First impressions reviews: The Dawn of the World: Myths and Tales of the Miwok Indians of California, collected by C. Hart Merriam
As the title suggests, this is a collection primarily of creation myths told by the Miwok – a linguistic and cultural group of Indigenous people whose traditional territory stretches from San Francisco Bay and Sonoma to the central Sierra Nevada - compiled in the late 19th century. Merriam was a biologist by training but became interested in Native cultures and concerned about the way they were being eroded by loss of land and language. I’ve tagged these tales as having Native authors, because they do appear to have been written down exactly as told. I do wish Merriam had noted down the name and something about the background of the person who told him the story, rather than just their sub-group affiliations, though, because there are a lot of variations and sometimes comments on recent events. I suspect that, as in many folklore traditions, every teller tended to add and subtract details around the core points of the story. Moreover, some individuals may have been the primary storytellers for their group, while others might be recounting half-remembered fragments of something their grandmother told them twenty years ago.
This book is not set up to be optimally readable to a Euro-american audience; the
stories haven’t gone through the “smoothing” and consolidating process that,
say, the brothers Grimm applied to European folktales. As a result, there are
multiple different versions of “how we got fire” or “why there is a sun” or
“how coyote created humans” that have overlapping elements (eg. a piece of fire
is almost always stored within a buckeye tree, explaining why the branches of
that tree are used for fire-starting) but can involve different characters (eg.
was it hummingbird, robin, or flicker who got his feathers turned red by
carrying the fire? Or was it mouse who instead stole the flame?). Details that
might explain the context or morality associated with a particular action are
often lacking, probably because it is assumed the listener already knows. If you think that sounds confusing, consider this: If you asked a dozen random modern Americans to tell
you the story of Little Red Riding Hood, you’d get a lot of common elements but
the details would vary and probably no one would try to tell you why the wolf
can talk and walk on its hind legs, why Red can’t tell the difference between a
wolf and her grandmother, or what exactly the moral of the story
is! We could say what we think the story means if asked, but if we’re just
telling the story we wouldn’t bother. And that's a story that has already been "smoothed".
Anyway, the collection of stories here is fascinating, even if you don’t know as much of the context as you might like. A lot of people think of coyote as a trickster in Native America folklore, but here he is more of a creator spirit – often aided by his grandson WekWek the falcon - no more tricksy than anyone else. He usually creates people out of feathers, but there is one rather sad version of the story where people are made out of different kinds of sticks that concludes: “Here at Bodega Bay he left only sticks of Po’topp’ the sage herb which has a hollow stem and has no strength. That is the reason our people are tender and weak and cannot stand the cold, and why nearly all died soon after the white men came.” That has to be a recent variant, as is the tendency to refer to rancherias, which is a term introduced by the Spanish that by that time was basically referring to small Indian reservations. Another story that clearly had a recent detail added is that of how meadowlark always gossips and makes uncomplimentary remarks, including “that they are dark on the outside only and under the skin are as white and mean as a white man”. Something that clearly comes across as a moral in this and other stories is: “Don’t be greedy and hoard the meat you hunt”. In one, it is the skunk who is claiming all the elk meat for himself, and the others are afraid to confront him because his spray is deadly, but the badger shows them how to build a pit trap to kill him.
Those who live in California and are at least somewhat outdoorsy will find a lot of familiar things in these tales. Mol’luk the condor has his house on Mount Diablo, an isolated peak that overlooks most of Miwok territory and is fairly close to Pinnacles National Park, where California condors were reintroduced. There are several stories that involve catastrophic landscape scale fires that seem pretty believable if you live in this region today, and even the flood that filled the whole valley might have been based on a real event, since such a flood occurred in 1862. The brothers who make thunder and lightning only come through the hole in the sky in winter – because that’s when it rains here!
While most of the tales are set in something like the Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime”, where beings that are both human and animal form the landscape we know to day, some of the short snippets recorded as “present day myths” are really charming. For instance, dog and stump are friends and, if dog is ever lost, he asks stump where his man is – which is a fun explanation of why dogs are always sniffing trees and stumps and how they are so good at finding people. Also, a child’s baby teeth should be put in a pocket gopher burrow so that the adult teeth will grow in strong! Some of the “present day” mythical beings will sound familiar to those who know other folklore traditions, such as the water women who will drown you if you are not careful, or the Little Folk who live in the darkest corners of the redwood forest and “sometimes they make people crazy”.
While most of the stories blend clear observations of the natural world with more fanciful elements, one little snippet was so close to how I would describe soil formation as an ecologist that I just have to share it here:
In the beginning, the world was rock. Every year the rains came and fell on the rock and washed off a little; this made earth. By and by plants grew on the earth and their leaves fell and made more earth…This is the way the world grew – and it is growing still.
The teller even adds that you can see that this is so if you look at how the earth is layered - and indeed you can!
Overall recommendation: Check this out if you like folktales and myths…and especially if you live in this part of California.
