NORWAN

Next to "Olelbis" stands "Norwan," both for value and interest. This

remarkable myth recalls forcibly the Helen of Troy tale, both in its

general plan and in many particulars.

The great war among the first people is caused by the woman Norwan.

Norbis Kiemila, who claims to be her husband, is descended from the

heavenly white oak which forms part of Olelpanti Hlut, the divine

mansion in the "Central Blue."

Norwan's full name is Pom Norwan en Pitchen, that is, daughter of the

land on the southern border. She has another name: Hluyuk Tikimit,

which means the dancing porcupine. Her residence, or hlut, was Norwan

Buli, Norwan Mountain. The Yana name of this mountain is Wahkanopa,

which means the son of Wahkalu. Wahkalu is Mount Shasta, and Wahkanopa

Lassen's Butte.

Norwan, or Hluyuk Tikimit, the dancing porcupine, has still a third

name, Bastepomas pokte, the food-giving or food-producing woman. In

her quality of producer she occupies a position in Wintu mythology

similar to that of the divine descendant of the earth and the sun in

the Algonkin religious system. This Algonkin myth is one of the most

beautiful and significant, not among creation, but among action myths.

And here I beg to call attention again to the distinction which I make

between the two classes of myths.

Creation myths relate always to what was done among the "first people

in the world which preceded this," while creation was going on, or

more correctly, perhaps, during the time of those transformations or

metamorphoses from which resulted the present world and the order of

things contained therein.

Action myths relate to ever-recurrent processes in nature which began

as soon as the sun had his course marked out for him and the physical

world around us received its present form and fashion; this happened

before all the "first people" were metamorphosed. The vast majority

had received the physical bodies which they have at present, but a few

were left, and they remained in various places till they saw or heard

the new race, the Indians. Action myths, therefore, relate to various

processes in nature which never cease. For us the most important are

those involved in the relations between the sun and the earth.

The great Algonkin sun and earth myth which has many variants and vast

wealth of detail, describes those relations more profoundly and

broadly than any other Indian myth devoted to the same subject.

The Algonkin myth in its most extended form describes the earth maiden

as becoming a mother through being looked at by the sun. She gives

birth to a daughter who is called Wakos ikwe, the fox woman; this

daughter becomes the mother of a great hero, the highest benefactor of

aboriginal man in America. He is the giver of food and of every good

gift by which life is supported.

Of this myth there is a shorter version in which the hero is born of

the earth directly; he is her son, not her grandson.

This benefactor and food-giver is no other than that warm air which we

see dancing and quivering above the earth in fine weather. Descended

from the sun and the earth, this warm air supports all things that

have vegetable or animal existence.

This myth in its more extended form, the one to which I have referred

first, is similar to that which Schoolcraft pieced together and which

Longfellow took as the foundation of his beautiful poem "Hiawatha,"

though not identical with it.

Schoolcraft, with his amazing propensity to make mistakes, with his

remarkable genius for missing the truth and confusing everything with

which he came in contact, gave the name Hiawatha to his patchwork.

Hiawatha is an Iroquois name connected with Central New York. The

Iroquois were mortal enemies of the Algonkins, and the feud between

these two stocks was the most inveterate and far reaching of any in

America. It was, in fact, the only Indian tribal hatred that rose to

historical importance, and it was by the adherence of the Iroquois,

the "Five Nations" of New York, that English dominion in North America

was established.

The Algonkin force of America was on the French side, but the Iroquois

held all water communication between Lake Erie and Ontario, the

greatest strategic position on the continent at that period. They cut

the Algonkins in two, and prevented France from receiving their

undivided assistance.

Had the whole Algonkin power aided the French, they would have had

great chances of victory. Had the Iroquois been friends of the

Algonkins and acted with them, there could have been no doubt of the

triumph of France at that juncture. But the Algonkins and Iroquois

were mortal enemies; the Algonkins were friendly to the French, the

Iroquois to the English.

In the face of all this Schoolcraft makes Hiawatha, who is peculiarly

Iroquois, the leading personage in his Algonkin conglomerate; Hiawatha

being an Iroquois character of Central New York (he is connected more

particularly with the region about Schenectady), while the actions to

which Schoolcraft relates him pertain to the Algonkin Chippewas near

Lake Superior.

It is as if Europeans of some future age were to have placed before

them a great epic narrative of French heroic adventure in which Prince

Bismarck would appear as the chief and central Gallic figure in the

glory and triumph of France. The error and absurdity would be, as the

Germans say, _colossál_, but not greater or more towering than in

Schoolcraft's Hiawatha. Longfellow, of course, could not free himself

from the error contained in his material; but the error, which was not

his own and which he had no means of correcting at that time, did not

prevent him from giving his work that peculiar charm which is

inseparable from everything which he did.

In the original Algonkin myth the hero to which Hiawatha has been

accommodated was a child of the sun and the earth. Whatever his names

in the numerous versions found in the twenty-eight languages of this

richest and most varied Indian stock of North America, he is always

the bounteous benefactor of man, the kindest of all divine powers that

have ever appeared upon earth. He is always in reality that warm light

which dances and quivers before us in fine weather, and through which

every man, beast, reptile, insect, fish, bird, and plant lives and

flourishes.

This myth has received on the Pacific coast, or more correctly on

parts of it, a different treatment from that given it east of the

Rocky Mountains. There the benefactor is a female, a daughter of the

earth. Nothing is said as to who her father was. It is significant

that she dances all day, that she is called the quivering porcupine

and the food-producing woman.

