Native American Legends of the Southeast: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations

book.

Introduction to the 2011 Edition

Upon rereading this book after two decades, I am pleased with what I choose to see as prescient insights into the nature of the texts and the societies that gave them birth. I have realized, sometimes with surprise, that I have personally explored in greater depth many of the same topics I raised in this volume and in the earlier dissertation in which I first pondered them (1975). The approach has been from a slightly different direction, in that I have been concerned with applying the mythic materials to the interpretation of late prehistoric art.

During the centuries from 1000 to the historic period, the inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands increased greatly in population, towns, earth mounds, social complexity, and art forms. The international communication and exchanges of commodities that had grown for centuries, perhaps millennia, despite the barriers of distance and mutually unintelligible languages, continued. Growing population produced fission of towns into multiple towns, and palisades around the towns demonstrated the anticipation of warfare. Some people pushed against the forest-plains boundary farther to the West, incorporating elements of the centuries-old ecological adaptation of people that brought both hunting and agrarian strategies together in a variety of ways.

For reasons not yet understood, this energetic world that the archaeologists call the Mississippian period (because of the importance of the great river valley during these centuries) increased in religious complexity apace with its social and political complexity. Cults, small groups with charismatic leaders and new rituals, were born and passed on to apparently receptive outsiders. Revitalization movements, which have been thought by scholars to have been sparked only by the arrival of the Europeans, seem to have been part of the dynamic religious landscape as well, long before the transatlantic invasions. Perhaps cults and revitalization movements are just two ways of talking about the same religious dynamism.

With the evolution and adaptation of religious practices to local contexts came new dances, new sacred narratives, and new sacred art. The beliefs of the societies were embedded in the myths, and the myths were expressed in images. The images were carved, engraved, painted, woven, drawn, tattooed, and hammered in imaginative ways with astonishing skill. Copper, shell, ceramics, wood, leather, houses, and bodies were the raw materials for artistry. The Mississippians lived in a world decorated with their pictures.

Such an explosion of art had happened before, notably in the Hopewellian era (300 B.C. to 300 A.D.) centered on the Ohio Valley, but never on such a scale. It appears that the Mississippians agreed on one uniting principle—everyone should do art. The result was a composite of shared images—whether gifted, traded, or learned—and local art forms and images. This phenomenon has been noted for more than a century, and scholars have searched for a label that would do justice to the complexity of the archaeological reality (Lankford 2011a). The most recent popular term, Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, was based on a restricted collection of the art forms and icons, and some scholars, including me, have concluded that our labels with their presuppositions impede our thinking about the wonderful art explosion (Knight 2006).

Much of the material appears to be iconographic, in that the images convey some specific meanings that were understood by its viewers across great distances and cultural boundaries. I had wrestled with the meaning of the clearly iconographic images after I discovered the Mississippian art explosion in graduate school, and I thought I had made some headway in matching myths to images. I let it become just my hobby, however, because it did not seem to be the kind of thing that either archaeologists or folklorists would worry about, at least not in print.

In 1993, I was fortunate enough to be invited to join a group meeting at Texas State University in San Marcos to talk about the art. The gathering proved to be a collection of scholars from various disciplines who had long been studying the iconographic materials. Some of them, like Robert Hall and James Brown, had lifetimes invested in that sort of study. Convened by Kent Reilly and James Garber of the TSU anthropology department, the group began as an offshoot of the University of Texas Maya Meetings, which had made much progress in the cracking of Mesoamerican visual codes. Reilly and Garber, both Mesoamerican scholars, thought that the same sort of workshop approach could yield similar results for the prehistoric iconography north of Mexico. They were right, for the workshop rapidly began to make insights into the material, the product of informed dialogue among scholars who viewed the art from varying disciplinary perspectives. The workshop became an annual affair, and the scholars began to produce papers and articles both in groups and as individuals.

For me, it was an invigorating experience, for it gave me the opportunity to think together with others who shared my peculiar passion for interpreting prehistoric art and myth. The result was a number of articles and two books offering interpretations of myths, many in relation to iconographic art (Lankford 2007a, 2008). At the same time, other scholars, both in and out of the workshop, were producing interpretations of different iconic images. Many of those also incorporated examinations of myths (see especially the workshop's two collections: Reilly and Garber 2007; Lankford, Reilly, and Garber 2011).

Many of those articles will be of interest to readers of this volume, since they offer interpretations of myth texts contained here. What follows is a brief suggestion of particular interpretations and their sources, all of which have been produced in the years since this volume was first published in 1987. The survey is not intended to be exhaustive, but merely to indicate avenues for further reading. All of the references have extensive bibliographies that can serve as a guide to the reader's continued research.

