Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo

In a few days they started again, tras... tras... tras.... The trail wound in and out through slowly rising foothills. There were many outcroppings of rock, jutting out everywhere. Soon the party was strung out in a long straggling line. Coyote Old Man and Antelope were taking their time and bringing up the rear. The Bears were way ahead of them. And way way ahead of the Bears were the Antelope men and women, almost running in their fast electric stride. This seemed to be the only way they could travel, because they were desert people. At intervals they would sit down and wait patiently for the rest of the party to catch up. They just didn't know how to travel slowly. The Antelope children were the same, and Fox Boy and Oriole Girl had work to keep up with them, abut they were too proud to be left behind.

Jamie de Angulo was a linguist and ethnologist who spent time among the Indian tribes of California in the beginning of the 20th century. He was, apparently, an eccentric autodidact who went west to become, and did become, a cowboy, before turning his attention to the languages and folk tales of the area. Indian Tales is his version of the "Coyote Tales" that he heard among these tribes, sewn together into a single narrative that begins when the family of Bear, Antelope, Fox Boy, and the baby Quail set off to visit some relatives. Along the way they meet various figures from Californian legend, including Old Man Coyote, but also the Grass and Flint People, a Grizzly Bear, some hawks, Doctor Loon, and Oriole Girl, on whom Fox Boy nurses an obvious and impossible crush.

The tales themselves are a great deal of fun. They are recognizable to anyone who has heard Indigenous creation stories, which are often long, circuitous, and unpredictable. They've always struck me as different somehow, perhaps more episodic, than stories in European mythic traditions, and more humorous. People die and come back to life, animals perform strange and courageous feats, people are transformed into monsters, that sort of stuff. I was interested in the way De Angulo nests the stories, having Bear, Coyote, and others tell them to each other around the campfire. Are they telling legend, or in their world, history? I suppose both.

What's most interesting, though, is the way that De Angulo manages to seamlessly combine the traditions of Indigenous storytelling and modernist "Western" literature. You can see it, I think, in the romantic tension between Fox Boy and Oriole Girl, who keeps telling Fox Boy (who of course does not listen) that she's not interested in men. You can see it in the beautiful evocations of the thin Grass People or their enemies, the Fire People. You can see it, I think, in the skillful sketching of the characters whose personalities emerge through repetition and gesture: Grumpy Bear, secretive Old Man Coyote, petulant Fox Boy--who, true to the novel form, comes of age in the process of the family's long excursion. At the end, there's even some metafictional flourishes when Fox Boy and Oriole Girl discuss perhaps getting rid of "the author," and what might happen to them if they do. That shows, of course, that what we are reading has been crafted by a single craftsman, rather than the shared or repeated mode of the Indian legends. And it forces us to remember to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, too: Indian Tales is more fiction than ethnography, more novel than myth.