#blackfoot lodge tales

[quotes-by-dilanka]

The origin legend of the Blackfoot buffalo society by Joseph Campbell

This story is of a time when a certain tribe was facing a desperate winter. The Indians had a way to kill a whole herd of buffalo, which gave the tribe its meat for the winter, by stampeding them over a great precipice.

So the animals go over and are knocked to pieces at the bottom and then they can be killed.

But this particular year when they had stampeded the buffalo and the buffalo would get to the edge, they would swerve aside — nobody was going over. So it looked bad for the tribe.

One morning a young woman gets up to get the water for her family. From the tepee she sees the buffalo just up there, right on the edge, and she says, “Oh, if you’d only come over and give food to my people for the winter, I would marry one of you.” And immediately they began coming over.

Well, that was a surprise. A still larger surprise was that one of them comes up and says, “All right, girlie, we’re off."

“Oh, no,” she says.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “Look, it’s happened, and you’ve given your promise and we’ve done the work.”

So he takes her by the arm (it’s hard to know how a buffalo can take you by the arm but he does), and he leads her off over the hill and out onto the plains. When her family wakes up the next morning they look around and ask, “Where’s Minnehaha, anyhow?”

Then Daddy goes out, and being an Indian he knows how to read in footprints what’s going on.

He looks and says, “She’s run off with a buffalo.” He puts on his walking moccasins and he takes his bow and arrow and goes off to find his daughter among the buffalo.

After he’s followed these footsteps and gone a considerable way, he comes to a wallow where the buffalo like to roll around to get the lice off.

He sits down and thinks, What am I going to do?

Then he sees a beautiful magpie. Now in the hunting mythologies there are certain animals that are very clever: magpies and foxes and blue jays and ravens.

These are sort of shaman animals. So the magpie comes down and begins picking around, and the father says, “Beautiful bird, my daughter has run off with a buffalo. Have you seen a young woman with the buffalo people?”

The magpie says, “Yes, there’s a young woman with the buffalo over there right now.”

So the father says, “Oh, will you go tell her that her father is here?”

The magpie flies over and there she is. I don’t know what she’s doing — knitting or something like that — and behind her all the buffalo are having a nap. Right behind her is the great big fellow.

The bird comes pecking over and says, “Your father’s at the wallow.”

“Oh, dear,” she says. “This is dangerous. This is terrible. Tell him to wait. I'll see about this.”

Presently the buffalo wakes up, the big fellow behind her, and takes off one of his horns and says, “Go get me some water.”

She takes the horn and goes to the wallow and there’s Daddy. Daddy grabs her and he says, “You come.”

“No, no, no, this is very dangerous. Let me fix this thing up.” So she gets the water and goes back to the buffalo. He takes it and sniffs and says, “Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Indian.”

And she says, “Oh, no.”

And he says, “Yes,” and he roars, and all the buffalo get up and they lift their tails and start to dance and roar and go to the wallow and trample Daddy into invisibility. He's just not there anymore; she has just wiped him out.

The girl begins to cry and the old buffalo says, “So you’re crying, what’s the matter?”

“It’s my Daddy.”

He says, “Yeah, you’ve lost your daddy, but we lose our wives and our uncles, our children, and everything, to feed your people.”

“Well,” she says, “but—Daddy!"

There’s a kind of sympathy in the buffalo for her and he says, “Well, if you can bring your daddy back to life, I'll let you go”

So she calls the magpie and says, “Will you peck around a little and see if you can find a piece of Daddy?” And he does. He pecks around and finds a little vertebrae, a bit of backbone.

“I’ve got something here,” he says.

“Well,” she says, “that’ll do.”

So she puts it down on the ground and takes her robe and puts it over the piece of bone and starts to chant.

She chants a magical power song. And presently you can see there’s a man under the buffalo robe.

She looks under, and yes, it’s Daddy all right. But he needs a little more singing.

And she goes on with her chant and presently he stands up. The buffalo are tremendously excited about this. And they say, “Well, now, why don’t you do this for us? Why don’t you bring us back to life after you've killed us all?

Now we'll give you our buffalo dance, we'll tell you how to do it.

And when you've slaughtered a lot of our people, you dance this dance and sing your song and we'll come every year to feed your people."

This is the origin legend of the Blackfoot buffalo society. It was published in a book I read when I was a kid by George Bird Grinned, a really marvelous writer and collector of Indian material; it's called Blackfoot Lodge Tales.

—The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

[jellobiafrasays]

blackfoot lodge tales (1970 ed., cover design by jerry jacoby)

[two-for-luck]

The old chief looked around and said: 'Where is that young woman, my wife? Go and find her.' They went to look for her, and found her out gathering rosebuds, for while the young man whom she loved was away, she used to go out and gather rosebuds and dry them for him. When they found her, she had her bosom full of them.

from the story entitled “The Beaver Medicine” in George Bird Grinnell’s Blackfoot Lodge Tales

[hyaenagallery]

Liver-Eating Johnson part 2 One tale ascribed to Johnson was of being ambushed by a group of Blackfoot warriors in the dead of winter on a foray to sell whiskey to his Flathead kin, a trip that would have been over five hundred miles. The Blackfoot planned to sell him to the Crow, his mortal enemies, for a handsome price. He was stripped to the waist, tied with leather thongs and put in a teepee with only one, very inexperienced guard. Johnson managed to break through the straps, then knocked out his young guard with a kick, took his knife and scalped him, then quickly cut off one of his legs. He made his escape into the woods, surviving by eating the Blackfoot's leg, until he reached the cabin of Del Gue, his trapping partner, a journey of about two hundred miles. Eventually, Johnson made peace with the Crow, who became "his brothers," and his personal vendetta against them finally ended after 25 years and scores of slain Crow warriors. The West, however, was still a very violent and territorial place, particularly during the Plains Indian Wars of the mid-19th century. Many more Indians of different tribes, especially but not limited to the Sioux and the Blackfoot, would know the wrath of "Dapiek Absaroka" Crow killer and his fellow mountain men. The above information is based upon the yarns and tales told over and over through the years. The accurate story is told in the diaries of Lee and Kaiser, who were on the Missouri River in 1868 when Johnston was given his moniker, after a rainy fight with the Sioux. He joined Company H, 2nd Colorado Cavalry of the Union Army in St. Louis in 1864 as a private, and was honorably discharged the following year. During the 1880s, he was appointed deputy sheriff in Coulson, Montana, and a town marshal in Red Lodge, Montana. He was listed as five foot, eleven and three-quarter inches tall according to government records. #destroytheday