In Indian myths from New York to California the porcupine is ever

connected with light; in some cases it is the sun himself. In

"Tulchuherris" of this volume, Sas (the sun) carries a porcupine

quiver, and is advised never to lay it aside, for as long as he keeps

it on his shoulder he is safe from his children the grizzlies (the

clouds) who wish to kill him.

In California Norwan, daughter of the earth, occupies in part the

place of the Algonkin hero, the child of the sun and the earth. Her

usual life is of the housekeeping order; she has great supplies of

food in her hlut, or residence, and she goes on dancing each day until

evening. The great and characteristic event of her life, her departure

from the dance with her partner, is of the same scope and meaning as

the last journey of Hiawatha when he sails to the west and vanishes in

the regions of sunset. The hero of the Algonkin myth must go, he

cannot stay; he must vanish in the ruddy glow of evening because he is

the warm dancing air of the daytime. He must go whether he will or

not. Before he goes, however, he cheers all whom he leaves behind by

telling them that another will come from the east to take his place

and comfort them. Next morning, of course, the comforter comes, for

the life career of the Algonkin hero is included in the compass of a

single day, and a successor is bound to come as surely as he himself

is bound to go.

Norwan dances, and then goes away with her partner, to the desperate

vexation of Norbis Kiemila, her would-be husband, who wishes to have

her to himself exclusively. She dances, as she says, without knowing

it and goes away unconsciously. She dances with this partner because

she cannot help it, and departs imperceptibly to herself.

Who are the rivals for her person?

Norbis means "living in the south;" he lives in the southeast, the

land of greatest productiveness, in the region of Hlihli Piu Hlut Ton,

that most beautiful of houses on earth, and second only to the divine

mansion in the "Central Blue." He is descended from one of the white

oaks in the heavenly house.

The person who was metamorphosed afterward into the red wiu bird (Tede

Wiu) is his rival, the person with whom Norwan left the dance, thus

causing the first war in the world. Was this person the red of evening

which became Tede Wiu afterward? If we acknowledge that he was, and if

we are willing to admit Norbis as the representative of all people

living east of the west, we have at once the two parties to an

irreconcilable rivalry in the most vital of questions, the possession

of warm sunlight, and that most vital of questions is embodied in the

person of a woman. That was the cause of the first war in the world

and of fell strife. A story substantially the same as this was, we may

think, the ultimate basis of the Iliad. The mythic origin of the

particular tale from which Homer constructed his epic had been

forgotten, that may be granted, but there is little doubt that in

rustic Greece men might have found a similar tale which was mythologic

beyond peradventure; and the Helen of that tale, or her equivalent,

was a person like Norwan. With the materials at our command even now,

we have enough to indicate this, for was not Helen the daughter of

Leda and the divine swan, a person to be fought for with all available

energy in the world at that period, and to be fought for in a war

which surpassed in importance all that have ever succeeded it?

Helen of Troy, the daughter of Leda and of Zeus, the overarching

heaven, with all its light; Norwan, daughter of the earth, with

Lassen's Butte, California, for her residence; and the Algonkin hero

whose place is taken by Hiawatha, are all different representatives

of the same person, different expressions for the same phenomenon; and

that person or phenomenon is the warm air which dances above the earth

in fine weather. This air, in one case noted here, is conceived as the

greatest benefactor of man, that being who gives the choicest and most

necessary gifts to all, and, in the other two cases, as a priceless

treasure, in the form of a woman who is to be fought for with all the

valor that can possibly be summoned, and in a manner that in Helen's

case inspired the noblest epic known to the world thus far.

These three cases show clearly the methods of mythology, and prove the

absolute need of knowing that we must deal (to borrow mathematical

language) with constants and variables taken together,--knowing

clearly, meanwhile, which are constants,--and not with variables only,

supposing them to be constants, or with constants and variables mixed

together without being able to distinguish which belong to one class

and which to the other. Were some writer to deal with the prehensile

capacity in animated creatures, and describe how it is exercised, he

would find a variety in the organs used for grasping things which

would represent very well the variety of methods employed by primitive

man in mythology to represent the same phenomenon or force in nature.

If man be considered as standing on his hind feet, his fore feet (the

hands) are his grasping instruments. With the elephant the nose is

prehensile; with some monkeys the tail performs this office, in part

at least. With tigers and lions, dogs and cats, the mouth and teeth

are prehensile instruments of great force and precision. With the bear

the forepaws are almost hands. The two feet with their talons, which

correspond to the hind feet in quadrupeds, are the graspers with birds

of prey, working instruments with domestic fowl, and weapons with some

other birds, as, for instance, the ostrich.

Take another case, the teeth, one office of which is to reduce food to

fine particles; with all mammals they serve this purpose, and, in many

cases, others also. Birds have no teeth, but they have a substitute in

the gizzard, which they line with gravel and other hard particles; and

this second stomach, by contraction, grinds to pulp grain and other

food already softened in the crop or first stomach. The

boa-constrictor has no teeth and no second stomach; it chews by

crushing between its body and a tree the beast which it is to swallow.

The chewing mouth of the boa has for one jaw the tree, for the other

its own body; between those two jaws it reduces to a soft mass the

carcass of the creature to be swallowed.

In considering the various personages in mythology, it is all

important to discover, first of all, what they are, and, next, what

they do. The office filled by a certain personage in a group of myths

belonging to a given race or tribe may be filled by an entirely

different kind of character in a similar set of myths of another

tribe. This results sometimes from different geographic and climatic

conditions, and sometimes from looking at the phenomenon or process of

nature in another way. There is as much variety in the treatment of

one subject by various tribes as there is variety in prehensile

members and the use of them among grasping creatures, or as there is

difference in the manner of reducing food to fineness among

quadrupeds, birds, and boa-constrictors.