Wisconsin Folklore

12 Turtle Trying to Get Credit (A Tale)

12 Turtle Trying to Get Credit (A Tale) Paul Radin The traditions of Wisconsin's Winnebago (or, as they are now known, Ho-Chunk) people tell them they have always been here. Certainly they occupied villages throughout southern Wisconsinparticularly along the Black, Fox, Rock, and Wisconsin River valleys-at the time of European contact. In the nineteenth century, the United States government forced the Winnebago to move successively to reservations in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Many people, however, resisted forced relocation and hid out in Wisconsin, while others relocated to western reservations, only to return later. Eventually the Wisconsin Winnebago won federal recognition. Nowadays they have no central reservation, but are variously settled around such communities as Baraboo, Black River Falls, La Crosse, Neillsville, Tomah, Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin Rapids, and Wittenburg. Perhaps because of the hardships endured, Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk people have sustained their cultural traditions to a high degree. In the early 1990s they established the Hocak Wazijaci Language and Culture Program, under the leadership of Kenneth Funmaker, Sr., primarily to maintain the language, but also to accumulate, archive, and conserve documentary materials on the Ho-Chunk people-including materials produced by Paul Radin. A pioneering anthropologist, Paul Radin (1883-1959) was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University before devoting much of his professional life to Winnebago culture. His many publications include three classic works: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (Berkeley: University of California Press, Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology, vol. 16, no. 7, 1920); The Winnebago Tribe (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, vol. 37, 1923); and The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). The story offered here originally appeared with three others as appendices to Radin's "Literary Aspects of Winnebago Mythology." Radin, however, conducted most of his fieldwork with HoChunk converts to the Native American Church. Because their new religion no longer bound them to keeping sacred stories secret, they departed radically from traditional practices by offering them to an outsider. Hence I am unwilling to reproduce myths or waika (literally "what is old"). Such stories belong to their respective clans and medicine lodges, Ho-Chunk institutions that are very much intact. Rather, I offer ''Turrle Trying to Get Credit," a humorous post-contact story about a popular trickster figure. As Paul Radin states: It is palpably a modern production. It is in brief the story of a man with a bad reputation who tries to get credit from a merchant in order to buy food for his family. After he has been rebuffed a number of times, a kindhearted merchant takes pity on him because of the poverty of his family. In return he goes hunting and returns with canoes full of the finest furs for his benefactor. This hero, however, is Trickster, and all the characteristics that are associated with him in the Trickster cycle are found here. He is untrustworthy, boastful and a gambler. As in the cycle, so here also there are humorous touches. Trickster is of course a hero of "myth." Nevertheless the Winnebago follow a commonsense classification and call this story a "tale." 113 Part Two. Storytelling Just as contemporary Qjibwe storytellers continue to involve the mythological trickster Wenabozho in new tales, Radin's Ho-Chunk "raconteur-authors use the figures of the older mythology in the modern tales/' involving in this instance Frenchmen, guns, liquor, and the fur trade. Reprinted by permission of the American Folklore Society from "literary Aspects of Winnebago Mythology'" Journal of American Folklore 39: 151 (1926): 18-52. Not for further reproduction. There was a village in which a chief lived. Turtle lived there too. The village was situated near a large river. One day they said to each other, "Look, the traders are coming." They were the Frenchmen. Finally the traders landed and settled in houses along the edge of the water down the stream. A large number of Indians immediately surrounded these houses. They were dressed in their best, with white and black wampums around their necks. Many of the women also wore earrings. The men were painted in various colors. Everyone went there except Turtle. One day he said, "Younger brothers, the Indians are getting credit and we also ought to be able to get some. However, I thought it would be better to wait till all the others are gone. They need clothing, and we do not need such things the others...