The very title of Native American Legends raises an important issue. Why did I choose to call them legends rather than myths? It was certainly not an attempt to avoid the word myth, although many people, including some Native Americans, have objected to the word. I insist to my classes that the problem of misunderstandings of the word to mean lie cannot be solved by changing it to another word, because the same problem will develop again. Myth refers to a particular genre of narrative. It is considered by folklorists to be an important sub-category of legend, which consists of narratives that are usually believed and told as events that really happened. Legend is specifically not the same as tale, which is fictional narrative. Myth is legend that deals with sacred or ultimate topics, ideas that are usually considered part of religion in most cultures.

I picked the word legend as part of the title because I was not—nor have I ever been—sure of the nature of some of the collected narratives. Some may have been intended for entertainment—tales or jokes. Some may have been historical legends about heroes and events remembered from the recent past. Some may have been legends that were told so frequently by narrators that they became polished tales in their own right, cut loose from any historical or geographical anchors. Gifted narrators know how to change the meaning of a plot by changing the genre of a well-known plot in the telling. The difficulty is that it is hard to discern the intended genre of many Native American narratives collected and printed decades ago.

Consider, for example, one of my favorite texts (which does not appear in this volume). Knife chief of the Skidi Pawnee told a story about a man who went to the woods to beg for pity and a gift of power from the mosquitoes. He stripped himself and, as he received bite after bite, cried aloud for a gift. The narrator was using a standard myth format for describing how humans seek power from animals and other Powers who inhabit the cosmos. There are many examples of such stories in the collections, for crying for a vision is a major ritual of most groups. This text, however, ends abruptly when the chief of the mosquitoes whispers in his ear that he is mistaken—they have no power to give. He said that they were created just to suck blood, and that the petitioner had better go home before he dies (Dorsey 1904: 278). So what is this narrative? It looks like a myth, but it doesn't end correctly, with the bestowing of power, so it is not a model of proper religious behavior. Is it a warning anecdote? Or is it merely a joke? It is not hard to imagine the hearers collapsing in laughter at the last line: Mosquitoes can pity nobody. Genre counts, but the right category for a narrative is not always clear.

Further, the status of some myths may vary from one tribal group to another: A narrative considered sacred by one group may be a frivolous entertainment to another. When ethnographers sought to obtain an indication of the genres used by the tellers, they usually were given little more than the sacred/not sacred dichotomy. When lists of the texts in each category were compared with those from other tribes, some narratives were found to be in different genre categories. This situation has led many students of Indian religion and myth to conclude that the narratives as a whole should be termed myths until an individual example is confirmed to be in another narrative category. Since I have included in this volume Trickster stories and texts from Africans and even Europeans, it seemed the safest middle ground to call them all legends and let the discussion indicate any genre issues.

The structure of Native American Legends does not bear any resemblance to indigenous categories. I superimposed it on the collections of material as a way of organizing the texts. As a teacher of religion, I found the religious logic of categories a useful and easily grasped way of ordering the narratives. The standard North American cosmology of three basic levels seemed an obvious way to begin, and chapters are devoted to examining the nature of each level. A good overview of the artistic expression of the three-story cosmos can be gained by examining two articles in particular: an examination of cosmic symbolism on pottery from Cahokia, Illinois, the largest mound site north of Mexico (Pauketat and Emerson 1991) and a look at cosmic symbols on shell gorgets from the upper Tennessee River Valley and Moundville, Alabama, the second largest mound site (Lankford 2004).

For examining the three cosmic levels—Above World, Beneath World, and Middle World—each receives a chapter. Then the inhabitants of the Middle World where humans dwell are examined in separate chapters: the tribes of non-humans and the plants of societal importance. Then comes the adventure narratives, heroes and heroines of all kinds—four chapters of texts. Finally, the unique characters called Tricksters take up a chapter of their own.

The Above World myths deal with Sun, Moon, Stars, Winds, and Birds. All of these topics have not received special studies during the years since this book was published, but Reachable Stars is worth mentioning, for it is an attempt to look at the astronomical traditions of the Eastern Woodlands and Plains by examining the myths and their patterns of distribution (Lankford 2007a). An exhaustive comparative study of solar myths and their religious meanings awaits its author, but it is clear that it will be more complex than current references suggest. The same is true for the Above World's avian figures, as shown by a comparison of the symbolism of the Raptor at two competing regional centers—Etowah and Moundville (King and Reilly 2011; Lankford 2011b). Instances of possible political differences embedded in the apparently common symbolic art have to be interpreted through yet another filter, the likelihood of change in the details and meaning of myths through time. Greg Keyes's useful contrast of versions of an Apalachee myth collected two centuries apart is a useful warning about temporal discontinuity (1994).

