Reading Notes: Tales of the North American Indians, Part B

For the second part of this weeks reading notes I will be finishing Native American Marriage Tales unit by Stith Thompson.

I wanted to look into the first story, The Dog-Husband, because there were a few interesting aspects to it. First, I thought it was weird that the young girl became pregnant by her dog. It was understood that no one knew the dog could transform into a human at night, but did that include the young girl? The story says that she became pregnant, so I immediately think (assuming she was not aware of his ability to morph) he took advantage of the girl in her sleep. There was also a story in Part A where a man takes advantage of a Buffalo-Woman. Other than this unit, I cannot recall stories where women are taken advantage of. I am sure there are some, I just have not come across it yet or I am forgetting. However, it seems to be a common theme throughout Native American Marriage tales. 

Another fascinating feature to this story of The Dog-Husband, in particular, was the word tamanous. In Dr. Gibbs notes, tamanous is a reference to one's "spirit power," which is attained through "ritual bathing." In this story, the mother had her children bath every day so that they could get tamanous for hunting and fishing. I think this would be a unique idea for a story. One idea for a story could be about fish or some type of sea creature that is constantly in the water, and because of their continuous bathing, they have a lot of tamanous.  People could come to summon and request things from the fish because of its high spirit power. Maybe a different idea could be about a cat who has no tamanous, but desperately wishes that he/she could. The only problem is that the cat is terrified of water, so it refuses to bathe (although, I already see a hole in this story because cats bathe themselves, but whatever...). I think I should do some searching on the matter because I really like this idea of using tamanous as my main theme.

An image I created on Cheezburger