Coming back from Monterey, we decided to stop and spend a day in Jackson, CA. I had hoped to visit Chaw’se (aka Indian Grinding Rock State Park), but the weather didn’t cooperate, so I went to a local used bookstore instead. Among other things, I was able to find a short collection of Wintu traditional stories.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve long been interested in what I sometimes call fantastic ethnobiology – creatures which are part of the cultural knowledge of a society, but which do not exist in nature. Dragons would be an example of this, as would the Point Pleasant Mothman.
Unfortunately, while it’s extremely easy to find stories about such things from our own society, getting them from many other cultures is very difficult. A great many of the books on American Indian traditional narratives, for example, combine stories from all over the continent, selected according to some person’s aesthetic sense. Additionally, many of the narratives in collections of this type have been edited to make them more interesting to a European or American audience. A large part of the problem is that most of the older published collections were intended primarily as entertainment for Euro-American readers. Obviously, there’s nothing at all wrong with entertaining people. Books written for that purpose, however, tend not to be very useful for serious research.
What is needed is extensive collections of narratives, each from a single culture, with details about the informant from whom each narrative was collected. Ideally, such a work should include the informant’s own opinion about what type of story is being told; religious story, children’s story, history, strange-but-true, etc. In a perfect world, it would even be possible to identify which stories are definitely not told in a particular culture. Some information of this type has been recorded by anthropologists working with American Indians, but a vast amount has undoubtedly been lost in the five centuries since Columbus. And that causes me to wonder how much more irreplaceable information is still in danger of being lost forever when those few who still remember it die.
If you have not already seen it, check out Decembers Child by Thomas Blackburn. For the Chumash of Southern California, it is exactly what you are looking for.
Thanks. You’re right, December’s Child is an excellent resource for the Chumash. I discovered it when I took Dr. Blackburn’s Anthropology of Folklore class at Cal Poly Pomona a number of years ago.