PART ONE 1 / Creations Origins
There was no land, only a great lake. Kamukamts came from the north in a canoe. It floated along. It stopped. He shook it, but could not move it. He looked down, and in the water he saw the roof of a house. It was the house of Pocket Gopher. Gopher looked up. Then Kamukamts went down into the house, and they talked.
Kamukamts said, âYou had better be thinking of what is the best thing to do.â
âYes, I am thinking of that now,â replied Gopher.
âIf you can plan anything better than I can do, you shall be the elder brother,â promised Kamukamts. âWhat kind of food are we going to have?â
Gopher opened his mouth to yawn, and fish, roots, and berries came forth.
âIt seems that you will be the elder brother,â said Kamukamts.1
THE GREAT MAJORITY OF READERS TODAY, IF THEY have had any contact with traditional American Indian narratives, have gotten it first through readingâprobably in childhoodâversions of Native creation and origin myths. These are not bad entrees into the traditional literature, and I would propose to take them up first here even if they werenât the most familiar category of Indian stories to begin with, but that very familiarity has its problems, and I want to scout two in particular.
First, if our general knowledge of the traditional literatures of the American Indian is compromised by a longstanding reliance on corrupted and unauthentic texts, this unhappy state of affairs is especially true for creation and origin myths. Every form of textual debasement known can be illustrated, I think, in the fate of these stories at the hands of Anglo writers and editors over the years, many of them well intended but working in the presumptions of ignorance, others merely careless or exploitive, or both. There has always been a pronounced tendency, for example, to render Native cosmogonies as versions of the Judeo-Christian Genesis, leaving out much that is distinctively âIndian,â so as to call attention, a la comparative mythology, to the fact that the Indians also had Eden myths, flood myths, Babel myths, and so on. In particular, editors and redactors have been guilty of cultural bias in silently eliminating the erotic, bawdy, and playful elements of Indian creation stories, giving the wrong impression that, like our Genesis text (itself, it now appears, a severely edited palimpsest), the Native creations are all remote, grand, teleologically rigorous affairs, full of what has been called âthe perfection of origins.â2
A less obvious difficulty with the relative familiarity of Native creation stories is that such familiarity usually comes with ignorance of two facts: (1) such stories constitute only a small portion of the surviving traditional literatures; (2) such stories, engaging and accessible as they often are, are not especially representative of these literatures. Readers who grew up, as I did, encountering Plains and Far West creation and origin narratives in schoolbooks, Boy Scout materials, and so forth, have understandably concluded that âHow the Earth Was Formedâ and âHow the Chipmunk Got Its Stripesâ and âThe Fight Between the Mountainsâ illustrate the thematic and emotional range and artistry of Indian narrative.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, as I hope to show in these essays. The etiological motive, as T. T. Waterman demonstrated seventy years ago in his monumental and neglected study, âThe Explanatory Element in the Folktales of the North American Indians,â3 is only one generic motive among many at work in the Native literature and rarely appears as an exclusive motive; yet the general conception of myth that Waterman, Franz Boas, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, and other pioneers undertook to refuteâthat it fundamentally expresses a human impulse to explain natural phenomena, especially solar and lunarâis still very much alive today, in the popular view of what Indian stories are and what they mean. Native narratives given to âexplainingâ conspicuous natural features and above all capable of being understood with a minimum of knowledge about the cultures they reflect are still what the general reading public in America knows, and favors. A regrettable state of affairs: as if we were to deny artistic value and significance to the traditional literature of India except for its Just So stories.
The fact is that the traditional repertory of any well-transcribed American Indian group contains a rich diversity of imaginative motives and literary forms, some corresponding to the motives and forms of our literature, and some not. Besides cosmogonies and origin myths, we will findâif we lookâcycles of trickster stories exploring the world in a spirit of âanything possible,â rather like picaresque novels; didactic and pedagogical narratives, not so much âexplainingâ as chartering customs and rituals; stories of realistic bent; âproblemâ stories that engage and clarify pressing conflicts between social norms and personal impulses; hero stories, like epic episodes; songs (often integral to narratives, like dramatic lyrics); prophecies; ceremonial texts; and mythopoetic syntheses of Native and Anglo materials, with many of the characteristics of romance.
Nonetheless, having identified these misunderstandings, we can profitably begin with a consideration of a few representative Western Indian myths of creation and origins. Butâwhat is a myth? As Percy Cohen has pointed out, none of the standard ways of formulating the subjectâetiological, cultural, psychoanalytical, structural, and so onâseems to be wholly adequate to the task of accounting for the mythic impulse and its manifestations, and none of them is probably without some merit in carrying out that formidable task.4
I want to propose, therefore, an eclectic working definition, one that favors inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, and that allows for recognition of multiple, simultaneous, and complementary lines of meaning in a given myth. In the history of any culture, it appears that certain central institutions come to accept a variety of purposes; people expect more and more of them as vital agencies. Soâto mention a not inappropriate analogue for mythâin our culture the school has evolved into a bewilderment of social, political, economic, and psychological, as well as pedagogical purposes; and so, by the same process of centralizing of functions, the mythologies of tribal societies seem to have evolved toward functional complexity. Bronislaw Malinowskiâs perception about what a myth-narrative means to a Melanesian tribesman is valid, I think, for our Western American context as well: a myth is ânot an idle tale, but a hard-working active force.â5 In our attempts to engage myth-texts on literary grounds, then, as imaginative verbal constructs, we must be prepared to deal with this âhardworkingâ aspect by recognizing that they may in fact be structured to âperformâ a number of functions all at once.
