American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always songs) of the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived. As a result, Native American oral literature is quite diverse.
Tribes maintained their own religions — worshiping gods, animals, plants, or sacred persons.
Systems of government ranged from democracies to councils of elders to theocracies.
Indian stories, for example, glow with reverence for nature as a spiritual as well as physical mother.
Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics, chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and legendary histories.
In one well-known creation story, told with variations among many tribes, a turtle holds up the world. In a Cheyenne version, the creator, Maheo, has four chances to fashion the world from a watery universe. He sends four water birds diving to try to bring up earth from the bottom. The snow goose, loon, and mallard soar high into the sky and sweep down in a dive, but cannot reach bottom; but the little coot, who cannot fly, succeeds in bringing up some mud in his bill. Only one creature, humble Grandmother Turtle, is the right shape to support the mud world Maheo shapes on her shell — hence the Indian name for America, “Turtle Island.”
The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous: There are lullabies, war chants, love songs..
A Chippewa song runs:
A loon I thought it was
But it was
My love’s
splashing oar.
The Indian contribution to America is greater than is often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday
American English include “canoe,” “tobacco,” “potato,” “moccasin,” “moose,” “persimmon,” “raccoon,” “tomahawk,” and “totem.”
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