Native American Folklore

The folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America is one of the oldest continuous storytelling traditions on the continent. Long before any European ship appeared in the western Atlantic, the nations of what is now Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico had developed a vast and interwoven body of story, song, ritual, and belief, in which the Coyote and the Raven play tricks on each other and on the world, in which the Thunderbird makes the thunder with its wings, in which the sacred numbers four and seven give shape to the calendar and the cosmos, and in which the medicine bundle holds the spiritual power of a person or a people. This section offers an introduction to that inheritance: the major regional cycles, the recurring figures, the ritual practices, and the modern voices that continue to retell the older stories in new forms.

The older stories are not a single body but a federation of many, each tied to a particular landscape and a particular language. Yet certain figures and themes cross the boundaries from one nation to another, and certain stories can be traced across the continent in related forms. The trickster, in particular, takes the same basic shape in many traditions — Coyote in the Southwest and the Plains, Raven in the Pacific Northwest, Iktomi in the Northern Plains, Nanabush in the Great Lakes — and the same tales of stealing fire or stealing the sun appear in different versions across the continent.

The Major Regional Cycles

The traditions of the American Southwest are some of the most thoroughly documented. The Navajo, or Diné, who live in the Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, have preserved a body of origin stories in which the Holy People emerged from a series of underworlds into the present world, the Fifth World. The principal ceremony that keeps this story alive is the Nightway, a nine-day healing ritual in which the chant of the singer calls the old world back into being. The story of Changing Woman, the first woman of the Fifth World, is one of the great creation narratives of the continent. The Coyote trickster of the Navajo tradition is called Mą’ii, and the cycle of stories in which he steals fire, kills the monsters, and is killed and resurrected is one of the deepest in the region. The Diné also kept the art of sand-painting, in which the singer and his helpers construct a temporary picture of the Holy People on the ground with crushed coloured minerals, the patient sits in the middle, and the sand is then erased before sundown.

The Hopi of northern Arizona kept their cosmology in a different form. The Hopi cycle of the Kachina is a body of stories about the spirits of the ancestors and the natural world, who visit the villages in the winter and are danced out in the great ceremonies. The kachina masks, carved from cottonwood root, are the visible form of these spirits. The Hopi also kept the tradition of the Emergence, the long journey from the underworld to the present world, and the related story of the destruction of the previous worlds by flood and fire.

The Pueblo tradition more broadly — the Zuni, the Acoma, the Laguna — kept a rich body of story in which the Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player, is the figure of fertility, music, and mischief. The Apache of the Southwest kept a tradition closer to that of the Plains nations, with trickster stories of Coyote and a deep cycle of the culture hero Child-of-the-Water, who gave the people their medicine.

The Plains tradition is the body of stories told by the Lakota (Sioux), the Blackfeet, the Crow, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Kiowa, and the other nations of the Great Plains. The principal trickster of the northern Plains is Iktomi, the spider, who is both a teacher and a fool. The principal trickster of the western and southern Plains is Coyote, whose adventures are sometimes heroic, sometimes disastrous, and almost always funny. The great ritual of the Plains nations is the Sun Dance, the summer ceremony in which the people come together to renew the world and to give thanks for the gift of life. The vision quest, in which a young person goes out alone to a high place and fasts until a spirit comes to them in a dream, is the foundational ritual of personal power.

The nations of the Eastern Woodlands — the Cherokee, the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), the Cree, the Ojibwe, the Algonquin, the Abenaki, the Lenape, the Shawnee — kept traditions that combined the trickster tales of the older North with a deep interest in the cycles of agriculture, the calendar of the corn, beans, and squash, and the longhouse ceremonies of the great councils. The Iroquois Great Law of Peace, the political and moral foundation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, is one of the great constitutional documents of the indigenous Americas and a foundation of the modern American tradition of federalism. The Cherokee kept a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the 1820s, one of the first indigenous writing systems of the Americas. The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes kept a deep tradition of the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society, whose ceremonies are still performed in the northern communities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

The Pacific Northwest — the Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian, the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Nuxalk, the Chinook, the Coast Salish — kept a tradition in which lineage, family, and clan were central. The totem pole, the great carved cedar column that stands before the clan house of a chief, is the visual record of a family’s history. The trickster of the North is Raven, the great black bird who stole the sun, who freed the people from beneath a clamshell. The great beings of the North are the Thunderbird, whose wingbeats cause the thunder, and the Killer Whale, who carries the souls of the drowned chiefs. The potlatch, the great winter feast at which a chief gives away his wealth to confirm his rank, is the social ritual of the North and one of the great counter-images to the European cult of accumulation.

