Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One

1) Creations and Origins

2) Coyote and Friends, an Experiment in Interpretive Bricolage

3) The Poetry and Drama of Healing, the Iroquoian "Condolence Ritual" and the Navajo "Night Chant"

Part Two

4) From Mythic to Fictive in the Nez Perce Orpheus Myth

5) "The Hunter Who Had an Elk for a Guardian Sprit" and the Ecological Imagination

6) The Wife Who Goes out Like a Man, Comes Back as a hero: The art of two Oregon Indian narratives

7) Uncursing the Misbegotten in a Tillamook Incest Story

8) Genderic and Racial Appropriation in Victoria Howard's "The Honorable Milt"

Part Three

9) Simon Fraser's Canoe; or Capsizing into Myth

10) Fish-Hawk and Other Heroes

11) Retroactive Prophecy in Western Indian Narrative

12) The Bible in Western Indian Mythology

13) Ti-Jean and the Seven-headed Dragon, Instances of Native American Assimilation of European Folklore

14) Francis La Flesche's "The song of FLying Crow" and the Limits of Ethnography

15) Tradition and Individual Talents in Modern Indian Writing

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Reviews

"A gathering of brilliant essays by the most literarily sensitive of commentators on Native American myths and tales." - Karl Kroeber (Traditional Literatures of the American Indian) "Jarold Ramsey has emerged as one of the most skilled and articulate commentators on American Indian literature active today." - J. Barre Toelken (Western Folklore) "A balanced, steady intelligence informs these essays. . . . It is a book that should be read by anyone who teaches American literature or specializes in American literary studies." - Larry Evers (Western Humanities Review) "American scholarship needs more of what Ramsey has done here: his work is a careful, detailed, but also sympathetic and profound study of the myths he has examined." - Dell Skeels (Pacific Northwest Quarterly)