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“The Star Woman” is the title assigned to a myth text collected originally from Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet and brother of Tecumseh. After study of the original C. C. Trowbridge version, James Clifton rewrote and published “The Star Woman” and four other Shawnee texts. Here is an abridged version of the plot, with direct quotations from the Clifton rendition. White Hawk was a solitary Shawnee, an excellent hunter, who took a journey toward the west. He came upon a prairie with a cleared space. “As the White Hawk walked over the clearing he soon realized that someone had prepared this prairie for playing lacrosse.” The space was covered with “very small footmarks!” He hid to watch and see what would happen. A whirring noise above signaled the arrival of a speck, which became identi¤able as it came toward the earth. “When it came near the tops of the trees, the White Hawk saw that it was a kind of a large shooshooni—a wicker basket and that it contained a dozen people who were seated astride the great basket’s rim, swinging their feet to the rhythm of a song. “These people were the Halaakowi?kweki—the Star Women, sometimes called the Twelve Sisters. It was their custom to come every day to play lacrosse on this prairie.” White Hawk fell in love with the youngest of the sisters, but they ®ed back into the sky when he ran toward them. The next day he disguised himself as an opossum, but they again became alarmed and ®ed. The next day he changed himself into a mouse, and this time he succeeded in seizing the young woman. “So terri¤ed were the others that they abandoned their younger sister, leaped into the basket, and 7 The Star Women disappeared into the sky, the youngest Halaakowi?kwe left struggling in the grasp of White Hawk.” They lived together and produced a son. When the boy was four years old, she told him that she was planning to take him to the sky to meet her family. “The boy said nothing for or against this plan, and thus his mother busied herself gathering the Black Ash splints needed to make the special shooshooni for their journey to the stars.” She got White Hawk to bring in a great deal of raccoon meat, which she dried and stored for her journey. “Putting these supplies in the basket, she got in with her son, telling him they would ®y ¤rst to the lacrosse ¤eld where his father had ¤rst caught her. There they would ¤nd the trail to her sister’s home.” When she and the boy ®ew over the head of White Hawk at the lacrosse ¤eld, he begged her to return, but she ignored him. Singing the “special song” of the Twelve Sisters, she ascended into the sky. After some time in her father’s village in the sky, the boy grew homesick for his father, and the woman’s father urged her to go back to earth and invite White Hawk to come live with them in the sky, bringing with them samples of all the good animals from the island of the Shawnee. White Hawk accepted the invitation, and when he had prepared samples of all the meat and fur, they made a return journey to the sky. They unloaded the samples, which the chief-father magically expanded into a great pile, which he then distributed among the sky people. Upon clothing themselves in the furs and feathers, “each suddenly turned into the animal or bird whose®esh, fur, or feathers they had taken from the piles.” “And Star Woman, her son, and his father? They three all took on the shape of Waapimskwalnyaki—White Hawks.” [summary of Clifton 1984:1–8] Although the Twelve Women are identi¤ed as star women, no constellation is mentioned in the text. Clifton’s telling of this myth closely follows the earliest recorded text, the one collected from Tenskwatawa. It was ¤rst collected before 1825 and it saw an interesting publishing sequence. Here is the way C. E. Schorer identi¤ed the 19th-century players in the transmission story: Directly or indirectly serving under [Gen. Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory] were three men who each produced a separate version of the tale: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Henry Whiting, and C. C. Trowbridge. Trowbridge and Schoolcraft joined with Cass in the 1820 expedition he conducted to Lake Superior—Schoolcraft as geologist, Trowbridge as assistant...

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