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Menominee Red Swan Introduction by Monica Macaulay and Marianne Milligan Menominee is an Algonquian language still spoken by a small number of elders on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin. This story was told to Leonard Bloom- field in the early 1920s by Nyahto Kichewano (Nay— aehtow in Menominee) and published in Bloomfield’s Menomini Texts.1 Unfortunately, Bloomfield does not tell us anything about the narrator, beyond making the point that none of the speakers with whom he worked spoke English well. Bierhorst describes Red Swan as ‘‘one of the most characteristic of Midwest myths, told by Algonkians and Siouans alike,’’ although the published versions that we have been able to find differ in significant respects from the one presented here.2 Much of what transpires in the Menominee version is found in the Ojibwe and Fox versions with which we are familiar, but this version ends where the others begin a new episode. The part that all the versions share (and which is the entirety of the Menominee version) proceeds as follows: There is a set of brothers (eleven, in the Menominee tale). The youngest spots a red swan in a lake and tries to shoot it. After failing to hit it with normal arrows, he takes arrows from someone’s sacred bundle (his oldest brother’s here) and with those is successful. The wounded swan flies off, and he pursues it. On his journey he stops at a number of villages and marries a woman at each one. Eventually the swan leads him to the house of an old man, who feeds him with food that magically replenishes itself as soon as it is eaten. The old man asks him to retrieve something variously described as his head (in the Menominee version), his scalp, and his hat, which has been stolen. The hero transforms himself into a variety of things (first into plant down and then into a small dog in the Menominee version), so that he can sneak into the enemy’s territory and recapture the head/scalp/hat. He brings it back to the old man, who rewards him (with eleven red feathers or with the red swan itself in some versions). On the way back he collects the women that he married and brings them back as wives for his brothers. The brothers are grateful, but eventually the oldest brother decides that he wants the youngest’s wife. He hatches a plot to kill his youngest brother (and gets the other brothers in on it), which in the present version in- red swan 469 volves making a swing, getting the youngest into it, and then cutting the rope. The youngest knows what the others are up to and sends all the women away before it happens. In the Menominee version the hero dies, the brothers go back to their home, find the women gone, and then apparently regret having killed their youngest brother. In the Ojibwe version, after the hero has returned from the adventure with the scalp, the brothers send him off on a hunt so that they can take his wife.3 He goes to the land of the dead, and the spirits give him arrows to replace the ones he shot the red swan with. He then goes back and kills his brothers with those arrows. Thomason describes six Meskwaki (Fox) versions of this story.4 In one the story turns into the tale of Rolling Skull (with the hero becoming Rolling Skull after the brothers kill him). This is another traditional narrative that Thomason says is ‘‘almost certainly grafted onto a tale with which it has no very close traditional association.’’5 In all the other Fox versions described by Thomason, however, the youngest brother goes to the underworld and has various adventures there. Bierhorst says that Red Swan is part of the Hare cycle among the Ho-Chunk (Winnebagos), but that the other tribes who tell it treat it as a stand-alone story.6 It appears, then, that although the basic story line is shared among a number of Midwestern tribes, there is great variation in how and where different groups (or even different storytellers among a single group) end the story. As we mentioned, this text was published in both Menominee and English in 1928. We have retranslated it using ethnopoetic methods, following Hymes and others.7 Such work has established that there is a ‘‘rhetorical architecture’’ to oral narrative signaled bya...

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