Folklore of Native America

                      Native American Folklore

       Native American folklore is a part of human culture since the evolution of the earth for Native American Indian tribes. Traditional Native American narrative types are fiction, tales, legends, myths and personal narratives. The section Native American world and worldview deals with the life, culture and myths of the Native American tribes in the Americas. The tribes here being talked about are Cherokee, Eskimo ,Gros ventre ,Seneca and Yupik. We have here the folktales of these tribes and the point of views of the anthologist Mc Michael, Karl Kroeber and John Miles and these folktales are associated with the creation of the world how the earth came into existence. Some other representative examples of the folklore tradition of major native North American geographic and cultural areas are northeast ,southeast ,and southwest, California, plains, northwest, sub-arctic and arctic. The tales reflect the environment , cultural adaptation of the Native American worldview.

        The origin of folktales compared to native American world and world view is different depending upon the ‘origin’ and ‘content’ like the ‘Hopi’ established a village culture, the narrative focuses on a pair of themes the creation of life forms by a pair of female deities and the introduction of strife into the world of spider woman, raven befriends the human race, the first fire plays an important role in the formation of the earth in the origin myths of all cultures ,fire is a symbol of technology. The Cherokee narrative symbolises the function of exploring how the animals who set about to obtain fire acquired their distinctive attributes .It is considered that at the beginning of the world it was cold, and thunder put up lighting and put fire into the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree that grew on an island contrasting it with some Indian storytelling people believe in ‘Dhrama’ a part of Indian folklore has been variously translated as duty, faith ,righteousness, sacred law, justice, morality and so on. According to one school of Hinduism dharma is an obligatory duty as prescribed by the Vedas to be performed by an individual in accordance with the rules prescribed for the caste to which he or she belongs and also it is believed that the time period in which we are living in is Kal-Yuga and the period before was Sat-Yuga this belief is important in itself like the oral tradition of native American Indians. The folktales told by people are inter-related in every cultural folklore because American Indians existed without written language for many generations unlike many tribes in the world, their culture was dependent on an oral tradition for continuity and preservation, no wonder they spent many hours perfecting the art of oral communication and learning methods .Also, folklore gave native American group in order to help them achieve federal tribal recognition ,the stories gives a tradition of telling. Storytelling as storytellers gave native American an identity about their culture and language. The storytelling of the Native Americans is the voices of the spirit and soul, it not only gives the stories to us but the tradition of the telling , it gives us their way of expressing through story telling.

            We acknowledge and learn through the native speakers, they speak with a pride that is humility with a sense of self that holds within all the relations. Thus, we can hear the form in stories which is -the soul of the people. The question that arises is how did these folklore emerge? The answer would be it is just because of the spoken words we view as alive because they carry breath, sound vibrations and spirits, but there are not people all the time who are the speakers but the environment also plays a big role,willows whisper, rain roar ,trees talk , hill humans, and spirits speak which develops acute awareness, listening to all these languages which also contributes to the humanising effect considering the relation on oneness between nature and the Native American themselves.

“ Music enveloped the Indian's individual and social life like an atmosphere"

                                 -Alice Cunningham Fletcher

       Songs are not sung for enjoyment but also for storytelling .The oral form of storytelling/folklore is not confined with story tellers of native America but folklore is expanded on a large scale and celebrated with different forms, there are various methods in which folklore is enjoyed among the people and in every culture ,they are celebrated as songs, poems, stories etc. Taking an example of india itself here folklores/folktales are celebrated in the form of Gazals, chorus song in epic documentary/movie and Ragini a popular form of story telling and singing still celebrated in Haryana. Fletcher compares music with language, pointing out that the speech of so-called savage tribes is certainly organised and cultivated, in the same manner music was also organised, but the songs were not yet developed.

      "On the Cattaraugus reservation, it was part of a child's initial training to learn why the bear lost its tail, why the chipmunk has a striped back, and why meteors flash in the sky"

                                                    Arthur C. Parker

             In seneca myths and folk tales, he discusses their basic themes and components before going on to relate more than seventy of them that he had heard as a boy. He describes the magical senecan world populated by unseen good and evil spirits ghosts and beings capable of transformation, which includes creation myths, folktales ,tales of love and marriage and stories about cannibals, pygmies, giants, witches, talking animals .The collection of seneca folk-tales were the hearing of the wise old man, related tales of the mysterious past called kakaa or gakaa special young men who dug up the ground to search for the buried ”old- time folks".

            With the moving of the present time period the lore are losing/ oral story telling their importance and identity ,which causes the contemporary information about human behaviour ,its effects and its existence and its effects on social structure is sometimes hard to gather and the effect of that is that too much information in the heads of the contemporary world with so many documentary records one hardly takes some time out to understand the data(origin of folklore) .When we try to understand earlier societies and their cultural perspective the task is equally difficult because the available data is scarce .Even the descendents are puzzled about their own past , history and identity perhaps we may disagree with the idea of the information received by our ancestors were true may be they have not thought about it and behaved in the same manner to gather the right information as we do now .When the problem of ” Doing history” is shifted from societies which involves all the paper work to be pen down the contemporary or past of the societies the only thing is left is the oral traditions among their descendants,archaeologists are called to the arena and anthropologist work to create the model of the past that make some sense of the oral past, even folklorists ,battles with the problems of establishing the historical background of traditional belief in their representative field of work. Thus, we can say that with changing time period the origin of native american folklore is losing its importance the reconstruction of native american folklore should be acknowledged by the literary scholars so that people can get a worldview of their history , culture and tradition without indulging in the practise of receiving wrong information which will affect the whole historical identity and right information should be passed to the new generation to keep “folklore alive”