Reading Notes: Native American Marriage Tales (A)

Title: The Bear Woman
Author: Stith Thompson
Link: Story link.

Plot:

• A Medicine Woman has many marriage suitors, but rejects them.
• She has taken a bear in the woods as her lover in secret.
• Her younger sister spies on them while they are together and reports the relationship to their father. The father summons a hunting party and kills the bear.
• The Medicine Woman sends her sister to collect some flesh from the bear's paws and dresses up like a bear.
• The younger sister asks to wrestle and the Medicine Woman agrees, but with a strict warning: The younger sister cannot touch the Woman over her kidneys.
• The younger sister promptly touches the Woman over her kidneys.
• The Medicine Woman converts into a real bear and rampages through the village, killing many.
• The younger sister warns the brothers that the Woman is in bear form and that she will surely kill the brothers when she returns.
• The brothers scatter prickly pears around the lodge, except for a small passageway.
• The sisters cook and clean a rabbit, but when the younger sister eats all of the rabbit, the bear-woman become angry and threatens to kill the younger.
• The younger sister tries to flee the country, but the bear-woman knows what she's up to and chases her into the forest.
• One of the brothers throws some water from his hand into the bear's path and it becomes a great lake.
• Another brother throws a hairbrush on the ground and it becomes an impassable thicket.
• The bear corners the siblings in a tree and kills four of the brothers.
• A small bird tells the siblings to shoot the bear-woman in the head and they do, killing her instantly.
• The youngest brother then shoots an arrow straight up. When it hits the ground, one brother comes back to life. Repeat x3.
• The siblings decide that they would rather live in the sky since their relatives are dead and they become the constellations of the night sky.

Setting:

• This story comes from the Sioux people. This puts the origin point somewhere around Lake Superior, however the Sioux were eventually pushed from Minnesota into North and South Dakota by rival tribes.

Two traditional Sioux chiefs: Red Cloud and American Horse. Source: Library of Congress.

Characters:

• Medicine Woman: Magical, aloof, powerful. She rejects a slew of suitors in her village in favor of a bear. Surely there's some Freudian analysis of what this indicates about her parents' relationship and the self-projections that lead her to struggle with human intimacy, but the Sioux opted not to tackle those questions. I don't blame them.
• Younger Sister: A tattle-tale. She spies on the Medicine Woman while she's with the bear and tells her father -- and subsequently, the whole village.
• Responsible for the death of the bear and the death of many villagers once she triggers her sister's bear form.
• Brothers: Pretty bloodthirsty. They kill the first bear, then they kill the bear-sister-woman with little remorse.

Writing Style:

• I understand that this is a creation myth about how we got constellations, but man is it convoluted. So much happens for what feels like no reason at all. I chose this story because it served as an example of what I don't want to do -- add lots of details that serve little purpose and are instantly reversed. Why would you include killing four of the brothers if they just come back to life courtesy of arrows ex machina 30 words later?
• I think this story could have profited from the "trim it down" portfolio editing strategy.