Part two of the shelf. Three more tales from Algic Researches (New York, 1839), Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's landmark collection of Ojibwe and other Algonquian oral tradition — a record made with his wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800–1842), whose own Ojibwe family's stories stand behind many of its pages — read here in the English of the 1839 edition, as printed, in the order of the volumes. In The Celestial Sisters, a Shawnee tale, Waupee the White Hawk finds a ring worn in a prairie where no path leads, and watches twelve sisters come down from the sky in a basket to dance; he wins the youngest for his bride, loses her to the stars, and follows her up at last on a white hawk's feather. In Sheem, or The Forsaken Boy, a dying father charges his children never to forsake their youngest brother; the charge is broken, and the forsaken boy, kept alive by the kindness of wolves, is found by his brother in the act of becoming one. And in The Two Jeebi-Ug, or A Trial of Feeling, two pale strangers out of the winter forest are taken into a hunter's lodge and fed through the season — and only at their parting say who they are, and what their one strange rudeness at his table was sent to prove. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Blazing Fire, heard also briefly between the stories.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
2:49 The Celestial Sisters
13:11 Sheem, or The Forsaken Boy
25:53 The Two Jeebi-Ug, or A Trial of Feeling
In The Celestial Sisters the passage notes of the screen stand as printed: the sisters, striking in jest at a stump, kill the mice that run out of it, in a single sentence; and hunting, the hero's livelihood, runs through the tale in summary — the Star father's present is a tail, a foot or a wing of each kind of bird and animal the hunter kills. Sheem is read whole as printed; Schoolcraft's bracketed editorial moral, printed after the tale, is apparatus and is not read. Five narratives of the collection are held for a ruling — the sacred and ceremonial tales Iadilla and Mon-Daw-Min, Leelinau, Git-Chee-Gau-Zinee and Paradise Opened to the Indians — and three more (Iosco, Wassamo and The Grave Light) were not cleared for this build; twenty-four further tales are not read on this shelf, each excluded by name after a full reading. Three tales passed the screen and stand on the bench for later parts of this shelf. The shelf is billed as what it is — Ojibwe and Algonquian tales in Schoolcraft's literary retellings of 1839, crediting Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft — and no claim of completeness for the collection is made.
From Algic Researches by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1839), public domain — The Celestial Sisters and Sheem from the first volume, The Two Jeebi-Ug from the second, complete and in the order read here, in the English of the original edition, not a new translation. Narrated by Magnolia. Theme: Blazing Fire.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud. Season 153, Episode 2.
