This
week I read the Sioux Legends unit. I went into it expecting to read some
stories involving animals, maybe some humans, and a lot of tricksters based on
the description in the UN-Textbook table of contents. This much was true.
However, I went into the unit with a pre-existing assumption that legends and
fables usually are strongly centered on some moral. This much was not true for
this particular reading unit. The stories did not seem to make much sense and
contained a lot of randomness. I did not see a point to many of the stories
that I read.
I
rewrote the story of The Rabbit and the Bear in my storytelling assignment. I
did this because of my lack of satisfaction with the ending. The rabbit finds
himself ill prepared for the hunt. He then travels to visit the bear chief to acquire
flint for his arrowheads. He takes too much and kills the chief. My expectation
for a story like this would be for the rabbit to learn a lesson at the end. He
was an irresponsible and selfish creature and he should be punished. Instead,
he gets away with the flint and kills all of the other bears. The story takes
the alternate path that is very unsatisfying and ultimately boils down to an
explanation for why there aren’t as many bears anymore. It just made me feel
like I wasted my time by reading this story.
Even
worse was the story of The Boy and the Turtles. What the heck happened in that
story? Why did the boy not hunt for turtles in the usual place? Why did the men
appear in the lake? Why was the boy honored when they confirmed his story? What
does it all mean? The story just seems so nonsensical and ridiculous.
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| Turtles. Web Source: Flickr |
I had to smile when I read this, Joshua - if it so interesting to see the different ways people read and what they are looking for. I absolutely love the Sioux stories here because I really am not so sure we KNOW what the meaning of the world is. The idea that it is all just kind of weird and mysterious is something that makes sense to me, and if a story is able to give me a reason why there are not so many bears around, I'll settle for that. As you can see in the story of Wankan Wanyanka, holiness can be a mystery, a revelation, unpredictable, beyond human power. I like stories that remind me that we do NOT know about the world far exceeds what we know. Just speaking for myself, I think we would be kidding ourselves to believe otherwise, despite the best efforts of the philosophers and scientists to try to find answers to it all. Have you seen the movie Contact...? I highly recommend it for getting a sense of what happens when mystery and science collide. The book (by Carl Sagan) is good too, but this is one case where I think I like the movie even better than the book.
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