The Beneath World myths in the Eastern Woodlands are mostly about the world of water and its inhabitants, with the Earth-Diver myth as the most widespread cosmogonic myth. The complexity of the creation myths of eastern North America is reflected in the variety of texts collected in a recent volume of Creek creation myths (Grantham 2002). Recent studies have emphasized the importance and almost universal traditions of the world of water spirits and their various manifestations. An important beginning point is Thomas Emerson's study of water symbolism from the viewpoint of Cahokia studies, for he examines the artistic and mythic traditions of the water serpents and water panthers with a focus on the Central Mississippi Valley (Emerson 1989). A complementary study looks at the interplay between the visual art and myths about the Great Serpent, attempting to trace that figure through multiple forms and functions from the Great Lakes to the Gulf (Lankford 2007c). That early study included a hypothesis that the wings of the winged serpent image indicate not a visual characteristic of the master of the Beneath World, but were an indication of an alternate location in the night sky, and that theme was followed into an astronomical interpretation (Lankford 2007a: 240-56). A recent examination has added to the graphic array with a focus on the Lower Mississippi Valley (Reilly 2011).

The Middle World, the world inhabited by human beings, is the home of sacred fire and is largely seen as an earth island, even by those who see the earth as a complex of levels and powers, a structure necessitating the creation of a tunnel upward to enable the ancestors to emerge onto the top of the Middle World. The cosmogonic myths usually account for the creation of the Middle World, which is widely understood to have been a later stage of creation than the formation of the Above World and the Beneath World with its vast waters. For some peoples, though, creation is a minor legend, because the cosmic structure seems to be taken almost for granted.

The Middle World is the home of humans and all the other people with whom they live—animals, insects, birds—and plants of all kinds. Since this is the location of many of the events recounted in myths, there is a great deal of information about the Middle World in every myth collection. Animals have not yet come in for their full share of attention in art studies, but their time is coming, because it seems likely that animal effigies must have been far more than decorative art in the midst of so much iconography. Speculation about their role in myths as clan totems has a long history, but the specific connections to myths in ritual roles have not been clarified, having been relegated to the background by their exclusion from the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex canonical iconographic list (but see Dye 2011). One surprising advance has been the recognition of one apparently important divinity in moth form that has artistic distribution from the Lower Mississippi Valley to Moundville and Etowah (Knight and Franke 2007, and an extension of the discussion in Reilly and Garber 2011: 294-312).

Plants have not received as much attention from the artistic side as they might, but a discussion of the Birger figurine included significant study of the plant imagery and the mythic connections (Prentice 1986). That article has been followed up by broader examinations of female figurines and their symbolism (Emerson 1997; Emerson et al. 2003; Smith and Miller 2009; Sharp et al. 2011). The mythic material on maize and the variety of female owners of plants in Chapter 7 of this volume has been expanded and re-examined from a different perspective in A Maze of Maize Myths (Lankford 2008: 24-69). The ethnography of tobacco has been explored in a series of studies by von Gernet, among others, and there are references to the mythic background (von Gernet 1992, 1995, 2000).

As the texts published in Chapters 7 through 11 of Native American Legends demonstrate, the corpus of stories about the adventures of the heroes is large and complex. As has long been recognized, adventures come in episodes that are easily interchangeable—a specific exploit may be attributed to different heroes by different tribal groups or even different narrators within a tribe. Since archaeologists understandably desire to make some tentative identification of heroic depictions on art forms or rock art, I have attempted to provide them with an abbreviated list of adventure episodes and their mythic sources, but it remains to be seen whether the index is of any value to them (Lankford 2009: 191-214).