Myths are sacred traditional stories whose shaping function is to tell the people who know them who they are; how, through what origins and transformations, they have come to possess their particular world; and how they should live in that world, and with each other.
Notice that this definition replaces the simplistic why of a purely etiological formulation of myth with questions of who and how; that is, it focuses attention upon the relationships between a groupâs myth-repertory and its sense of collective identity in relation to origins, welfare, and destiny. Therefore, it stresses the importance of ethnography to interpretation. And this emphasis on mythic fabulation of collective experience does not preclude speculation, at least, on the ways in which myth can be both medium and mediator of deeply personal, individual meanings. From the evidence of the Native American literatures, I would venture to guess on this score that if the individuals forming the first Indian communities had somehow found a way to achieve social solidarity and order without affronting individuality, they wouldnât have created for themselves the richly imaginative accommodations to tribal living that we now attempt to understand as âIndian mythology.â They wouldnât have needed what myth as we have it provides.
One extreme of myth interpretation, notably encouraged by Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss and followed by some of his disciples, conceives of mythology as being so remote from the individual minds that have known it, transmitted it, perhaps re-created it, that it is best seen as a sort of grand natural process, just going its own glacial way, according to its own laws: in Dell Hymesâs witty phrase, an âimperturbable self-transmogrification.â6 That mythic stories do âstoryâ themselves systematically over time is, I think, undeniable; but unless we can also learn as readers to attend to evidence of historical and individual human âperturbationâ and deliberate artistic âtransmogrificationâ in them, we cannot really hope to claim them as imaginative literature. I think the claim can and should be made, because the evidence of artistic control and of personalized content, expressing such personal factors as gender (see essays 6 and 8) is certainly there. If for most traditional narratives the identity of the âindividual talentâ working on the âtraditionâ is irrecoverable, that shouldnât preclude our engaging as best we can the artistic achievements of that talent, whosoever it belonged to.
Now letâs turn back to some representative Western Indian creation and origin stories in which such difficult questions of personal content are, conveniently for our purposes, unimportantâthese are, it would appear, very old stories, well worn, âimperturbable,â and impersonal. Return to the Klamath story with which we beganâKamukamts and Pocket Gopher, remember, have begun a sort of creative competition, to see who can earn the title âElder Brother.â
That night Gopher caused his companion to sleep, and he burrowed under the bottom of the lake and made it bulge up into hills and mountains, which raised their tops above the surface. In the morning he said, âYou had better go up and look around!â When Kamukamts went out he was astonished. Gopher asked what should become of his house, and Kamukamts replied, âIt will always remain as the oldest mountain [Modoc Point].â
âWhat will our children have for amusement?â asked Kamukamts. They played the game of throwing spears at a mark. They threw them, and their targets were hills. Kamukamtsâs spear knocked off the top of Bare Island, and so it is today. Then they invented all the other games.
Gopher asked, âWhat will live on the mountains?â
âMountain lions, bears, elk, deer.â Kamukamts named all the animals, both beasts and birds.
âWhat will grow in the mountains?â asked Gopher.
âI will walk over the earth and see what I can do,â replied Kamukamts. So he went about and selected homes for the different tribes, and in each territory he placed something which was to characterize that particular tribe, such as obsidian in the Paiute country, marble in the Shasta country, and tules in the Klamath country. Then he looked about and saw smoke. Kamukamts said, âWhat is the matter, I wonder? I see smoke here and there.â
And Gopher replied, âYou have beaten me. You are the elder brother.â For he knew that the smoke was from the fires of people brought into being by Kamukamts. They listened, and heard the sound of people talking and of children laughing and playing. The people increased very rapidly, and the animals and plants on the mountains multiplied.7
Obviously such a narrative of beginnings does not conform to modern Judeo-Christian conventions of the genre! What we witness here is far short of a real cosmogony, comparable to the first chapters of Genesis. However it happened, the world has already gotten itself primally created, though not properly organized, and the adventures of Kamukamts and Pocket Gopher are considerably ex post facto what our modern âBig Bangâ cosmologists call âthe first three minutes.â Furthermore, it is clear that what is at stake here etiologically speaking is not the globe at large anyway, but only the Klamath world in southwest Oregon and northern Californiaâits distinctive features and boundaries, centering on Klamath Lake. And whereas our Judeo-Christian narrative is resonant with a sense of what Mircea Eliade has called the power, prestige, and perfection of origins, literally Godâs Story, the tone of the Klamath story as we have it is remarkably casual and lighthearted . . . an amiable tale, then, rather than an overwhelmingly majestic one.8
On all three counts, âThe Klamath Creationâ is representative of Western Indian creation narratives, at least in the form in which they now exist. With some notable exceptionsâthe Cheyenne, Maidu, Navajo, and several of the Pueblo cosmogonies are as philosophically systematic and grand as any cosmologist could wish9âsuch stories are, like this one, indifferent to global beginnings, concentrating instead on the creation and ordering of the immediate environs of the people who know the story, and investing the action of the story with a sense of casual improvisation, or so it seems to us, expecting something different.
But, like Genesis, such stories do establish priorities and ultimate values; creation myths are ipso facto teleological formulations as well. Thus, as with our tradition, the Klamath narrative leads up to the appearance in the world of the human race; man appears to be the final cause in Aristotelian terms. But of course it is a teleology alien to us in which the world takes its shape according to a friendly competition between two demi-urges as to who will be called âElder Brotherâ; and as for specific priorities, it is noteworthy that Kamukamts (the Klamath progenitor per se) and Pocket Gopher decide to invent sports and amusements immediately after they have created gathering-food...