For Native Americans, the telling of stories passed down from generation to generation remained their primary form of wisdom communication even after the written word had spread across the globe. Native American oral storytelling traditions allowed tribes to transmit their mythological, spiritual and historical understandings of themselves and the worlds they inhabited to their children and their children’s children. This all but guaranteed that members of each individual Indian nation would never forget their roots or lose sight of important knowledge that would allow them to continue to exist in harmony and cooperation with the natural world. In order to make this critical information memorable, Native Americans translated practical prescriptions along with subtle and sophisticated ideas about the Great Mystery of life and existence into allegories filled with heroes and villains, comedic twists and dramatic encounters and lessons learned the hard way through suffering and eventual transcendence.
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What is important to realize is that Indian peoples had a different understanding of dimensional travel than western anthropologists and self-styled “Indian experts.” For Native Americans, alternate dimensions where animals had human-like qualities and the wise spirits of dead ancestors resided after leaving the earthly realm were real places. In fact they were more real than this world, which was just a shadow of these transcendent realms. The western, scientific approach, however, was to dismiss the shamans as essentially con men, and to see Native American storytelling as always and only metaphorical and allegorical.
But Native peoples did not recognize strict boundaries between the real and the allegorical. For them, the universe was a complex and mysterious place and the stories they told used the spiritual world as a foundation and a background for putting their spiritual and metaphysical knowledge into a more personalized, orally transmittable form. While the Bible is filled with stories that can be examined and understood as literature, it is also taken as a source of true and real wisdom and revealed knowledge by Christians - and so it is as well for Native Americans and the shamanic dimensions. |
Links to Select Native Oral Accounts of the Battle
Red Horse (Sioux) Wooden Leg (Cheyenne) One Bull (Sioux) Spotted Horn Bull (Sioux) Black Elk (Sioux) Gall (Sioux) Sitting Bull (Sioux) Standing Bear (Sioux) White Cow Bull (Lakota) Crazy Horse (Sioux) Curly (Crow) White Man Runs Him (Crow) Red Bear (Arikara) Arikara Scouts Moving Robe Woman (Sioux) Kate Bighead (Cheyenne) Pretty Shield (Crow) |
Here are some short videos to introduce you to the place of Oral Tradition in Native cultures.
This first one is about "tradition" more than history but still provides a glimpse into the importance of oral transmission of knowledge and culture.
This first one is about "tradition" more than history but still provides a glimpse into the importance of oral transmission of knowledge and culture.
This second video is a Ted Talk about more recent historical events for tribal members and the importance of oral history as a method of transmission of familial and cultural identity. Think about the place oral history played in understanding one's cultural past. |