![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Self-Propagating Fakelore
23/12/15 18:11One of the many things I retained from my grad school storytelling class was an interest in fakelore, which is to say "the representation of materials written by professional authors as reproductions of the oral traditions of historical and ethnic communities";
So when I popped in at this question, my spidey senses tingled. It's a story I'd read myself, probably in the late 1990s, a story that goes something like:
What's interesting is that in the oldest sources I can find for the story, the story leans on the Biblical creation story:
A legend tells us that after the creation a gulf gradually opened between Adam and the beasts he had named.
But by the 1990s, the "legend" resurfaces as a "Native American folktale": The earth trembled and a great rift appeared, separating the first man and woman from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The "idealized time of harmony with the animal kingdom" motif fits so well with a certain 1990s stereotype that it doesn't even seem necessary to find a source for this "folktale," or identify a particular tribe it's associated with. (I've seen web sources refer to it as an Ojibwa story and an Anasazi story, but can't find evidence for either; far more often it's just a "Native American legend.")
When we were preparing a story, in my storytelling class, one of the parts of the assignment was to find multiple sources for the story (if it was a traditional story). For one of my assignments I ended up doing The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, which exists in quite different versions in China and Japan -- and there was a limit to how much I could do because my Chinese was quite terrible. (Not so terrible that I didn't try to struggle through it. But I didn't succeed). I think it really impressed on me what it means to tell a story when you know the culture that it came out of and you know the context around it -- rather than treating it as some artifact that just exists by itself. So I can't help feeling kind of angry and cynical when people just make up a cute story, or hear it third-hand, and then decide that it's the kind of thing that probably sounds like a Native American folktale... based on nothing more than a lifetime of hearing fakelore rather than folklore.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, newspapers and magazines were filled with so-called "American Indian legends" (in England they were from Africa, India, and other colonies), written as part of what Pearce (1965) terms "savagism," an image making process in which the "savages" of the American west were "tamed" while preserving a facade of the exotic. These stories were set in wigwams and tipis and featured characters with Indian-sounding names (Little Firefly, Laughing Water). Mostly, they told of how extreme love, faith, self-sacrifice, or devotion led to the creation of some natural phenomenon: a star, a flower, or a place of great beauty (a waterfall, an overlook, a clear spring), a narrative formula central to Ovid's Metamorphoses, which heavily prejudiced neo-classical and Romantic expectations for mythology. No such stories were ever told by traditional Native Americans, yet this kind of tale has come to epitomize Indian storytelling, and by now these invented legends have been reprinted in guidebooks, schoolbooks, and tourist propaganda for so long, almost everyone, including many Indians, assumes they are the real thing (Pound 1959).
So when I popped in at this question, my spidey senses tingled. It's a story I'd read myself, probably in the late 1990s, a story that goes something like:
“The earth trembled and a great rift appeared, separating the first man and woman from the rest of the animal kingdom. As the chasm grew deeper and wider, all the other creatures, afraid for their lives, returned to the forest – except for the dog, who after much consideration leapt the perilous rift to stay with the humans on the other side.
His love for humanity was greater than his bond to other creatures, he explained, and he willingly forfeited his place in paradise to prove it…”
What's interesting is that in the oldest sources I can find for the story, the story leans on the Biblical creation story:
A legend tells us that after the creation a gulf gradually opened between Adam and the beasts he had named.
But by the 1990s, the "legend" resurfaces as a "Native American folktale": The earth trembled and a great rift appeared, separating the first man and woman from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The "idealized time of harmony with the animal kingdom" motif fits so well with a certain 1990s stereotype that it doesn't even seem necessary to find a source for this "folktale," or identify a particular tribe it's associated with. (I've seen web sources refer to it as an Ojibwa story and an Anasazi story, but can't find evidence for either; far more often it's just a "Native American legend.")
When we were preparing a story, in my storytelling class, one of the parts of the assignment was to find multiple sources for the story (if it was a traditional story). For one of my assignments I ended up doing The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd, which exists in quite different versions in China and Japan -- and there was a limit to how much I could do because my Chinese was quite terrible. (Not so terrible that I didn't try to struggle through it. But I didn't succeed). I think it really impressed on me what it means to tell a story when you know the culture that it came out of and you know the context around it -- rather than treating it as some artifact that just exists by itself. So I can't help feeling kind of angry and cynical when people just make up a cute story, or hear it third-hand, and then decide that it's the kind of thing that probably sounds like a Native American folktale... based on nothing more than a lifetime of hearing fakelore rather than folklore.