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"Loons Folklore."
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The Blind Man and the Loon
The story of the Blind Man and the Loon is a living Native folktale about a blind man who is betrayed by his mother or wife but whose vision is magically restored by a kind loon. Variations of this tale are told by Native storytellers all across Alaska, arctic Canada, Greenland, the Northwest Coast, and even into the Great Basin and the Great Plains. As the story has traveled through cultures and ecosystems over many centuries, individual storytellers have added cultural and local ecological details to the tale, creating countless variations.
InThe Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale, folklorist Craig Mishler goes back to 1827, tracing the story's emergence across Greenland and North America in manuscripts, books, and in the visual arts and other media such as film, music, and dance theater. Examining and comparing the story's variants and permutations across cultures in detail, Mishler brings the individual storyteller into his analysis of how the tale changed over time, considering how storytellers and the oral tradition function within various societies. Two maps unequivocally demonstrate the routes the story has traveled. The result is a masterful compilation and analysis of Native oral traditions that sheds light on how folktales spread and are adapted by widely diverse cultures.
eBook
We Are the Stars
After centuries of colonization, this important new work recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes' traditional culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender. Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.
eBook
Visiting the Six Worlds: Shamanistic Journeys in Canadian Mi'kmaq Cosmology
Mi'kmaq Indians' descriptions of journeys between worlds, as we find them in tales collected from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are far too complex to fit into Mircea Eliade's model of shamanism or romantic images of Indians as being \"at one with nature.\" The tales reveal six parallel worlds in which all types of beings belong to families, have wigwams, and search for food. The parallelism between worlds has no significance for beings living their ordinary lives, but it is of the utmost importance for understanding how differing types of beings in the stories (people, animals, supernaturals) achieve interworld journeys. The notions of cosmological deixis and perspectivism are used to explore the narratives and shed light on Mi'kmaq cosmology.
Journal Article
Diving down: Ritual Healing in the Tale of the Blind Man and the Loon
Introduction. Some stories enjoy a very widespread distribution in the North. Anthropologists and folklorists have long collected and analyzed these stories, and scrutinized their regional variants. Craig Mishler taps into this longstanding scholarly tradition as he looks at the widespread story of \"The Blind Man and the Loon.\" However, he goes beyond analyzing the form of this tale to explore what gives it healing properties. He wants to know why this story has become part of virtually every Native storyteller's repertoire throughout the Arctic and Subarctic. One answer is that the main character and events of the story evoke the undeserved suffering that shapes the human condition everywhere. Much of the story's power stems from its depiction of a ritual for healing the handicapped, thereby becoming a medicinal oral text. Additional power comes from the wide range of local and regional forms that adapt it to local sensibilities. WHA
Journal Article
Foreword
From a distance of miles and centuries, stories in the oral tradition seem to have an independent existence, drifting from place to place like species of animals over time and territory and gradually evolving from one form to another. Indeed, early folklorists and anthropologists sought to dissect and classify them in the same way that anatomists and taxonomists dissect and classify groups of animals. Later, Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow (also known as the father of actor Max von Sydow) coined the term oicotype to describe local forms of a widely distributed folktale. His idea was that stories evolve and
Book Chapter
Foreword
From a distance of miles and centuries, stories in the oral tradition seem to have an independent existence, drifting from place to place like species of animals over time and territory and gradually evolving from one form to another. Indeed, early folklorists and anthropologists sought to dissect and classify them in the same way that anatomists and taxonomists dissect and classify groups of animals. Later, Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow (also known as the father of actor Max von Sydow) coined the termoicotypeto describe local forms of a widely distributed folktale. His idea was that stories evolve and
Book Chapter
The Telling of the Tale
Maggie Gilbert (Maggie Jyah) was a Gwich’in Athabaskan woman born at Shuman House on the Porcupine River in northeastern Alaska in 1895 or 1896. Her father’s English name was William and her mother was Laura, but after her mother died in 1909 she was raised by her uncle, Chief Christian, in the upper Chandalar River country.
Maggie’s first husband was Titus Peter, and her children from Titus include Naomi (Tritt) and Kias Peter. An early photograph of her with husband Titus was taken in Arctic Village in 1927 (fig. 14). In 1931, sometime after Titus died, she married James Gilbert,
Book Chapter
The Power of the Tale
As mentioned in chapter 1, “The Blind Man and the Loon” has traveled for thousands of miles and has been performed for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years for thousands of people over a very large part of northern and western Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and the western United States. Most exciting of all is the fact that it is still very much a living tradition.
My exercise on the morphology of the tale in chapter 1 demonstrates the tale’s great popularity and its ability to bend and transcend many cultural and linguistic boundaries, but it offers little or no insights
Book Chapter
The History and Geography of the Tale
Some years ago I presented a paper attempting reconstruction of the archetype of the Blind Man and the Loon (Mishler 1988). At that time I defined paradigms for thirteen selected traits found within each of its two major subtypes (see appendix A). I called these the Eskimo or Inuit subtype featuring the BlindBoyand the Loon and the Indian subtype featuring the BlindManand the Loon. With these two major ethnic subtypes the tale behaves like a double helix. Its dna gets passed on from generation to generation, reproducing itself much like genetic information being transmitted from storyteller
Book Chapter