Native American Mythology

Native North American mythology is the collective name for the oral traditions of hundreds of nations, each reaching back millennia, with no single system among them: the Haida and Tlingit of the rainforest coast tell of Raven stealing the light, the Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes tell Nanabozho stories after the snow falls, the Lakota of the Plains pray to Wakan Tanka through the sacred pipe, and the Hopi of the southwestern mesas receive the kachinas in their kivas. Each tradition stands on its own, yet certain motifs run across the continent: animals diving for soil to create the world, a great turtle bearing the land, a vast bird whose wingbeats are thunder, and tricksters who bless and blunder in the same breath.

These traditions have no single scripture. Their vessels are winter-night storytelling, song and dance in ceremony, and the memory of keepers passing their charge down the generations. Most written records come from ethnography since the nineteenth century: Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (1839), Swanton's Haida and Tlingit texts, the Lakota holy men's accounts recorded by Walker at Pine Ridge, and Black Elk's testimony in Brown's The Sacred Pipe, alongside Native authors writing from within, such as the Tuscarora historian David Cusick and the Ojibwe scholar Basil Johnston. Any page of text is a single dipper drawn from moving water.

Everything gathered here belongs to living religions. The Sun Dance and the kachina ceremonies are still held, the birth of a white buffalo calf is still an event, and figures like the wendigo and the skin-walker remain grave subjects not spoken of lightly in their communities, far removed from the monsters of popular culture. This collection puts respect and accuracy first, naming the specific nation each entry comes from.