Creation Stories & Myths

The relationship between stories and songs telling the legendary tales of a given people and the history of that people is not always a clear one. The songs and stories in "Cupe�o Genesis" are valuable less for what they say of history as we usually define it and more for what they say about the people who told these stories and sang these songs in their own language. These are cultural elements that have been passed down for generations, connecting the remaining members of this tribal group directly to their ancestors and to the world of their ancestors. Such texts provide the historian with a sense of the people about whom he or she writes and of the manner in which those people related to the world in which they lived, and the events and movements of history depend very much on how human beings relate to their world, take action within that world, and view how the world "behaves" toward them.

The songs and stories in "Cupe�o Genesis" has been derived from the Cupe�o villages at Oala and San Ysidro in San Diego County in Southern California. The songs were published in 1953, and the informant had been born in 1874, making her a bridge between the two centuries and covering much of the history of her people in conflict with the developing of the United States. Since her mother and grandmother were important religious and ceremonial leaders as well as cultural historians for the group, the informant was well-versed in the tales by which her people expressed their sen

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ated by the god have been given eternal life in a wilderness setting where food is abundant and peace will reign. In the Bible, Adam and Eve disobey; in "Cupe�o Genesis," the human beings step on Mokat's favorite child, Rattlesnake, and Mokat gives poison to the snake, who then bites a human, bringing death. It is interesting how the snake figures prominently in both the Judeo-Christian conception of the origin of death and in the Cupe�o view as well. The Christian story is intended to explain human beings and why they owe allegiance to God as well as why they have to suffer, while the stories in "Cupe�o Genesis" are more designed to tell why the world is as it is than to address human suffering or any other specifically human activity. In analyzing the verbal methods of respondent Mabel McKay, Greg Sarris demonstrates how to read the meaning of various verbal stories and how to relate them to the time and place from which they originated as well as to the people who perpetuated them over a much longer period of time. Sarris says that the spoken story was a means of working to establish a premise from which a moral or ethic emerges. He is referring specifically to experiencing the way Mabel tells a story, but the principle

Category: Philosophy - C