Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths / Thirty-Second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology; 1910-1911

by Unknown

The identifications and interpretative field notes accompanying Mr. Curtin’s material by some mischance were not made a part of the present collection. Their loss, which has added greatly to the work of the editor, is unfortunate, as Mr. Curtin possessed in so marked a degree the power of seizing readily the motive and significance of a story that his notes undoubtedly would have supplied material for the intelligent explanation and analysis of the products of the Indian mind contained in this memoir.

The texts recorded in the Seneca dialect by Mr. Curtin were very difficult to read, as they had been recorded with a lead pencil and had been carried from place to place until they were for the greater part almost illegible. The fact that these texts were the rough field notes of Mr. Curtin, unrevised and unedited, added to the difficulty of translating them. Fortunately, in editing a large portion of one of these manuscripts, the editor had the assistance of his niece, Miss Caroline G. C. Hewitt, who speaks fluently the Seneca dialect of the Iroquois languages. [[50]]

Part 2 also consists of Seneca legends and myths, which are translations made expressly for this work from native texts recorded by Mr. Hewitt in the autumn of 1896. Two of the texts so translated appear here, revised and edited, with a closely literal interlinear translation in English. The matter of Part 2 constitutes about two-fifths of the whole, containing only 31 items, while there are 107 in Part 1; but the latter narratives are uniformly much longer than the former.

The Seneca informants of Mr. Hewitt in the field were Mr. Truman Halftown, Mr. John Armstrong, and Chief Priest Henry Stevens, all of the Cattaraugus Reservation, N. Y. These worthy men, who have all passed away, were uniformly patient, kind, and interested. They were men whose faith in the religion of their ancestors ennobled them with good will, manliness, and a desire to serve.

Special attention is drawn to the freedom of these Seneca narratives from coarseness of thought and expression, although in some respectable quarters obscenity seems to be regarded as a dominant characteristic of American Indian myths and legendary lore. This view is palpably erroneous and unjust, because it is founded on faulty and inadequate material; it is, moreover, governed largely by the personal equation.

To form an impartial and correct judgment of the moral tone of the myths and legends of the American Indian, a distinction must be made between myths and legends on the one hand and tales and stories which are related primarily for the indecent coarseness of their thought and diction on the other; for herein lies the line of demarcation between narratives in which the rare casual references to indelicate matters are wholly a secondary consideration and not the motives of the stories, and those ribald tales in which the evident motive is merely to pander to depraved taste by detailing the coarse, the vulgar, and the filthy in life.

It is, indeed, a most unfortunate circumstance in the present study of the spoken literature of the North American Indians that the headlong haste and nervous zeal to obtain bulk rather than quality in collecting and recording it are unfavorable to the discovery and acquisition of the philosophic and the poetic legends and myths so sacred to these thoughtful people. The inevitable result of this method of research is the wholly erroneous view of the ethical character of the myths and legends and stories of the American Indian, to which reference has already been made. The lamentable fact that large portions of some collections of so-called American Indian tales and narratives consist for the greater part of coarse, obscene, and indelicate recitals in no wise shows that the coarse and the indelicate were the primary motives in the sacred lore of the people, but it does indicate the need of clean-minded collectors of these narratives, men [[51]]who know that the obscene can not be the dominant theme of the legendary lore of any people. Such men will take the necessary time and trouble to become sufficiently acquainted with the people whose literature they desire to record to gain the confidence and good will of the teachers and the wise men and women of the community, because these are the only persons capable of giving anything like a trustworthy recital of the legendary and the poetic narratives and the sacred lore of their people.

Should one attempt to acquire standard specimens of the literature of the white people of America by consulting corner loafers and their ilk, thereby obtaining a mass of coarse and obscene tales and stories wholly misrepresenting the living thought of the great mass of the white people of the country, the procedure would in no wise differ, seemingly, from the usual course pursued by those who claim to be collecting the literature of the American Indian people by consulting immature youth, agency interpreters, and other uninformed persons, rather than by gaining the confidence of and consulting the native priests and shamans and statesmen.

To claim that in American Indian communities their story-tellers, owing to alleged Christian influence, are editing the mythic tales and legends of their people into a higher moral tone is specious and is a sop thrown to religious prejudice for the purpose of giving color to the defense of an erroneous view of the moral tone of such myths and legends.

It is notorious that in this transition period of American Indian life the frontiersman and the trader on the borderland have not been in general of such moral character as to reflect the highest ideals in thought or action. Few genuine native legends and myths show any so-called “moral” revision from contact with “white people.” It is, of course, undeniable that the coarse, the rude, and the vulgar in word, thought, and deed are very real and ever-present elements in the life of every so-called Christian community; and they are present in every other community. But this fact does not at all argue that it is useful to collect and record in detail the narratives of these indecent aspects of life in any community, because the wholesome, the instructive, and the poetic and beautiful are, forsooth, far more difficult to obtain.