I enjoyed many parts of each of the creation stories we heard this week. I enjoyed how each one almost sounded like they could have all been a part of the same one big creation story. I also thought that the stories sounded like they didn’t have an ending, almost like the indigenous groups who wrote them thought that they needed to finish the stories throughout their own lives and the lives of their families. I liked how all had a sense of respect and love for how they described the earth and how certain gods created different aspects of the earth. I think that a detail that stood out to me was the thought of each story having a reference to a certain animal and natural resources and I understood it as these animals and resources are probably what these tribes and groups saw just in their day-to-day and they used these things they saw within the stories.
I believed that it was way more effective listening to these stories rather than reading them. I feel like how they were told for generations, through a verbal story lens a listener can use their imagination to picture these stories and it tends to resonate with the listener by picturing it more. I feel like I experienced it better this way, I’m sure that others within the class had different visuals in their heads and I feel like that makes these creations stories better due to the listener being able to interpret their values and thoughts told by the stories.
I also believe that these stories are a way to keep the memories of these people alive. These stories have been passed down through generations upon generations of people. An example of this is the woman in the video about the Cherokee story, she’s an older generation who probably has heard the Cherokee story told by her past loved ones. These stories are a prime example of how strong a sense of resilience and tradition are in Native American communities.
Hi Vince!
I also really enjoyed working with the creation stories this week– they are such useful and insightful sources that blend culture and history together. It is important to think about their similarities and differences, as you describe. I was surprised at how they shared more commonalities than not– despite being from entirely different communities separated by hundreds of miles. One of the recurring features was how creation stories conceptualized different spiritual worlds– some above, and some below– with Earth figuring in the middle. This is a useful way to think about balance, as the lower worlds typically represented disorder and the upper worlds represented harmony. In some ways Earth, as the middle world, was/is a trial in bringing the elements together and finding balance between them.