This book is mostly about sex and farts. In all their austere nobility, Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz have plumbed the depths of American Indian fart jokes and bawdy fireside tales and have compiled them into an easily accessible form, so all the world’s people who can read English good can partake of true American Indian culture. And, because I am actually a ten year old in my head, I thought it was hilarious.
I suppose it’s impossible to know how honestly these stories reflect pre-colonized Native American culture. It’s like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (about which I know absolutely nothing; just sayin). Does your act of observation change the subject, and thus skew the result? Does the lonesome tree make a noise when it falls? Does a bear crap in the woods? (A lot of science happens in the forest, apparently. ) Added to all that, I have to consider the biases of the editors. So I’m not sure if what I’m reading is truly a cross section of Native American myth, as it stood in their culture, or if it’s merely a modern interpretation of their stories. I’ll assume the editors have done their duty in scholarship, and these are true distillations, mostly because I don’t have the schooling to claim otherwise, though I found their retelling lacking at points in authentic flavor.
Even so, the more I read other cultures’ myths, the more I’m struck by the similarities between peoples. The same characters show up on different continents, in stories sung by warring or impossibly distant tribes, in other languages, and they do the same things. With some variation, of course, and different names, but it’s like reading accounts of the same historical event from different perspectives, in the same way you and I would talk differently about a person we both knew.
There’s a trickster god in most pantheons, but he’s especially important in Native American and African stories (though of course Loki and Hermes make a decent showing as well). He’s a god of paradoxes. The trickster is generally a fool, and he performs the duties of his office well. He cracks jokes, bumbles around, and humbles the wise. He generally takes himself very seriously; he’s greedy, selfish, and sometimes intensely powerful. In these stories, the trickster—usually Coyote or Raven—creates the world and then travels it and invents the institutions we know of now like the sun and moon, the tides, fog on the sea, etc. But he’s also a lecherous moron, as proven by a third of this book devoted to Coyote tricking ladies into bed.
These stories are light, for the most part, but not flippant. They’re warm and simple, like family in-jokes. Many have a morality tales sort of sub-text, but they usually don’t preach; they’re full of enjoyment in simple pleasures and lessons without dumbing down human experience to represent “noble savages.” This is hard to do, and Erdoes and Ortiz have done it well.
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