  On December 15, 1890, a devastating blow fell on the Sioux. As policemen recruited from among the very people who had once fought alongside Sitting Bull tried to arrest him at Standing Rock Reservation, fighting broke out. At the end of a brief but bloody skirmish, the legendary warrior lay dead. He was buried without ceremony two days later.

  With their leader gone, Sitting Bull’s followers fled south, joining up with the Ghost Dancers on the Cheyenne River Reservation. But their leader, Big Foot, himself was a wanted man, so the combined group of over 300 people kept heading south through the Badlands. They were intercepted by cavalrymen on December 28 and diverted to Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning, the troops moved in to disarm the Sioux. Suddenly, a shot rang out; a warrior had accidentally fired his weapon. The result was carnage; nervous soldiers shooting point-blank with rifles and cannon slaughtered 250 Lakota.

  Not only were the lives of men, women and children extinguished by the terrible massacre. In the words of Black Elk, one of the few survivors: “Something else died in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.”

  A painted pottery bowl from the mogollon culture of the southwest, a civilization at its zenith between c.1050–1150. such artifacts are evidence of the diverse creativity of Native American societies before the arrival of europeans.

  The brulé sioux chief he-Dog, photographed in the early 20th century by John Alvin Anderson. The sioux were among the last Native peoples to resist white domination.

  The First Americans

  At the time of the first European contact at the outset of the sixteenth century, as many as 600 distinct nations or tribes were living in North America. Several million indigenous people inhabited the continent, with a variety of ways of life adapted to the varying climate and topography.

  Traditionally North America was thought to have been peopled by nomadic hunters, who crossed the Beringia land bridge linking Asia and the Americas during the last Ice Age and spread south over the course of six thousand years. Although some more recent archaeological finds from South America may indicate earlier human occupation, there is as yet no firm evidence of a human presence in North America before around 15,000 BCE.

  The first Americans were all hunter-gatherers, but some herding and farming cultures developed over time. For example, by 700 CE the area encompassing much of present-day Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico had become home to the ancestors of the peoples known now as the Pueblo. They lived in adobe (mud brick) villages near rivers, which fed irrigation canals; these allowed them to cultivate biannual crops of corn, as well as plentiful beans, squash and cotton. At around the same time, communities living in Mississippian river valleys built the first true North American towns. The most widely studied of these pre-Columbian “mound cultures,” Cahokia, was inhabited at its zenith by at least 10,000 people. But these sites were abandoned before the first European contact, probably in about 1450 CE, as a result of epidemic diseases.

  The Impact of Europeans

  The first Europeans to arrive in North America settled near the coasts and navigable rivers but later began to move deep into the wooded hinterland in search of furs and new farming land. They also wished to consolidate their political and religious authority in this uncharted country. The territorial ambitions of the white settlers— whose acquisitiveness was at variance with the Native American attitude to the natural world—soon brought them into conflict with indigenous peoples. Although political and commercial alliances that were expedient for both parties were formed, they were ultimately to cause the displacement of many settled peoples. For instance, the fur trade was lucrative to both whites and some Indians, but it created great upheaval for other Native Americans. In its early days, this trade was dominated by five Iroquois groups (the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca), who were armed by Dutch and English settlers. These groups drove the Ojibway southwards from Lake Superior, and they, in turn, pushed the Sioux on to the Plains. As punishment for their alliance with the British, the Iroquois themselves were later displaced during the American War of Independence (1775–83).

  A Dakota sioux winter Count (c. 1890), a detailed calendar of events painted on a buffalo hide. This late example of a traditional method of recording history is indicative of the highly developed social structures that existed in Native American communities prior to the arrival of europeans.

  Growing European incursion into the North American interior during the nineteenth century saw Native American peoples driven relentlessly westwards. The Indian Removal Act, passed by the US Congress in 1830, forcibly removed five tribes from their original homelands in the southeast and resettled them west of the Mississippi. The Act provided for a new enclave of “Indian Territory” in an area covering the modern states of Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as parts of Nebraska, Colorado and Wyo ming, but even this fell victim to white encroachment after mineral wealth was discovered in the region. Just one example of genocide at this time was the brutal expulsion of Native American peoples inhabiting areas affected by the gold rushes of the late 1840s onwards. The populous Shoshoni, Ute and Paiute of northern California and Nevada were swiftly extirpated.

  Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the lives of many Native North Americans had revolved around seasonal hunting activities. This was especially true of the cultures that inhabited the vast plains in the middle of the continent. Here, big-game hunting was generally a male preserve, while women were responsible for gathering and gardening. For centuries, Plains Indians had stalked the buffalo on foot. Initially, white influence brought prosperity by making hunting easier; horses were taken from Spanish settlers, who did not allow Indians to own them, in the seventeenth century. By the mid-1700s, the horse, known to Native American peoples as “Spirit Dog” or “Medi cine Dog,” was allowing Cheyenne, Osage, Sioux and Pawnee buffalohunters to range across vast areas.

  However, as the nineteenth century progressed, white frontiersmen systematically exterm in ated the buffalo population—for their meat and hides and to protect new railway development—and so eroded the basis of Plains culture. In one three-year period alone (1872–74), some 3 million animals were killed. By the 1880s, from a population that once totalled 90 million, only 1,000 buffalo remained, two-thirds of them in Canada.

  In concert with the eradication of the animals on which their livelihood depended, the Plains peoples faced a sustained onslaught on their cultural traditions and religious observances. Many rites were outlawed because reformers saw them as obstacles to the assimilation of Native Amer icans into white culture (“Americanization”). Most notable of these was the Sun Dance, an eight-daylong ceremony of thanksgiving to the Great Spirit and the buffalo, which was outlawed by the US government in 1884. The Bureau of Indian Affairs also promoted poli
cies that prohibited the use of Native American languages. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which broke up tribal lands into European-style homesteading lots of 160 acres. In addition, schools were established to inculcate Christian values in Native Am er icans, principal among which was the “love of personal property.” It was in this atmosphere of complete white dominance that the Ghost Dance evol ved, as a despairing attempt to affirm a dying culture.

  This hand drum belonged to a shaman of the Assiniboine people of the northern Plains. The Assiniboine were just one of the nations of this vast region to suffer greatly from white incursion in the 19th century. A smallpox epidemic carried by traders in 1837 severely reduced their numbers, while buffalo hunting wiped out the animal on which their livelihood depended.

  Passing on Sacred Wisdom

  Knowledge of the diverse spirit forces that were believed to pervade the physical world was essential to Native Americans. Spiritual wisdom was conveyed in the form of myths and legends narrated by storytellers or community elders.

  For Native American audiences, myths were far from being fantastic “fairytales” even when, as was common, they involved magical phenomena, such as animals talking to one another or people conversing with animals and spirits. Rather, stories were seen as accounts of real events that took place at the dawn of time.

  The purpose of myths and legends was both to instruct and to entertain. For instance, a familiar character from stories of many cultures was the clownish Trickster. This ambiguous figure was both sacred and profane, and his antics were intended to provoke thought and laughter in equal measure.

  Storytelling occupied a seminal position in Native American cultures. It was not a purely spoken art: singing and drumming were often involved. Moreover, details from myths were often depicted on artifacts in daily use. Pottery, baskets, blankets, storage boxes and robes were decorated with patterns or symbols that had their origin in narratives.

  One of the most highly developed artistic traditions was among the societies of the Northwest Coast, whose masks and totem poles portrayed numerous characters from mythology and history. In the same way, the kachina figures created by the southwestern Hopi people represent an extensive range of mythical and ancestral spirits.