Reading notes: Native American Marriage Tales, Part A

For the first half of this week's reading assignment, I read about Native American marriage tales. I didn't expect so many stories to deal with marriages between humans and animals, so that was an interesting twist.

The story about the Splinter-Foot-Girl, in which a girl is born from a man's leg, reminded me of the mythology story about Zeus sewing the unborn Dionysus into his leg and later giving birth to Dionysus out of his thigh. I wonder if in a story later this week, I could combine that story with the story of Splinter-Foot-Girl.

Another story I would be interested in trying to retell in a creative way would be the Buffalo-Wife story, in which a man fathers a child with a buffalo woman and how she, the husband and their child flip back and forth between buffalo bodies and human bodies. I would be interested in retelling the story from the buffalo wife's perspective, particularly after her husband misidentifies their buffalo son.

Illustration of a buffalo family. Web source: Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography: Tales of the North American Indians by Stith Thompson (1929).