Koasati Traditional Narratives

2. Origin Tales

47 2 Origin Tales Origin tales comprise a large group of Koasati traditional narratives. Their principal purpose is to explain how some feature of the natural universe came into being. This explanatory purpose can be DIRECT, that is, the entire thrust of the tale, or OBLIQUE, that is, an appendage to the tale. Origin tales can additionally be divided into two groups, depending on the style of the narrative. The larger group consists of serious narratives, in which the action, no matter how strange, is taken seriously by narrator and listener. The other group consists of humorous narratives, in which the situations are intended to provoke laughter in the audience. The origin tales included in this chapter may be classified as follows: SERIOUS HUMOROUS DIRECT The Origin of the Koasati The Origin of Opossum’s Tail The Origin of Orion’s Stars The Origin of Owl’s Call The Origin of the Pleiades The Origin of Deer The Origin of Illness Corn Woman The Origin of Corn The Origin of Deciduous Trees OBLIQUE The Thunderer and the Man The Creation of Crow The Origin of Deer How Bat Received His Wings As can be seen in the table, a tale may be placed in two categories at the same time. The Origin of Deer, for example, is SERIOUS and DIRECT in its main focus on the origin of deer in the world, and SERIOUS and OBLIQUE in its explanation of why flying squirrels seem to like things made of horn. Oblique explanations have had a tendency to spread out from this subcategory of tales and become attached to tales of other subcategories. For example, in the Rabbit story Rabbit Tricks Great-One-Who-Eats-Human-Beings, an OBLIQUE statement indicates that this is the reason that elephants (which share the term a:tipacobá with Great-One-Who-Eats-Human-Beings) 48 Koasati Traditional Narratives live only overseas. Likewise, in the Rabbit story The Bungling Host, the fact that the beaks of birds are pierced is explained, as is the peculiar nature of Box Turtle’s shell in the tale Wolf and Box Turtle Run Race. A striking stylistic parallel can be seen between these tales and Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories. Both explain the occurrence of features in the natural world in a way that is unscientific, but psychologically satisfying. Both use droll humor on occasion, and both do not require the intervention of a deity. The most interesting feature about Koasati origin tales is that even in the most serious of these tales there are no deities. There are, of course, supernatural beings and supernatural happenings, but they occur without divine intervention–there are no gods per se. In two tales collected in 1910 and included here, The Origin of Illness and, especially, The Origin of Deer, one can infer the presence of a mysterious, unnamed, powerful being, linguistically suggested by the use of the distributive prefix in its function of marking an indefinite actor. Perhaps this is a hint at the being anciently known as Hifoshilkimí:si ‘The Owner of Breath’, and lmililliksó ‘His-Death-Does-Not-Exist’. However, this cannot be determined at the present time, since the former title has been forgotten, and the latter has become applied to the Christian God. In these origin tales, one can discern the outline of the world in myth. At some ancient point in time, the only beings in the world were the animals, who were intelligent, speaking beings that combined human personalities with the essentials of their animal natures. At a later date, humans emerged from the earth and coexisted for a time with the earlier animal-humans, who are understood as having the power to transform themselves from animal to human form. Finally, the animal-humans mysteriously disappeared, with the major exception of Rabbit; he, and the tales concerning him, appeared in the first chapter. THE ORIGIN OF THE KOASATI narrated by Pahá:ca This short and fragmentary text is the only one that speaks to the aboriginal ideas as to the origin of the Indians. Pahá:ca, known in English as George Henry, was a Koasati who had never left Texas. He was originally from the Colita village near Shepherd, Texas, but early on he married to an Alabama woman, Sihomáhki, and moved to the Alabama village near Livingston, Texas. One of his daughters married into the Koasati of Louisiana, and his descendants dwell there to this day. Pahá:ca himself visited the Koasati...