Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Children Read online

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  THE BASKET WOMAN

  A BOOK OF INDIAN TALES FOR CHILDREN

  BY

  MARY AUSTIN

  _SCHOOL EDITION_

  BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  The Riverside Press, Cambridge

  COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY MARY AUSTIN COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  From photograph by A. A. Forbes THE BASKET WOMAN]

  PREFACE

  In preparing this volume of western myths for school use the object hasbeen not so much to provide authentic Indian Folk-tales, as to presentcertain aspects of nature as they appear in the myth-making mood, thatis to say, in the form of strongest appeal to the child mind. Indianmyths as they exist among Indians are too frequently sustained by coarseand cruel incidents comparable to the belly-ripping joke in _Jack theGiant Killer_, or the blinding of Gloucester in _King Lear_, and whenpresented in story form, too often fall under the misapprehension of themyth as something invented and added to the imaginative life. It is, infact, the root and branch of man's normal intimacy with nature.

  So slowly does the mind awaken to the realization of consciousness andpersonality as by-products of animal life only, that few escape carryingover into adult life some obsession of its persistence in inanimatethings, say of malevolence in opals or luckiness in a rabbit's foot, orthe capacity of moral discrimination against their victims residing inhurricanes and earthquakes. The chief preoccupation of the child in hisearlier years is the business of abstracting the items of hisenvironment from this pervading sense, and ascribing to them theirproper degrees of awareness. He arrives in a general way at knowing thatit hurts the cat's tail to be stepped on because the cat cries, and thatit does not hurt the stick. But if the stick were provided with asqueaking apparatus he would be much longer in the process, and if thestick becomes a steed or a doll it is quite possible for him to weepwith sympathetic pain at the abuse of it.

  He sees the tree and it is alive and sentient to him; you cut a stickhorse from its boughs, and that is separately alive; cut the stick againinto two horses, and they will prance whole and satisfying. Later whenthe game is played out, the stick may burn and furnish live flame todance, live smoke to ascend, live ash to be treated with contumely; allof which arises not so much in the mere trick of invention as in thenatural difficulty in thinking of objects freed from consciousness,almost as great as the philosopher's in conceiving empty space. There isa period in the life of every child when almost the only road to theunderstanding is the one blazed out by the myth-making spirit, kept opento the larger significance of things long after he is apprised that thethunder did not originate in the smithy of the gods nor the Walrus talkto the Carpenter. Any attempt, however, to hasten the properdistinctions of causes and powers by the suppression of myth making islikely to prove as disastrous as helping young puppies through theirnine days' blindness by forcibly opening their eyes. You might get a fewdays' purchase of vision for some of them, but you would also have agood many cases of total blindness. What can be done by way of turningthe myth-making period to advantage, this little book is partly to show.

  Of the three sorts of myths included, about a third are directtranscriptions from Indian myths current in the campodies of the West,but it must not be assumed that myths like _The Crooked Fir_ and _TheWhite Barked Pine_ are in any sense "made up," or to be laid to theauthor's credit. Since the myth originates in an attitude of mind, itmust be understood that, to the primitive mind, nearly the whole processof nature presents itself in mythical terms. It is not that the Indianimagines the tree having sentience--he simply isn't able to imagine itsnot having it. All his songs, his ceremonies, his daily speech, are fullof the aspect of nature in terms of human endeavor. The story of _TheCrooked Fir_ was suggested to me in the humorous comment of my Indianguide on one of the forks of Kings River, the first time my attentionwas caught by the uniform curve of the trunks, and he explained it tome. The myth of _The Stream That Ran Away_ might arise as simply as inthe question of a child who has not lived long enough to understand theseasonal recession of waters, wishing to know why a stream that ranfull some weeks ago is now dry. And if his mother has had trouble withhis straying too far from the camp she might say to him that it had runaway and the White people had caught it and set it to work in anirrigating ditch, "and that is what will happen to you if you don'twatch out" ... or she might draw a moral on the neglect of duty if theoccasion demanded it ... or if she were gifted with fancy, tell him thatthat was it which fell on us as rain in Big Meadow, and it would returnto its banks when it had watered the high places. But whatever she wouldtell him would have an acute observation of nature behind it and wouldbe stated in personal terms. It is so that the child begins tounderstand the continuity of natural forces and their relativity to thelife of man.

  There is a third sort of story included with these, which aside frombeing of the stuff from which hero myths are made,--_Mahala Joe_ is inpoint,--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 processof making it a part of the child's experience, the meaning of it mustnot be pulled up too often to learn if it has taken root. Unless itelucidates itself in the course of time,--and one must recall how long aperiod elapsed between the first reading of the _Ugly Duckling_, say,and its final revelation of itself,--unless its content is broadly humanand personal, it has practically no educative value. It is notabsolutely indispensable that the whole unfolding of it should be withinthe limited period of school life that affords it; some of the noblesthuman myths reveal as it were successive layers of insight and purport,taking change and color from the passing experience; but it remains truethat the best time to insinuate the myth in the child's mind is when heis normally at the myth-making period.

  To make it, then, part of the child's possession it should be read to orby him at convenient intervals, until he can give back a fairly succinctversion of it. Along with this must go the business of deepening andextending the background; and whether this is to be done at the time ofthe reading or intermediately, must depend largely on the localbackground. Children in schools on the Pacific slope should findthemselves already tolerably furnished; any hill region in fact shouldyield suggestive material, without overlaying the content of the mythwith trifling exactitudes of natural history.

  It is very difficult to say in a word all that is implied in theextension of the background. One has only to consider the amount of timespent in teaching the so-called Classic Myths, tremendous in their powerof vitalizing and coloring their own and related times, and reflect ontheir failure to effect anything beyond their mere story interest inmodern life, to realize that the value of a myth is directly inproportion as its background is common and accessible. What would happenin a locality calculated to suggest and with a teacher properly equippedto interpret the background of Greek and Roman mythology, is notproven, but in practical school work the author has found it best todefer the teaching of it until by general reading a point of contact isestablished, which enables the child to read _backward_ into itsmeaning, and for the actively myth-making period to use forms sprungnaturally from the child's own environment. The better he can visualizeand locate the objects mythically treated, the better they serve thei
rpurpose of rendering personal the influences of nature and sustaininghim in that happy sense of the community of life and interest in theWild.

  It is for this purpose of extending the background that the introductorysketches and some others are included in this collection. _The GoldenFortune_ could be read with _The White Barked Pine_, and _The ChristmasTree_ with _The Crooked Fir_. Any hill country or wooded district shouldfurnish additional color, but let it be cautioned here, that though allthe nature references in these tales are entirely dependable, the childis not to be made unhappy thereby. Whatever branch of school work it isfound necessary to correlate with the myths, it should be in generalrecreative rather than instructive; for what is comprehended in the termNature is after all not a miscellany of objects, but a state of mind setup by their happiest coincidences. The least that can be said to achievea proper notion of a tree or a glacier is so much better than the most;a casual application to a known and neighboring circumstance goesfurther than any amount of explanation.