The Arctic — the Inuit of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and the Russian Chukotka — kept a tradition in which the great beings are Sedna, the sea goddess whose fingers are the seals, and the Moon Man, who keeps the souls of the dead in the sky. The great stories are the ones of survival in the deep cold, of sea-mammal hunting, of the dangerous journey home, and of the long winter night. The shamans of the Arctic kept a tradition of drumming and spirit travel in which the shaman’s soul could leave the body and fly to the world of the spirits to find game or to cure the sick.

The Trickster Cycle

The trickster is the central figure of the older North American folk tradition. The Coyote of the Southwest and the Plains is a small, sly, hungry animal, capable of great cunning and great foolishness. In one cycle of stories, he is the one who steals fire from the people who are hoarding it and gives it to the human beings, at the cost of being burned and losing his beautiful fur. In another cycle, he is the one who steals the sun, which the people are keeping in a box, and who hides it until the people agree to share it. In another, he is killed by his own children, cut into pieces, and resurrected by the careful work of his sister or his wife.

The Coyote of the Navajo, the Hopi, the Zuni, the Crow, and the other nations is not the same character from one story to the next, but the same basic character across many stories. He is a being of immense mythic importance, and the trickster cycle is one of the great literary bodies of the Americas. Among the principal modern collections of Coyote stories are those of Lame Deer (John Fire Lame Deer), the Lakota medicine man whose stories were recorded by Richard Erdoes in the 1970s, and Hyemeyohsts Storm, whose Seven Arrows (1972) is one of the foundational modern retellings of the Plains tradition. The Coyote of the American Southwest has clear parallels in the Anansi of West Africa and in the Loki of Norse myth, all of them figures of cleverness, misrule, and the great joke of the cosmos.

The Thunderbird and the Sky Beings

The Thunderbird is the great sky being of the older North American tradition. He is a giant bird whose wingbeats cause the thunder and whose eyes flash the lightning, and he is present in some form in nearly every indigenous nation of the continent. The Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the other nations of the Pacific Northwest carved his image on the great totems of the cedar houses and painted it on the transformation masks of the great winter ceremonies. The Algonquian-speaking nations of the Great Lakes and the Northeast had a Thunderbird tradition of their own, in which the great bird fought the Underwater Panther in the great cosmic battle between the sky and the depths. The Navajo, who do not normally have a great bird of this kind, have a related figure, Atósí, who is the mother of the Holy People and the bringer of the great flood.

The Thunderbird of North America is the great parallel of the Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica, the feathered serpent who brings the rain and the morning star. He is also a parallel of the European dragon, the great flying being of the older Eurasian tradition. The Thunderbird legends of North America and the dragon legends of Europe are not historically related, but they share the basic image of the great flying being, and the modern American cryptid tradition, from the Mothman to the Thunderbird sightings of the modern UFO era, draws on the older image.

The Sacred Numbers and the Calendar

The indigenous traditions of North America place a deep emphasis on the sacred numbers. The number four is the most widely distributed — the four directions, the four winds, the four colours, the four sacred mountains, the four great rivers — and the number seven, while less universal, is also widely present, especially in the Navajo, the Apache, the Lakota, and the Pueblo traditions, where the seven directions (four on the ground, three in the air) structure the ceremony. The number four is also the basis of the medicine wheel, the great circular diagram that organises the directions, the seasons, the stages of life, the colours, and the sacred plants.

The calendar of the indigenous Americas is in nearly every case a lunar calendar, organised by the cycle of the moon, the appearance of the morning star, the migration of the game animals, and the flowering of the sacred plants. The great ceremonies of the year are tied to the calendar: the Sun Dance in midsummer, the Green Corn Dance in late summer, the winter ceremonies in the depth of the cold, the spring ceremonies at the time of the first thunder. The calendar is not a separate institution but is woven into the story, the song, the dance, and the ritual.

