In preparing this volume of western myths for school use the object has
been not so much to provide authentic Indian Folk-tales, as to present
certain aspects of nature as they appear in the myth-making mood, that
is to say, in the form of strongest appeal to the child mind. Indian
myths as they exist among Indians are too frequently sustained by coarse
and cruel incidents comparable to the belly-ripping joke in _Jack the
Giant Killer_, or the blinding of Gloucester in _King Lear_, and when
presented in story form, too often fall under the misapprehension of the
myth as something invented and added to the imaginative life. It is, in
fact, the root and branch of man's normal intimacy with nature.
So slowly does the mind awaken to the realization of consciousness and
personality as by-products of animal life only, that few escape carrying
over into adult life some obsession of its persistence in inanimate
things, say of malevolence in opals or luckiness in a rabbit's foot, or
the capacity of moral discrimination against their victims residing in
hurricanes and earthquakes. The chief preoccupation of the child in his
earlier years is the business of abstracting the items of his
environment from this pervading sense, and ascribing to them their
proper degrees of awareness. He arrives in a general way at knowing that
it hurts the cat's tail to be stepped on because the cat cries, and that
it does not hurt the stick. But if the stick were provided with a
squeaking apparatus he would be much longer in the process, and if the
stick becomes a steed or a doll it is quite possible for him to weep
with sympathetic pain at the abuse of it.
He sees the tree and it is alive and sentient to him; you cut a stick
horse from its boughs, and that is separately alive; cut the stick again
into two horses, and they will prance whole and satisfying. Later when
the game is played out, the stick may burn and furnish live flame to
dance, live smoke to ascend, live ash to be treated with contumely; all
of which arises not so much in the mere trick of invention as in the
natural difficulty in thinking of objects freed from consciousness,
almost as great as the philosopher's in conceiving empty space. There is
a period in the life of every child when almost the only road to the
understanding is the one blazed out by the myth-making spirit, kept open
to the larger significance of things long after he is apprised that the
thunder did not originate in the smithy of the gods nor the Walrus talk
to the Carpenter. Any attempt, however, to hasten the proper
distinctions of causes and powers by the suppression of myth making is
likely to prove as disastrous as helping young puppies through their
nine days' blindness by forcibly opening their eyes. You might get a few
days' purchase of vision for some of them, but you would also have a
good many cases of total blindness. What can be done by way of turning
the myth-making period to advantage, this little book is partly to show.
Of the three sorts of myths included, about a third are direct
transcriptions from Indian myths current in the campodies of the West,
but it must not be assumed that myths like _The Crooked Fir_ and _The
White Barked Pine_ are in any sense "made up," or to be laid to the
author's credit. Since the myth originates in an attitude of mind, it
must be understood that, to the primitive mind, nearly the whole process
of nature presents itself in mythical terms. It is not that the Indian
imagines the tree having sentience--he simply isn't able to imagine its
not having it. All his songs, his ceremonies, his daily speech, are full
of the aspect of nature in terms of human endeavor. The story of _The
Crooked Fir_ was suggested to me in the humorous comment of my Indian
guide on one of the forks of Kings River, the first time my attention
was caught by the uniform curve of the trunks, and he explained it to
me. The myth of _The Stream That Ran Away_ might arise as simply as in
the question of a child who has not lived long enough to understand the
seasonal recession of waters, wishing to know why a stream that ran
full some weeks ago is now dry. And if his mother has had trouble with
his straying too far from the camp she might say to him that it had run
away and the White people had caught it and set it to work in an
irrigating ditch, "and that is what will happen to you if you don't
watch out" ... or she might draw a moral on the neglect of duty if the
occasion demanded it ... or if she were gifted with fancy, tell him that
that was it which fell on us as rain in Big Meadow, and it would return
to its banks when it had watered the high places. But whatever she would
tell him would have an acute observation of nature behind it and would
be stated in personal terms. It is so that the child begins to
understand the continuity of natural forces and their relativity to the
life of man.
There is a third sort of story included with these, which aside from
being of the stuff from which hero myths are made,--_Mahala Joe_ is in
point,--has a value which must be gone into more particularly.
What is important for the teacher to understand is that the myth,
itself a living issue, will not bear too much handling; in the process
of making it a part of the child's experience, the meaning of it must
not be pulled up too often to learn if it has taken root. Unless it
elucidates itself in the course of time,--and one must recall how long a
period elapsed between the first reading of the _Ugly Duckling_, say,
and its final revelation of itself,--unless its content is broadly human
and personal, it has practically no educative value. It is not
absolutely indispensable that the whole unfolding of it should be within
the limited period of school life that affords it; some of the noblest
human myths reveal as it were successive layers of insight and purport,
taking change and color from the passing experience; but it remains true
that the best time to insinuate the myth in the child's mind is when he
is normally at the myth-making period.
To make it, then, part of the child's possession it should be read to or
by him at convenient intervals, until he can give back a fairly succinct
version of it. Along with this must go the business of deepening and
extending the background; and whether this is to be done at the time of
the reading or intermediately, must depend largely on the local
background. Children in schools on the Pacific slope should find
themselves already tolerably furnished; any hill region in fact should
yield suggestive material, without overlaying the content of the myth
with trifling exactitudes of natural history.
It is very difficult to say in a word all that is implied in the
extension of the background. One has only to consider the amount of time
spent in teaching the so-called Classic Myths, tremendous in their power
of vitalizing and coloring their own and related times, and reflect on
their failure to effect anything beyond their mere story interest in
modern life, to realize that the value of a myth is directly in
proportion as its background is common and accessible. What would happen
in a locality calculated to suggest and with a teacher properly equipped
to interpret the background of Greek and Roman mythology, is not
proven, but in practical school work the author has found it best to
defer the teaching of it until by general reading a point of contact is
established, which enables the child to read _backward_ into its
meaning, and for the actively myth-making period to use forms sprung
naturally from the child's own environment. The better he can visualize
and locate the objects mythically treated, the better they serve their
purpose of rendering personal the influences of nature and sustaining
him in that happy sense of the community of life and interest in the
Wild.
It is for this purpose of extending the background that the introductory
sketches and some others are included in this collection. _The Golden
Fortune_ could be read with _The White Barked Pine_, and _The Christmas
Tree_ with _The Crooked Fir_. Any hill country or wooded district should
furnish additional color, but let it be cautioned here, that though all
the nature references in these tales are entirely dependable, the child
is not to be made unhappy thereby. Whatever branch of school work it is
found necessary to correlate with the myths, it should be in general
recreative rather than instructive; for what is comprehended in the term
Nature is after all not a miscellany of objects, but a state of mind set
up by their happiest coincidences. The least that can be said to achieve
a proper notion of a tree or a glacier is so much better than the most;
a casual application to a known and neighboring circumstance goes
further than any amount of explanation.