Reading Notes, Marriage Tales: Part A

The first story in this series of marriage tales was called "The Piqued Buffalo-Wire".  This story was very odd in my opinion and a little hard to follow.  Essentially, a man took advantage of a female cow and later she bore a human son.  The son then went on a quest to find his father, which he eventually did.  When the son brought the man back to his cow mother, she turned into a woman and they lived happily for quite some time.  That was until the husband struck the wife with fire and her and her son ran away.  The father then went on a quest to find them.  He had to correctly identify his son four times in order to win them back.  He guess incorrectly on the fourth guess and was trampled to death by the herd of cows.  However a piece of his bone was recovered and with the use of a sweat lodge he was restored to life, and he, his wife, and his son lived happily and started their own native tribes.

The next story called "Bear-Woman and "Deer-Woman" was also interesting.  The Bear ate the deer and brought the head back to the deer's children.  The children immediately knew that is was their mother's head and in return smothered the bears children to death with smoke.  They then ran away from the bear and crossed the river by a crane's neck.  When the bear followed, the crane dropped its neck halfway across and the bear fell to her death.

Out of the remaining stories in this series, I found "The Woman Stolen by Killer Whales" to be my favorite.  I could see myself retelling this story for my story this week. 

Killer Whale. Web Source. 

I found all of the stories to be very dark, and involving a lot of animals, ruthless killing, and interactions between humans/animals.  A lot of the other units have involved animals and humans interacting with each other, but not to this extent.  On multiple occasions, the stories involved intimacy between them which I found very odd. 

Bibliography: Native American Marriage Tales from the book "Tales of North American Indians" by Stith Thompson. Read for yourself here!