The Medicine Bundle and Spiritual Power

A central concept in the older North American traditions is the idea of medicine, not as the modern English word for the doctor’s prescription, but as the indigenous word for spiritual power. To have medicine is to have a connection to the spirit world. The medicine of a person or a people is held in the medicine bundle, a personal collection of sacred objects wrapped in hide or cloth, kept in a special place, and unwrapped only for ceremony. The medicine bundle of a chief can include the bones of an ancestor, a sacred feather, a polished stone, a bit of a sacred plant, and a great many other things, each with its own song and its own story.

The sweat lodge is the principal place of purification in many traditions. It is a small dome of willow branches, covered with hides or blankets, in which heated stones are placed in a central pit and water is poured over them to make the steam. The shaman is the person in the community who has the gift of travelling between the worlds. The shaman can heal the sick by retrieving a lost soul, can predict the future by reading the signs, and can defend the people against witchcraft by the force of his or her power.

The Oral Storytelling Style

The older North American stories were not told in a vacuum. They were told in the longhouse in winter, in the kiva in summer, on the trail, by the fire, at the time of the ceremonies. The style of telling was particular to the tradition. In the Navajo, the style is careful, slow, and respectful, with much attention to the small details of the world. In the Coyote stories of the Southwest, the style is often comic, with the trickster outwitting himself as often as he outwits others. In the Raven stories of the Pacific Northwest, the style is the style of the great feast, with much attention to the rank and the lineage of the characters.

The written tradition came later, and the transcription of the older stories, by writers like Natalie Curtis (The Indians’ Book, 1907), John Bierhorst, and Aileen Garland, has had to wrestle with the question of how to put the spoken word on the page. The most important modern collections are those in which the indigenous teller is named and credited, and in which the words on the page are recognised as the storyteller’s choice rather than the folklorist’s transcription.

The Modern Retellings

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen a flowering of Native American literature. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa writer born in 1934, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, a novel in which the older Kiowa and Navajo ceremonies shape the rhythm of the narrative. Louise Erdrich, an Ojibwe writer born in 1954, has built a fictional universe around a North Dakota reservation, drawing on the Ojibwe tradition of the trickster Nanabush; her novel The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo writer born in 1948, has drawn on the Pueblo tradition of the Emergence in novels such as Ceremony (1977) and the long poem Almanac of the Dead (1991).

The trickster tradition has been carried into the modern era in the work of writers like Stephen Graham Jones, a Blackfeet writer born in 1972, who has built a body of horror fiction around the Thunderbird and the older figures of the Blackfeet world. Tommy Orange, a Cheyenne and Arapaho writer, made a sensation with his first novel There There (2018), in which the older ceremonial life of the Plains meets the urban Indian life of Oakland, California.

In the visual arts, the modern tradition is alive in the work of Allan Houser (Apache, 1914–1994), one of the founding figures of the Studio Style of American Indian art; of R.C. Gorman (Navajo, 1931–2005), the great painter of the Navajo figure; of Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005); and of Wendy Red Star (Crow, born 1981), who works in photography and installation. The tradition of the kachina doll in the Southwest, the totem pole in the Pacific Northwest, the silver and turquoise jewellery of the Navajo and the Zuni, the beadwork of the Plains, the porcupine quillwork of the Woodlands — all of these are part of the modern folk tradition, and all of them are connected to the older stories.

The Stories and the Landscape

A defining feature of the older North American tradition is the relationship between the story and the landscape. A story is told about a particular mountain, a particular river, a particular cave or hot spring, and the landscape itself is part of the telling. The four sacred mountains of the Navajo — Blanca Peak in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, and Hesperus Peak in Colorado — are the boundaries of the Navajo world and the pillars of the story. The Black Hills of South Dakota are the sacred centre of the Lakota, and the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, who brought the sacred pipe, is a story of that specific place. The great petroglyphs of the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, the Writing-on-Stone in Alberta, the Peterborough Petroglyphs in Ontario, and the Tongue River in Montana are all places where the older stories can be read on the land itself.

The relationship to land has been at the centre of the modern indigenous political movement. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, drew on the older stories in its campaigns for the Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) and the occupation of Wounded Knee (1973). The Standing Rock protest of 2016–2017, in which thousands of indigenous and non-indigenous people gathered to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, drew on the older story of the sacred relationship to water, and the Water Protectors at Standing Rock became a national symbol of the continuing power of the older stories.

Native American Folklore

In this section

Coyote Trickster Tales

Thunderbird Legends