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

Introduction: Oral Narrative of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors

xiii Introduction Oral Narrative of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors on a visit to Cherokee country about the year 1812, a literate Mohawk chief named John Norton was intrigued by an unusual aspect of the landscape . Norton loved the oral traditions of the north and, when he asked his hosts to tell him about the feature, he expected to be entertained by a tale explaining how the oddity came to be. The Cherokees, however, only shrugged, saying they knew no stories about it. Now here were people, the astonished Norton confided to his journal, who clearly were not “addicted to the marvelous” (Klinck and Talman 1970, 62). Norton knew. The folktales, legends, and myths of the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee (in upstate New York and adjacent Ontario) and their Algonquian neighbors (all around Iroquois country) rank among the most imaginatively rich and narratively coherent traditions in North America. Mostly recorded around 1900, these oral narratives preserve the voice and something of the outlook of autochthonous Americans from a bygone age— prior to the dominance of radio, cinema, television, and Internet—when storytelling was an important fact of daily life. The folklore comprises an enormous body of material, one largely neglected by native and nonnative scholars alike. Such wondrous tales informed and inspired this set of essays about oral narrative in the Native American Northeast. The anthropological studies that follow focus on the nature of the stories as inferred, chiefly, from their plots. What do they say? What are they about? My answer is that some encapsulate cultural truths important to understanding Iroquois religion xiv | Introduction and worldview. Among the oral narratives testifying to older beliefs are several that clarify mythic imagery observable in the archaeological record. Other stories stand as irrefutable proof of bonds established between distant peoples, connections otherwise undocumented. Folktales and myths illustrate what people share, but they also furnish clues about what makes groups culturally distinctive. Finally, and in a few of the better-documented instances, one can follow plot development over time to recover a piece of the past of the people who told the story. The research grew out of an earlier book in which Iroquois oral narrative was interwoven with history and prehistory to tell the story of the New York Oneidas for whom I worked at the time (Wonderley 2004). The present studies explore and expand on questions raised in that earlier work. For example, I found that stone giants, popular creatures in Iroquois folklore , were similar to “various races of northern cannibal monsters familiar to neighboring Algonquian groups including windigo” (100). In this book, I make windigo’s acquaintance to get a clearer picture of the relationship between Algonquian and Iroquois mythic creations. Or again, in the earlier book I suggested that representational imagery found on certain archaeological objects might be reified oral narrative understandable from later folklore and myth. Humanlike depictions on ceramic cooking pots could be mythological cornhusk people. Faces and figures on certain smoking pipes of fired clay might relate to stories about mythic origin. The hypotheses are developed here in greater detail. I use a generally accepted tripartite classification for oral narrative that remains, after a century and a half of folklore usage, ambiguous and vague. By convention, oral narrative comprises three genres: myths, folktales, and legends. All are regarded as true, but myths, a people’s most important stories, are the truest of all. Myths tend to be regarded as older and more sacred and serious than other kinds of narrative. Usually they explain how the world came to be ordered, how something significant came about, or where a people came from (for example, the Iroquois tradition of emerging from the earth, discussed in chapter 7). Myths tend to begin in primal time and often include cosmic activities. They feature supernaturals and such culture heroes as Manibozho or Gluskap among speakers of Algonquian languages and Sky Holder among the Iroquois (chapter 4). Introduction | xv Legends describe human action “locally bound and historically rooted” (Grantham 2002, 3). They claim special and usually explicit credibility by alluding to what is regarded as historically true (for example, Iroquois accounts of the Kahkwa War considered in chapter 2). Folktales are less historically minded than legends and more secular than myths. Many seem more clearly designed to amuse and entertain. Among Iroquoian and Algonquian speakers in the Northeast, folktales are often animal stories or human adventures...