"Manabozho": a Native American resurrection myth

As the canon of American literature changes, more Native American literature is finding its way into the standard anthologies. Indian tales present unique difficulties for most readers, in part because of genre. As the products of an oral culture, the tales "mean" in ways that more familiar forms such as essays and short stories do not. Often the tales are parts of cycles of sacred myth, vehicles for the most important truths of preliterate cultures. Chanted to music and accompanied by dance, the tales were inseparable from sacred ritual. They were committed to memory for generation after generation and were associated with the vitality of the tribe. In Homer's Greece the word for truth was aletheia, meaning "not forgotten." The remembered tales were the truth, and as long as the tales were told the tribe lived.

The difference between the "tribal ear" and the "existential eye" scanning the printed page (Lincoln 9) is enormous but may be bridged in part by understanding the symbol systems of Native American thought. Although great cultural differences exist among the Indian nations, they share a reliance on symbolic language as a crucial aspect of communication. Lame Deer, a Sioux medicine man, provides a description of the highly developed symbol systems playing a common role in tribal life:

But I am an Indian. I think about ordinary common things like this pot. The bubbling water comes from the rain cloud. It represents the sky. The fire comes from the sun which warms us all - men, animals, trees.... The steam is living breath.... We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the common-place are one. To you symbols arc just words, spoken or written in a book. To us they are part of nature, part of ourselves - the earth, the sun, the wind and the rain.... We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us the meaning. (Lincoln 26-27)

Much current criticism seeks to make Indian symbols accessible by establishing "semantic fields," or "typologies," that group analogous figures in the tales of various native cultures (Bierhorst 78-79). Brian Swann's Smoothing the Ground, for instance, contains essays tracing such figures as Coyote the trickster (Buller) or the Chinook Grizzly Woman (Hymes) through their permutations in the legends of several tribes. Valuable and interesting as these studies are, they raise difficult questions regarding the interpretation of symbolic matrices. Some schools of anthropology and psychology interpret myths as expressions of archaic levels of conscious development. Resurrection imagery, for instance, is thought to express anxiety about food-gathering. Such figures as Ceres and Billy Budd, whatever their historical context, are viewed as sublimated vegetation deities.

Other readings, including those of Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye, treat the universal archetypes as expressions of typical stages in the development of consciousness. This method seems more suited to literary analysis since it acknowledges the deep roots and ontogenic quality of the archetypes, but also recognizes the complexities of new meaning emerging as symbol systems evolve. If we are to understand myth in its fully exfoliated manifestations, we must view it in the broadest, most comparative ways. Modem readers may be better able to bridge the gap between themselves and Indian tribal consciousness by extending the typological method to include not only Native American analogues, but also the more famifiar figures and motifs of Western myth.

"Manabozho, or the Great Incarnation of the North; An Algic Legend"(1) is an Algonquin tale translated in the 1830s by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.(2) It later became the source for Longfellow's Indian epic, "Hiawatha."(3) The tale is compact - about 12 pages long - and is written in a spare, direct style, full of action and humor, good advice and observations about the natural world. For all its lightness and brilliance, the tale has the gravity of sacred literature: the strongly drawn demigods and monsters re-enact the sacrificial rite of death and resurrection.

Manabozho's story follows the pattern Paul Ricoeur calls the Adamic myth (167). The path begins in Eden, then drops into the fallen world where all sorts of trials and adventures occur.4 The hero must pass through the underworld before rising again and entering the promised Kingdom. The tale of Manabozho begins in the wasteland where the boy fives alone with his Grandmother. The pair are in exile, literally fallen, because Grandmother was thrown to Earth from her native planet, and her only child, a beautiful daughter, was kidnapped by the West Wind. The daughter died giving birth to Manabozho.

When the boy learns of his parentage he sets out to challenge his father, Ningabiun, the West Wind.5 As he strides across the continent seeking his father/adversary, he becomes a giant, covering miles with every step. The quest itself realizes his nature; by the time he reaches the western mountains he is a demigod. His father embraces him, but Manabozho only pretends to be reconciled. One evening he asks his father if there is anything he fears. Reluctantly, the West Wind admits that he is vulnerable to a certain sort of black rock. Like Superman's Kryptonite or Balder's mistletoe, the black rock makes the otherwise invincible god vulnerable to injury. Manabozho finds the black rock and then asks his father if he caused the mother's death. When the Wind replies "Yes,"