Perhaps an even thornier problem is the identification of the heroes and their roles in a given society. The Twins, for example (Chapter 8 in this collection), come in several different mythic types in the Woodlands and Plains (Radin 1950). Connecting the heroes of the art forms with the figures of ritual and myth is a difficult task, but a number of scholars have set out to bring order to the multiplicity of Twins and other heroic traditions. The Twins have been claimed to be the subjects of artistic representation in shell gorget and copper designs (Lankford 2009: 139-162; Lankford 2010; King 2011), engraved rock art (Steponaitis et al. 2011), painted cave art (Hall 1989; Duncan and Diaz-Granados 2000; Diaz-Granados 2011), and ceramic art (Lankford and Dye 2007). The identifications have not been proved or universally approved, but the attempts to make the connections are a good indication of the mythic interpretive work in progress. James A. Brown and a group of scholars have been struggling for several years at the San Marcos Workshop to make sense out of the large corpus of engraved shells from Spiro that bear Twins-like images, paired human figures that clearly have complex iconographic meanings. The results of their work are not yet clear, but they may shed more light on the mythic relations of the Twins and other heroes.

James Brown has also pursued the single-hero problem. On the basis of the growing belief that the tribes who spoke Dhegiha Siouan were the core of the Cahokia mega-site phenomenon, he has used Osage materials and Cahokia art to build an interpretation of the Morning Star hero as connected to the Raptor (Brown 2004; 2007). James Duncan, involved with the Osage ritual tradition, has supported the argument by reconstructing from various sources the Osage pantheon of divinities and heroes (Duncan 2011). Rock-art of Missouri has been examined for its contribution to the discussion of heroes and other figures of myth (Duncan and Diaz-Granados 2000; Diaz-Granados 2011).

The discussion has ranged into the Red Horn tradition of Winnebago myth (Lankford et al. 2011, passim), but the editor of the online archive of Winnebago myths has argued against the incorporation of Winnebago materials in the Morning Star hypothesis (Dieterle n.d.). I have raised different issues, including Southwestern themes and the possible role of the Bead-Spitter myth, in examining the various astronomical traditions about Morning Star (Lankford 2007a: 53-125). The value of the discussion thus far lies in its indication of the complexity of the traditions and its underscoring of the importance of regional interpretations of myth and art.

Some of the other miscellaneous adventures presented in Chapter 11 have been further explored in regard to their astronomical connections. The Journey to the Sky and Orpheus myths have been more fully interpreted in the light of the mortuary practices of Native Americans, especially in regard to the Milky Way, the Path of Souls (Lankford 2004; 2007a: 201-25; Lankford 2007d). The Obstacle Flight myth has taken an unusual role on the Plains, in that it has become the story of the origin of Ursa Major (Lankford 2007a: 133-52).

The enigmatic Trickster figures continue to be a subject of discussion and a stimulus for articles by literary scholars, psychologists, and anthropologists (Chapter 12 in this volume). The figure does not lend itself to comparative study across media lines, because there appears to be little art in North America that is devoted to Trickster, and rituals about them are scarce, if they exist at all. It may be that this absence is due to the fact that the Trickster is a primal figure beyond cultural boundaries and the either/ors implied by cultural rules. Trickster stands as a critic of culture, including religion, so his absence from cultural rites may be appropriate. A stimulating collection of articles on Trickster myths that appeared almost two decades ago is a good place to start, for the papers are accompanied by an excellent bibliography (Hynes and Doty 1993).

These references to recent work in the interpretation of myth are heavy on the writing of me and my colleagues. That is not intended to be a biasing of the recent scholarship, but simply reflects the work that has come across my desk and attracted my attention. There is actually much more out there. The amount of work that I have mentioned here, though, has the virtue of indicating that the study of Native American legend and myth is alive and well. The field of myth interpretation is perhaps as vigorous in the beginning of the 21st century as it was at the beginning of the 20th century, when all the great collectors and sponsoring institutions were in their heyday.

If the return of this introductory volume to public availability can serve to usher into the field yet another generation of minds eager to understand the ancestors of the First People of North America, I will be pleased indeed.

George E. Lankford

Professor emeritus of folklore

Lyon College, Batesville, Arkansas

REFERENCES

Brain, Jeffrey P., and Philip Phillips. 1996. Shell Gorgets: Styles of the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Southeast. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Brown, James A. 2004. The Cahokian Expression: Creating Court and Cult. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, ed. by R. F. Townsend and R. V. Sharp, 105–23.The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press.

———. 2007. On the Identity of the Birdman within Mississippian Period Art and Iconography. In Reilly and Garber 2007: 56–106. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Diaz-Granados, Carol. 2011. Early Manifestations of Mississippian Iconography in Middle Mississippi Valley Rock-Art. In Lankford et al. 2011: 64–98.

Dieterle, Richard L. nd. Various articles online in The Encyclopedia of Ho/Chak (Winnebago) Mythology, http://www.hotcakencyclopedia.com.

Dorsey, George A. 2004. Traditions of the Skidi Pawnee. American Folklore Society Memoir 8.

