Reading Notes: Native American Marriage Tales, Part A

(Red Fox; Internet source, www.welcomewildlife.com)

  I enjoyed this section because of the simple language used for the stories but I find several of them really confusing. I guess that could be a good thing though, because I could use that as inspiration to learn more about Native American culture. Most of them are written with a very simple writing style and in a pretty straight forward manner so that it's easy to understand the direction of the stories. 

     Unfortunately, I didn't feel extremely inspired to write from this set of stories. I did find a few things I think I can use though. "Bear-Woman and Deer-Woman", for example, I think I could write some sort of backstory for this. I found myself wondering as I read this story how a deer and a bear came to be sister wives to a chicken-hawk. So, maybe I can answer that question for other readers in a story of my own. I also really didn't like how this story ended, with one wife killing the other and if I use this story as inspiration for my own, I could recreate this ending to be something I like better. 

     I really loved "The Fox-Woman" too, although I'm really not sure what I would want to write with this. I think the idea of a mystery helper is a fun idea but I'd like to change the plot, because I don't feel that I could re-write this one well without taking too much of the original story into my own. 

     I feel like "The Rolling Head" is a little bit "too much" for me. I think it's a clever story but it really creeped me out that the father fed his wife to their children. Maybe I could use this to write something similar with a little less of a demonic twist. For example, the man kills his wife and lies to his children about it (but doesn't feed her to them... ewww.) and in the end, the children's mother comes to the children spiritually to tell them what really happened. 

Finally, I rather enjoyed "The Bear-Woman". I'm 99% sure I've read this story before in another set of reading and I almost wrote a story based on it then. So maybe this time I will write something, using this one as my inspiration. I like the forbidden love idea and think I could write maybe a fun romantic tragedy based on this, although a lot of my stories have turned out to be tragic... That was never really my intention but that's just how things keep coming together.

Source
"Native American Marriage Tales", by Stith Thompson, online source