Folk Tales of the Pawnee — Part 1 (The Ghost Wife · The Ghost Bride · The Boy Who Saw A-ti'-us · How the Deer Lost His Gall · Yellow Fox · Coyote and Bear · Coyote and Prairie-Chicken · How Rabbit Lost His Tail · The White and the Black Rats)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Nine tales of the Pawnee people — the Chaui, Kitkehahki, Pitahauirat and Skidi bands, as the books name them. From George Bird Grinnell's Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales (1889): in The Ghost Wife, a dead wife agrees to return to her husband and child if no one lifts the curtain for four days; in The Ghost Bride, a young man finds the girl he loved waiting in the emptied village, and must not speak her name; in The Boy Who Saw A-ti'-us, two swans carry a starving boy through the famine winter to the lodge of A-ti'-us, and he comes back with the buffalo; in How the Deer Lost His Gall, a race on the prairie is run for a wager of galls; and in Yellow Fox, a boy lost in a blizzard is led home by a buffalo bull singing the Father's song. From George A. Dorsey's The Pawnee: Mythology (1906), four Coyote tales told by Skidi tellers: Coyote bluffs Bear out of a fine plum-wood bow; Coyote's song-duel of poisons names only Prairie-Chicken's favourite foods; Rabbit leaves his tail on a willow limb and Turtle sets it right; and Magpie's songs give the White Rat earth-nuts, the Black Rat artichokes, and the people both. The episode opens and closes with its theme, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Ghost Wife
4:41 The Ghost Bride
9:26 The Boy Who Saw A-ti'-us
22:55 How the Deer Lost His Gall
24:33 Yellow Fox
27:10 Coyote and Bear
29:51 Coyote and Prairie-Chicken
32:05 How Rabbit Lost His Tail
34:18 The White and the Black Rats
Much of both books is not read on this shelf. Held for the owner's ruling by name: Ti-ke-wa-kush, the Man Who Called the Buffalo (the book itself calls it a true and sacred story) · Turtle's War Party · Coyote and the Dancing Turkeys · Coyote and the Turkeys Roll Down the Hill · Coyote and the Artichoke. Excluded by name after a full reading: The Boy Who Was Sacrificed · Pa-hu-ka'-tawa · A Story of Faith · The Bear Man · The Snake Brother · O're-ka-rahr · The Dun Horse · the eight Hero Stories as a section · Coyote Tales Nos. 117–121, 123–128, 130, 131, 140, 142–144 and 148 in Dorsey. The Morning Star, sacrifice and bundle material found in both books is excluded as a class and is never read here. No claim of completeness for either book is made.
From Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales by George Bird Grinnell (New York, 1889) and The Pawnee: Mythology (Part I) by George A. Dorsey (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1906), both public domain — the nine tales complete, in book order within each source, in the collectors' printed English. Dorsey's tellers: White-Eagle, Young-Bull and Woman-Yellow-Corn, of the Skidi; his preface credits James R. Murie. Narrated by Mira. Theme: Bandoneo n Street Romance.
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