While reading through these Native American creation myths and legends, I found myself stunned by so many aspects and themes that recurred from story to story. Great value and status was repeatedly assigned to women, nature, and the animals with which we share the Earth. Although these themes alone can be shocking when interpreted by the mind of a Western Jew or Christian, more shocking, to me at least, were the similarities I found between these stories and the stories of the Bible.
Within the first few creation myths and legends in our collection, several recurring aspects struck me as familiar. We are told several times about immaculately conceived boys who live short lives, and are either resurrected, or promise to return at an unspecified time of need. These heroes, like Jesus and Adam, are also confronted by a physical embodiment of evil. In ‘Rabbit Boy’, evil is represented by Iktome (Spider Man), who like our very own Garden-of-Eden-variety snake, plots to destroy the hero. Despite Iktome’s apparent influence on others within the village, and the fact that Rabbit Boy seem to be physically vanquished by this influence, purity and good win the day when Rabbit Boy transcends the physical world to live with the Sun (God). Iktome is ultimately defeated by his evil aspirations, very much like the Eden snake ends up deprived of legs.
Besides the distinct character representations of good and evil, or a human link between ourselves and “God,” we also receive in-depth explanations of how our first ancestor procreated to form the contemporary populous. ‘Creation of the Animal People’ explains, as does Genesis, that human beings were formed from Earth. ‘Creation of First Man and Woman’ explains how we all could have come from two people. Striking similarities like this are scattered throughout the myths, but for a clear reason.
The point of creation stories, whether in the Bible or in this book, is to explain the unexplainable, and to answer seemingly unanswerable questions. Why do good and evil exist? How did we get here? Are we on our own? How holy does a schlub like me have the potential to be? What are our most important values, and why? Now that I see these stories, our own included, as an answer to these questions, I’m comforted, and not because Blood Clot is out there finding me some buffalo, and not because Jesus died for my sins, but because we can all agree on what it means to be human. That is what links these tales, and us all.
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