American Indians: Folk Tales and Legends. - book review

Edited by Keith Cunningham. London: Wordsworth Editions in association with the Folklore Society, 2001. 440 pp. 3.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 1-84022-505-X

This is one of the last of the series that the Folklore Society published in association with Wordsworth Editions, and probably the most substantial. The editor/compiler, Keith Cunningham, has spent a large part of his professional life working with Hopi, Navajo and Zuni people, and has published extensively on Native American belief-cultures and narrative-cultures. This volume consists of two hundred and seventy-four stories he has selected from the very large number of Native American stories published in the Journal of American Folklore between 1888 and 1940, a previously unpublished Zuni myth he and his wife Kathy collected in the field, and a Navajo clan origin story collected by one of his students.

The years 1888-1940, Cunningham explains, "was a period of time, when the American national consciousness began to see what had been lost and what was in danger of being lost as a result of the American experience and expansion." The pre-contact Native American population, estimated to have been over 300,000 people, had fallen to less than 150,000 by 1850 and had dropped to below 16,000 by 1900. The period during which the majority of the tales in this compilation were collected was "the twilight years of many Native American tribes but the golden years of Native American narrative collection" (p. 15).

The stories published here are grouped according to tribal origin; they include fifteen Arapaho tales, nine Cree stories, fourteen Hopi stories, nineteen Navajo stories (mainly Coyote stories), thirteen Tahltan stories, and six Zuni stories. Although myth and legend are the most numerous narrative genres, the book also includes trickster tales, sagas about cultural heroes, personal experience stories, family stories, and one from a narrative genre not recognised by European folklorists. This is the terse and touching "Ben Kindle's Winter Account" recorded from the Oglala Sioux. Each year between 1759 and 1925 one item of news was selected to be recorded. Cunningham's selection is taken, from the first twelve years.

Cunningham guides the reader to this (pp. 309-10) and to other tales that are historically or socially interesting or that are most meaningful for him--a Navajo clan origin story (p. 265); a classic Tewa tale, "Water Jar Boy" (p. 328); a Zuni myth, "Boy and Girl Rocks" (p. 408).

Cunningham's Introduction to his selection is one of the best things in the book--a wise, informative, personal and, at times, poetic consideration of Native American narrative culture, and the history of both those who collected it and the Society that published it.

A very good read.

Gillian Bennett, Folklore Society

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