Duncan, James R. 2011. The Cosmology of the Osage: The Star People and Their Universe. In Lankford et al. 2011: 18–36.

Duncan, James R. and Carol Diaz-Granados, Of Masks and Myths. Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology 25: 1–26, 2000.

———. 2004. Empowering the SECC: The ‘Old Woman’ and Oral Tradition. In The Rock-Art of Eastern North America: Capturing Images and Insight. Edited by C. Diaz-Granados and J. R. Duncan, 190–215. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

Dye, David H. 2011. Mississippian Ceramic Art in the Lower Mississippi Valley: A Thematic Overview. In Lankford et al. 2011: 99–117.

Emerson, Thomas E. 1989. Water, Serpents, and the Underworld: An Exploration into Cahokia Symbolism. In The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Artifacts and Analysis. Edited by P. Galloway, 45–92. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

———. 1997. Cahokian Elite Ideology and the Mississippian Cosmos. In Cahokia Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World. Edited by T. R. Pauketat and T. E. Emerson, 190–228.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Emerson, Thomas E., R. E. Hughes, M. R. Hynes, and S. U. Wisseman. 2003. The Sourcing and Interpretation of Cahokia-Style Figurines in the Trans-Mississippi South and Southeast. American Antiquity 68(2): 287–313.

Grantham, Bill. 2002. Creation Myths and Legends of the Creek Indians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Hall, Robert L.1989. The Cultural Background of Mississippian Symbolism. In The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, Artifacts and Analysis: The Cottonlandia Conference. Edited by P. Galloway: 239–79. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Hynes, William J. and William G. Doty, eds. 1993. Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Keyes, Greg. 1994. Myth and Social History in the Early Southeast. In Perspectives on the Southeast: Linguistics, Archaeology, and Ethnohistory. Edited by Patricia B. Kwachka, 106–15. Southern Anthropology Society Proceedings, No. 27. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

King, Adam. 2011. Iconography of the Hightower Region of Eastern Tennessee and Northern Georgia. In Lankford, et al. 2011: 279–293.

King, Adam, and F. Kent Reilly III. 2011. Raptor Imagery at Etowah: The Raptor Is the Path to Power. In Lankford, et al. 2011: 313–20.

Knight, Vernon James, Jr. 2006. Farewell to the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Southeastern Archaeology 25 (1), 1–5.

Knight, Vernon James, Jr., James A. Brown, and George E. Lankford. 2001. On the Subject Matter of Southeastern Ceremonial Complex Art. Southeastern Archaeology 20(2): 129–41.

Knight, Vernon James, Jr., and Judith A. Franke. 2007. Identification of a Moth/Butterfly Supernatural in Mississippian Art. In Reilly and Garber 2007: 136–51, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Lankford, George E. 1975. The Tree and the Frog: An Exploration in Stratigraphic Folklore. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University Folklore Institute.

———. 2004. World on a String: Some Cosmological Components of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand. Edited by Richard Townsend and Robert Sharp. The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press: 206–17.

———. 2006 . Some Southwestern Influences in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Arkansas Archeologist 45:1–25.

———. 2007a. Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

———. 2007b. Some Cosmological Motifs in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. In Reilly and Garber 2007: 8–38.

———. 2007c. The Great Serpent in Eastern North America, in Reilly and Garber: 107–35.

———. 2007d. The ‘Path of Souls:’ Some Death Imagery in the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, In Reilly and Garber 2007: 174–212.

———. 2008. Looking for Lost Lore: Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Iconography. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

———. 2011a. Regional Approaches to Iconographic Art. In Lankford, et al. 2011: 1–17.

———. 2011b. Raptor on the Path. In Lankford, et al. 2011: 240–50.

———. 2011c. The Swirl-Cross and the Center. In Lankford, et al. 2011: 251–78.

Lankford, George E., F. Kent Reilly III, and James F. Garber, eds. 2011. Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Vision, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Pauketat, Timothy R., and Thomas E. Emerson. 1991. The Ideology of Authority and the Power of the Pot. American Anthropologist 93: 919–41.

Phillips, Philip, and James A. Brown. 1978, 1984. Pre-Columbian Shell Engravings from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma. 2 Parts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Peabody Museum Press.

Prentice, Guy. 1986. An Analysis of the Symbolism Expressed by the Birger Figurine. American Antiquity 5, no. 12, 239–66.

Radin, Paul. 1950. The Basic Myth of the North American Indians. Eranos-Jahrbuch 17: