Folk Tales of the Iroquois — Part 1 (The Origin of Stories · Bald Eagle Sends Mud Turtle Around the World · Boy Rescued by a Bear · Why the Chipmunk Has the Black Stripe on His Back)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Four Seneca tales of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), collected by Jeremiah Curtin and Erminnie A. Smith, heard in the collectors' English exactly as printed. In The Origin of Stories, told by Henry Jacob, the orphan Poyeshaon — taken in and raised by an old woman who finds him in the woods — hunts birds for her table until, mending an arrow in a clearing, he hears a voice ask, "Shall I tell you stories?": a great round stone, which, when the whole village gathers with meat and bread, tells of a world before this one — and so storytelling itself begins. In Bald Eagle Sends Mud Turtle Around the World, the chief of the birds orders Mud Turtle to travel around the world and learn how many kinds of people there are and what they do, and Turtle reports on peoples who gather nuts, who live by corn and fish, and who build canoes and set traps — until Bald Eagle sends him out a second time to watch one settlement more closely. In Boy Rescued by a Bear, told by a grandson of Cornplanter from the Cattaraugus Reservation, a little boy lost below a cliff is found by a mother bear, who takes him to her den and raises him with her two cubs, carrying him the winter through until men from the village, tracking a bear, discover the child rhyming and playing with the cubs. And in Why the Chipmunk Has the Black Stripe on His Back, Mouse — the chipmunk — flees a quarrelsome Bear, hides beneath a fallen tree, and squeezes out so close under his great paw, again and again, that the paw's light touch leaves the black stripe her grandchildren carry to this day. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Imperial Violin Masquerade, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:39 The Origin of Stories
15:31 Bald Eagle Sends Mud Turtle Around the World
22:54 Boy Rescued by a Bear
24:50 Why the Chipmunk Has the Black Stripe on His Back
The remaining tales of these collections are not read in this part. Held for the owner's ruling by name: The Friendship of an Otter · The Old Man's Lessons to His Nephew · How the Bear Lost His Tail · Origin of the Constellations · Origin of Wampum · the creation narratives (The Creation of Men · The Creation of Man · A Genesis Tradition · A Tale of the Sky World). Ceremonial and sacred material in these collections — the Thanksgiving Address liturgy, the cosmology and medicine-society material — is held by class and is not read. Excluded by name: The Man-Eating Wife, the Little Old Woman and the Morning Star · Coon Deceives Crawfish · The Crawfish and the Raccoon · The Fox and the Rabbit · The Race Between the Turtle and the Bear · The Snake with Two Heads · Infant Nursed by Bears · Origin of Tobacco. Standing on the bench for Part 2: The Boy Who Learned the Songs of Birds · The Pigmies and the Greedy Hunters. No claim of completeness for these collections is made.
From Jeremiah Curtin's Seneca Indian Myths (1923) and Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths, with J. N. B. Hewitt (1918), and Erminnie A. Smith's Myths of the Iroquois (1883) — all public domain, the collectors' English as printed; these are their texts, not new translations. Narrated by Morgana. Theme: Imperial Violin Masquerade.
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