Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN AND CHRISTIANITY

NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN AND CHRISTIANITY l 89 dislodge his now dreadful cargo, cutting her fingers off down to the first joint and then to the second. They fell into the sea and became seals and walruses. According to the story recorded by Knud Rasmussen among his own Greenlander Inuit people in the early 1920s, Sedna was at last forced to relinquish her grip, and she sank beneath the waves. In Boas’s account, however, the gulls departed, thinking she had drowned, and the storm subsided. Her father then pulled her back into the boat. Father and daughter arrive home without further incident. Sedna, however, still deeply resented her father’s actions. At the first opportunity, she set her dogs on the sleeping man, and the dogs gnawed off his hands and feet. The old man cursed his daughter, the dogs, and himself. At that moment, the ground opened beneath them, swallowing their hut and all inside it. Sedna became Mistress of the Sea and the ruler of the underworld. From there she controls the sea creatures formed from her flesh. When human beings anger her, she withholds these sources of food, and the people suffer. In order to placate Sedna and keep her happy, Inuit shamans travel to her realm and comb her tangled hair because, without fingers, she cannot do so herself. According to Rasmussen, Sedna’s father is in charge of chastising those who have been wicked in this world before they can enter the land of the dead. As in the Cherokee narrative, a male figure or figures dismember a female body, and her remains undergo a transformation that provides food for the people. Where Corn Woman recognizes the necessity of her death and exerts some measure of control by instructing her sons how to dispose of her body, Sedna’s sacrifice is not of her own making. In one sense, this narrative of productive female sacrifice is appropriate among the Inuit, whose harsh environment necessitated population control that sometimes took the form of female infanticide. The power ascribed to Sedna is much like that of Corn Woman, however, in that her story explains tribal economics . Sedna exerts control over all the whales, seals, and walruses in the sea, which are the primary source of meat, oil, and skins needed by the Inuit to survive. The handful of examples discussed here are but a tiny sample of the many Native American creation stories in which women figure prominently. Given that balance between male and female is a key principal in most tribal structures, stories of female creators are the rule rather than the exception. White Buffalo Calf Woman gives to the Lakota nation the pipe and seven sacred ceremonies that order their lives. For the Tlingit and Haida, the first two women made by Raven critique his creation and decide that one of them should be a man, thereby re-creating humanity. For the Mescalero Apache, ‘Isánáklésh was one of the five sacred beings present at creation, and her power brought the people trees, plants, and medicinal herbs. For the Laguna, Thought Woman is the creator that gives shape and name to all things through the power of her imagination . In the words of Laguna poet Leslie Marmon Silko, Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. (Excerpted from Silko’s Ceremony, 1) SOURCES: Collections with a range of creation stories from various tribes in North America include Stith Thompson, ed., Tales of the North American Indians (1929); Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, eds., American Indian Myths and Legends (1984); Ella Elizabeth Clark, ed., Indian Legends of Canada (1960); and Susan Feldmann, ed., The Story-Telling Stone: Traditional Native American Myths and Tales (1965). Most of these stories are reprinted, retold, or compiled from one or more earlier sources, with varying degrees of contextualization. For an analysis and examples of different tribal creation stories, see Jace Weaver, American Journey: The Native American Experience (1998). Vine Deloria, Jr., in God Is Red 2nd ed. (1992), provides a comparative analysis of Native, Christian, and Jewish accounts of creation. Further study should focus on tribally specific materials. Hopi sources are Harold Courlander, ed., The Fourth World of the Hopis (1971), and H. R. Voth, ed., The Traditions of the Hopi (1905). Edmund Nequatewa in The Truth of a Hopi (1936) offers a Hopi account. Iroquoian stories of Sky Woman include David Cusick [Tuscarora], Sketches of...