My Experience with Native American Myths and Cultures

For Indigenous Peoples' Day, I would like to share with you my life experience learning about the first inhabitants of the good ol' U.S. of A.

My introduction to Native Americans and their cultures came from an elementary school lesson about the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest.

My intro to Native American mythology came from my high school junior year English class.

The stories we looked at were The Earth on Turtle's Back (Iroquois of Upstate New York), When Grizzlies Walked Upright (Shasta people of Northern California) and the Navajo Origin Legend (Dine/Navajo of the American Southwest).

My senior year of high school was the year when I first became interested in the myths and legends of different cultures past and present (Native American included).

On a local note, I strove to learn about traditional stories from the Native American peoples of my pre-adulthood home state of Pennsylvania.

To give a general overview, here is a map of the different indigenous peoples that used to/currently inhabit the Keystone State.

The Lenape (also known as the Delaware) are the first inhabitants of my region of Pennsylvania.

When I stumbled upon the Lenape legend of Rainbow Crow, I was very enthused to have found a Native story from my area!

Unfortunately, I would eventually learn that the Rainbow Crow story was fabricated, and based on a modern modification of a Cherokee story from the Southeastern United States.

Even Big Brother Wikipedia agrees.

When researching Native American mythology through Native-Languages.org, I did find some actual creatures from Lenape mythology...but those are also found/have counterparts in other Algonquian cultures as well.

Sadly, during the Beaver Wars (1609-1701), the Iroquois slaughtered the Native peoples of the west-central parts of Pennsylvania...as well as the Great Lakes region and the present-day Toronto area.

This means that unless I can find a mythical story from the Erie, Susquehannock, or Ohio Valley peoples, I will have to settle for Iroquois mythology to represent the Pittsburgh area...including the Earth on Turtle's Back story.

I was, however, able to find a story from the Shawnee people (whose original homeland includes not just Pennsylvania but also Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky).

That story is about a hunter who kidnaps a star maiden who is dancing with her sisters.

It was on Mythology Worlds before the Great Vanishing, so I promise to upload a new cartoon representation of it someday.

I have yet to find a story from the Munsee people as well.

By the time I moved to Connecticut, however, I had already learned tons of mythical stories from the indigenous peoples of that state as well as the greater New England region.

These stories range from Gluskap (the culture hero from the Abenaki peoples of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) to the Pukwudji (evil goblins from the tales of the Wampanoag of Massachusetts), from Maushop (the giant culture hero from the Native stories of Southern New England) to the Wanagemeswak (a race of water beings from the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tales of Maine; they are so thin that you can only see them from the sides)

Thus, when I settled in my new home eight years ago, I was both excited and eager to learn more about the local Native cultures of the area.

I frequent the Mohegan Sun Casino on occasion (although I don't gamble).

I volunteered at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum six years ago.

I took a summer course at the University of Connecticut about the Native history of New England. I even attended a local pow-wow known as the Mohegan Wigwam Festival four years ago!

That same year, I went to Canada...specifically, Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia.

My most memorable moment from that trip was when I went to the Royal British Columbia Museum, and saw totem poles and Native art everywhere.

There was even a section where you could press buttons that said hello in the various First Nations languages of the province.

Two years ago, I went on Easter vacation in Burlington, Vermont; and went on a boat tour of Lake Champlain.

The tour guide informed my group of an Abenaki legend of a creature figure known as Odzihozo, who is said to have transformed into a rock formation in the lake...known as Rock Dunder.

This was the very same Odzihozo who had appeared in one of my anthropology textbooks from when I went to Montgomery County Community College about a decade ago!

This has been the story of my life experience and history of learning about the people who lived in America first, and still live there today.

Happy Indigenous Peoples' Day

P.S. If you want to dive even deeper into my story, Canada is an Iroquoian name that means "big village", Connecticut is an Algonquian name that means "long tidal river", and there is a river in Pennsylvania known as the Susquehanna River.