Tales Told by Native Americans

The Girl Who Married a Ghost 
(published 1978)

The Girl Who Married a Ghost and other tales from The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis contains nine stories collected by the famous photographer. Curtis traveled throughout the western US around 100 years ago, and he is best known for his beautiful sepia images of Native Americans in traditional dress, posing in carefully chosen landscapes with many props. 

Curtis's photographs are incredible works of art, as well as being ethnographic documentation. Although most of his subjects no longer lived in the traditional style he depicted, the individuals in the photos seem to have been willing to cooperate with him. The result is a kind of fictional or subjective representation of their past.

While he was working with the Indian people, he and an assistant collaborated with the tellers of tales and with translators. They collected a large body of tales, and this small book contains a selection from them, representing a variety of tribes and locations.

Every story in the collection seemed very appealing to me, and I really enjoyed the accompanying photos. While Curtis for the most part did not create direct illustrations of the tales, the editor of the collection, John Bierhorst, included appropriate selections from Curtis's published photos.

Spirit monster mask.

"The Dance of the Spirit Monster" is a tale collected from the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. It begins: "One evening a hunter and his wife wen downstream to fish and landed at the mouth of the river, where they had a small hut. They spent the night. The next morning the man caught some salmon, and his wife cleaned them and laid them on a drying rack under the smoke hole."

During the following night, a spirit monster, "a strange creature with great, hanging breasts and a round, protruding mouth" tries to get at the drying salmon. The hunter kills the monster. After the couple return to their village, some of the other men see a female spirit monster, who is looking for her son. One ugly boy from the village helps the female monster to find the body of her dead son. She rewards him by giving him good things: "dressed skins and dried mountain-goat meat, and a mask that was just like the face of her son." 

She brings her dead son back to life, and also gives the now-handsome boy some "living water" which makes him handsome. She gives him a mask that looks like her son, and teaches him a dance. After dancing with the villagers, he uses the magic water to bring his dead parents back to life.

I especially enjoyed this story because a few years ago, I visited a village belonging to one of the tribes of this area, and I saw a collection of the tribal masks from the time when Curtis visited them (blogged here). I learned that in their tradition, a dance "belongs" to one person, and thus I understood what happened in the story when the hunter who had killed the spirit monster tried to claim the dance from the boy, and then had to leave for shame. ("The Dance of the Spirit Monster," pp 21-30)

Plains Indians.

"The Deserted Children" comes from the Gros Ventre tribe of Montana. It's a little like the European tale of Hansel and Gretel: two children are abandoned by their tribe, and their parents tell them that they don't want them any more: "Never mind, you are not my child." The big sister takes care of her little brother, finds roots and berries for them to eat, and makes them a shelter from brush, where they live for "many summers."

The boy, it turns out, has the ability that when he looks at herds of elk or buffalo, they all drop dead. The girl wishes for the meat to be dried and the hides to be tanned and made into tepee covers, and miraculously, they are so. Of course there's much more detail in the story, but eventually they rejoin their tribe -- though the girl still rejects the parents who had abandoned them. "After a while, however, she seemed to forgive them, and calling all the people around her, she divided among them a large quantity of boiled buffalo tongues." In the end, the brother's magic glance kills most of the tribe, but they come back to be "better than they were."

I enjoyed this story, because it so clearly highlights the material goods that were valuable to this tribe: food and shelter derived from the hunt of large animals. The "boiled buffalo tongues" are especially interesting because I've read that the tender meat of the tongue was the most valued meat on the very tough animals that roamed the plains. ("The Deserted Children," pp. 45-51)

This blog post documents a bit of escape reading in these rather depressing and isolated times! Review copyright © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.