Re: Tales from the Smokehouse?
John E. Koontz (koontz@alpha.bldr.nist.gov)
Fri, 22 Apr 1994 13:05:28 -0500
I'm no help on Tales from a Smokehouse, but there were some baldy Cheyenne
stories a few years back in the Algonquian & Iroquian Newsletter. Actually,
they weren't deliberately baldy, so far as I could tell, just more explicit
than typical modern sanitized versions of (originally baldy) European
folkstories. Pretty standard stuff for Plains Trickster stories, with some
Cheyenne-specific complications due to the Cheyenne being one the groups who
call Trickster "Whiteman." Or, to be more accurate, they call Euro (and
Afro) americans "Tricksters." In Cheyenne the same word means "spider," and
"spider" is the term for "Trickster" among the Dakotan groups, too, though
they have a different term for "Euro (and Afro) american." I'd sometime
like to see a real thorough, scholarly cross-linguistic investigation of
terms for "trickster/whiteman/spider/rabbit/raccoon/etc." Not to mention a
good study of the attributes of Trickster. And the stories told of him.
The best thing in this line that I've seen was Lowie's comparison of the
Crow and Hidatsa Twin cycles.
[ I think the word is "bawdy." According to my dictionary:
adj. -er, -iest. Humorously coarse; vulgar; lewd.
--bawd'i.ly adv. --bawd'i.ness n. --Gary ]