At the Font of the Marvelous: Exploring Oral Narrative and Mythic Imagery of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors

6 The Friendly Visitor: An Iroquois Stone Giant Goes Calling in Algonquian Country

98 6 The Friendly Visitor An Iroquois Stone Giant Goes Calling in Algonquian Country the tale most closely resembling a literary short story in all of native North America may be one documented among eastern Algonquian people of the Canadian Maritimes. It tells of a male cannibal giant who suddenly emerges from the woods at the camp of a small, human family. Welcomed as a person, the monster takes up residence with the humans and even defends his adopted family against the onslaught of a second cannibal giant. After the battle, the domesticated creature chooses to remain with his human kin when they return to their village (Rand 1894, 190–99). Unusually detailed, this tale is remarkable for its complexity and philosophical nuance (Fogelson 1980, 145). To a folklorist a century ago, it spoke of “the gradual civilization of the savage by kindness” (Leland 1992, 244). More recently, it is characterized as a musing on human nature and social solidarity (McGee 1975). But the Canadian tale is only one example of a narrative known to Algonquian speakers from the Midwest to the Atlantic Coast (Fisher 1946, 248). Wherever it is found, it seems to distill and express values common to its tellers across a large area. “The consistency of imagery that runs through the various versions of these tales,” as Kenneth Morrison (1979, 62) puts it, “indicates a universal agreement among the Algonkian peoples about the nature of the cannibal giant and of the threat he posed to society.” I described this plot in the preceding chapter as windigo story type N, the Friendly Visitor. Here, I widen the definition of the plot: A cannibal giant (variously named; windigos are one example) comes to live with a The Friendly Visitor | 99 human family, then protects the family by fighting and killing another cannibal giant. I became interested in the Friendly Visitor story type when I realized it was also present among the Iroquois. As they told it, however, the cannibal giant is a female fleeing her abusive husband. The second cannibal giant is her spouse, who comes after her and is slain. The same story type, in other words, looks like an altogether different tale in Iroquois country. The recognition of Iroquois variants greatly expands the story’s geographical distribution and increases its number of accounts. That makes possible the comparative study presented in this chapter. What follows is, in part, a geographical survey of the story’s occurrence. The Friendly Visitor seems to have been centered in Iroquois country, where it was recorded more frequently and told with greater consistency than elsewhere. If the story was Iroquois in origin, when did it spread outward? This chapter is also a comparative examination of the story’s content, a mapping of similarities and differences among its regional variants. Because the Friendly Visitor story type comprises such a plentiful and rich body of material, one can discern how the same story was regionally handled. It turns out that storytellers in different places were supplying their own motivations to the actors and drawing different conclusions about what the story meant. Ultimately, patterns characteristic of different regions raise questions about cultural distinctions between Iroquois and Algonquian oral narrative. Study of the Friendly Visitor story type properly begins among the Iroquois, who provided the greatest number of accounts. But first, let me introduce the distinctively Iroquois cannibal giant. Iroquois Stone Giants Iroquois folklore was peopled by a windigo-like creature usually rendered in English as stone coat or stone giant. Basically humanlike in appearance , it had a pointy head and wore, like a garment, an exterior covering made of stone (possibly of flint). According to a print done by an Iroquois artist in 1827, stone giants were about twice the size of humans (Bryden 1995, 62; Sturtevant 2006, 48). Like windigos, they were credited with 100 | At the Font of the Marvelous extraordinary strength and with such magical powers as the ability to disable humans with a shout (Beauchamp 1892, 28–29; Goldenweiser 1914, 474). Stone giants did not have hearts made of ice although, like windigos, they were of the north. The Iroquois giants were highly accomplished hunters capable of conveying luck in the chase to humans (Curtin 2001, 216, 511; Hewitt 1918, 437; A. Parker 1989, 336–39). Often, they were considered to have mystical ties with game. An association with forest animals and hunting magic implies the stone giants...