Reading Notes: Native American Hero Tales, Part B

Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away is so weird and cool. So many questions raised and never answered: Who is the Red Woman and why did she kill the twins' mother and impale her like a puppet? Thrown-Behind the Curtain (hereafter "Thrown-Behind") is every bit the prodigal hero as Hector or King Arthur--he's less sophisticated, but arguably way more cool. He slays a massive alligator whose organs are apparently in plain view, kills a witch with her own cauldron, and raises the dead on one occasion. Because he feels like it. This culminates into the legendary Thunder-Bird itself giving Thrown-Behind the task of killing a giant otter that has been threatening its eggs.

Dirty-Boy was more of a classic example of mythology, revolving around two gods, Sun and Star, who disguise themselves and infiltrate an Okanagon village. I especially loved the descriptions the writer gives for Sun and Star. Star is "a woman ... wearing a long skin dress covered with star pendants, with bright stars in her hair," while Sun is a handsome man, and "his garments and hair were decorated with bright suns." Up to this point, Sun and Star have been a haggard old woman and a dirty, scrawny young man respectively, so interestingly, this story is like an Okanagon version of Beauty and the Beast.

I'm hurting for more portfolio stories, so I need to pick one of the above stories to rewrite. Dirty-Boy would be interesting if the two sisters--who sort of function as point of view characters--were plain or even ugly instead of beautiful. The story involves the young men of the village pursuing them. But what if they weren't beautiful on the outside? A simple change, not as big a reversal as the other two stories in my portfolio right now, but it would alter the story in a big way. Instead of being pursued, the sisters--one or both of them--would be lonely. Sun's disguise of a "dirty, sore-eyed boy," and Star's disguise of "a very old woman in ragged clothes," would be off-putting to other villagers, but perhaps not to a girl (or girls) who feels just as cast aside. Ultimately, the pair could take the main character(s) up to the sky, with an opportunity to include the story's ending with stardust: "when the liquid ran down over [the sister's] hair and body, lines of sparkling small stars formed on her ... the liquid ran to the chief's lodge, forming a path, as of gold-dust."

"Glitter" on Pixabay

Source: Tales of the North American Indian by Stith Thompson