Reading Notes: Native American Marriage Tales; Part A

The first story in this reading was very interesting. It was called "The Piqued Buffalo-Wife". The beginning of the story started out with a buffalo-cow trying to find his human father that helped his buffalo mother and bring them together. The buffalo-cow had to go through a few trials to find the Indian man that did so and he was able to identify him correctly through all the people. When he brought them together, the human father was not supposed to use fire around the mother, but he did so one time when he was angry and the mother and son disappeared. The father felt remorseful and had to go through a few trials to try to find his buffalo-calf son and see if he could correctly identify him. The man was able to pick his son out a few times by different signals, but on the last trial, he was not successful. The father was then trampled by the heard and eventually they found his bones to give to his family and they turned into human being. I thought that this story gave me a lot of different ideas for my own writing. I like the different trials of identification, and also how the buffalo was trying to bring the human father together with the buffalo mom. I also liked how they turned into human beings after.

(headdress of the Matoki Society)

"Bear-Woman and Deer-Woman" was the next story in Part A and I thought it was cool how they were still mixing humans and animals. The into made it seem like something was not going to be successful. These two woman were wives of Chickenhawk men. From the story it seemed that the families of both of these woman were very close. That was true until the Bear decided to bite of the Doe's head and burn it. When the Bear returned, the Doe's children were skeptical and knew that that was their mother. The Bear made them not worry too much about it and so they went of the play with the Bear's children. The Doe's decided to kill the Bears and take them back to the mother Bear and tell them that they were skunks that they killed for dinner. The mother Bear believed them, and then someone mentioned that she was eating her own children. They called her out for killing a person then eating her children's hands. This story was a bit weird, but I like how had a twist and I was not anticipating what was going to happen. I think I could incorporate something like this into one of my stories, by thinking of a weird twist.

The last story that I felt inspired by was, "The Eagle and Whale Husbands". The story had a unique concept to it. There were little girls playing by the shore with eagle bones and whale bones. I thought that part was kind of weird, but could be fun to have random animal parts lying around that transform into other things. The girls then wished for a husband, one an Eagle and the other a Whale husband. Their wishes came true and they were then taken off with an Eagle and a Whale. The little girls did not like this and tried to escape because they felt trapped. They were both successful, but the animals were not. The animals ended up dead. I think it could by creative to continue a storyline with this and have the children trapped and something more happening to them instead of just allowing them to escape. It would have been cool if they turned into the animal or something.



Bibliography: Native American Marriage Tales by Stith Thompson