Beginnings: Native Oral Traditions, Contact, Exploration

This is Unit Three of American Literature, part one of two: the writing of the beginnings, before there was a nation for it to belong to. Units one and two gave you the instruments. This unit is the first period the exam tests, fifteen percent of the questions, and its governing idea is one part two pays off: always ask who is holding the pen. The oldest layer of this literature is Native and oral, and it survives only because outsiders wrote it down, often centuries later and sometimes in translation twice over. The second layer is European and written to be read in Europe, by men reporting to patrons, selling voyages to investors, or defending their own conduct in print. This part takes those two layers in order. First the oral stories, three accounts of a world being made and two more explaining a hero and a sickness, and then the technique that holds such a story together and a way of reading one under exam conditions. Then the Europeans: a sailor reporting a paradise, a castaway writing on foot, a soldier defending himself in print, and the advertising that sold a continent. Part two takes the collision between the layers, and the documents that came out of it. By the end you will be able to say what the period covers and why its oldest texts reach us mediated. To distinguish the creation accounts. To read an oral text for what it explains. To place Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca and Smith by what each was writing for. And to recognize a promotional tract when the exam prints one.

Two entries to set the ground: what the board counts as this period, and why its oldest layer is borrowed.

Fifteen percent, mostly not fiction.

AML 0201 What "Beginnings" Means on This Exam

The board's first period runs from the beginnings to eighteen hundred and carries fifteen percent of the questions. It covers Native oral traditions recorded later, the writings of exploration and conquest, Puritan New England, and the Revolution. The exam treats sermons, letters and narratives as literature, so most of what it tests from this period is not fiction at all.

Performed first, transcribed by strangers.

AML 0202 Oral Tradition: Literature Before Writing

The continent's oldest literature was spoken rather than written, and it survives because outsiders wrote it down centuries later. The witness cautions that these texts reach us with omissions and mediations, that they were performed rather than recited, and that thousands of distinct peoples cannot be represented by any anthology's handful. No selection speaks for Native literature entire.

Four entries on origins: three accounts of how a world was made, and one account of where stories came from.

A woman falls into water.

AML 0203 The Iroquois Creation Story

In the anchor's text, water covers the earth when a woman falls from the sky. Ducks break her fall and a giant tortoise takes her weight, growing until he becomes an island. She bears twin boys, one of them making maize and fruit and the other making weeds and vermin. Those twins organize the whole of the story.

An island hung from a rock.

AML 0204 "How the World Was Made": The Cherokee Account

The Cherokee story hangs the earth, a floating island, from a sky of solid rock by four cords that will break when the world grows old. The animals lived crowded above until Water Beetle dived and brought up soft mud, which spread out into the island. The story ends in a prophecy rather than in comfort.

A world rubbed from a body.

AML 0205 The Pima Story of Creation

The Pima account begins with no earth, no water and no light, only a person floating in the darkness, the Doctor of the Earth. Having wandered long enough, he rubs his breast and rubs out a greasy earth from the perspiration, and from that handful the world is made. Creation here comes from a body rather than from water.

An orphan, and the source of tales.

AML 0206 The Seneca Story of How Tales Began

The Seneca "Origin of Folk Stories" follows an orphan named Gaqka, or Crow, who hunts birds for his food and is mocked by the village for it. He resolves to leave his tormentors and become a great hunter, and the tale goes on to explain where stories themselves came from. No early source on this course's shelf calls him a trickster.

Four entries: a hero, a bargain between animals and plants, the technique behind both, and a way to read them.

A hero who found Europe first.

AML 0207 Glooskap and the Wabanaki Hero

The Passamaquoddy tell of Glooskap, a hero who called every animal with a pipe, and whose adventures the witness prints from Leland's collection of eighteen eighty-four. In the tale given, Glooskap travels to England and to France and makes America known to the Europeans. The claim reverses the discovery story on purpose.

Animals invent illness; plants answer.

AML 0208 The Origin of Disease and Medicine

In the Cherokee account, printed from Mooney's collection of eighteen ninety-one, animals and people once talked together and lived at peace. People multiplied until the animals were cramped, and the bow was invented. The animals answer by inventing diseases, and the plants answer that by providing cures. The story explains a balance rather than a punishment.

Built to be remembered aloud.

AML 0209 Oral Formula, Repetition, and Performance

Oral literature is built to be remembered and performed: repeated phrases, numbered sequences, animals with fixed characters, and endings that explain some present fact. A reader meeting such a text on the exam should expect a shape held together by repetition, and should expect an explanation rather than a moral. The written version records a performance.

Four questions, answered from the text.

AML 0210 Reading a Creation Story as Literature

Exam passages from oral tradition are answered by four questions, and the answers come from the printed text rather than from anything known about the people. First: what is there before creation, since water, darkness or a crowded sky each start a different story, and the Iroquois begin in water while the Pima begin in darkness. Second: who acts, since the actor may be a falling woman, a diving animal or a single person, and the agent tells you what kind of power the story credits. Third: what the world is made from, since mud fetched from the bottom, a turtle's back and a body's own substance are three different claims about the world's nature. Fourth: what the story explains at its close, since these narratives usually end by accounting for something a listener can see, whether maize and weeds, illness and its cures, or the tales themselves. The commonest error is reading such a story for a moral. These texts explain how a present arrangement came about, and the question will ask what the story accounts for rather than what it recommends.

Six entries on the Europeans: four writers, one famous episode, and the commercial purpose behind most of the genre.

A failed route, a reported paradise.

AML 0211 Columbus and the Letter That Invented America

A sailor from his youth, Columbus sought an Atlantic route to Asia that he reckoned at three thousand miles, won Ferdinand and Isabella's support in fourteen ninety-two, and landed in what is now the Bahamas. He returned three more times, reporting a paradise and noting the gold that the people wore. The reports are his own.

The only account written on foot.

AML 0212 Cabeza de Vaca: Shipwreck, Captivity, and a Changed Eye

Cabeza de Vaca sailed with a Spanish expedition that fell apart, then spent years crossing the southwest on foot, held by and later living among the peoples he met. His *Relation* describes the country from inside it rather than from a ship's deck. Captivity changed what he was able to see.

Soldier, captive, councillor, president.

AML 0213 Captain John Smith and the Making of a Legend

Born to a Lincolnshire farming family, Smith fought in the Dutch war at sixteen and later against the Turks, earning his captaincy, and escaped slavery by killing the man who owned him. Appointed to the Virginia Company's council and arrested on the voyage out, he became president of the colony's council in sixteen-oh-eight. Smith's writings are the source for Smith.

The rescued man is the source.

AML 0214 Pocahontas: The Story, the Sources, and the Doubt

On an exploring trek Smith was captured by people ruled by Powhatan, whose daughter Pocahontas, the anchor says, saved him from execution. The episode comes from Smith's own later account, written at a time when both Powhatan and his daughter were dead, and a reader should know whose telling it is before weighing it.

Advertising, in the shape of a book.

AML 0215 The Promotional Tract: Writing to Recruit

Much exploration writing was advertising. Its authors wrote to attract investors and settlers, so the soil is always fertile, the harbours deep, the natives friendly or conquerable, and the hardships brief. Recognizing the purpose is the first step in reading the genre, because the purpose selects the facts. That optimism is commercial rather than naive.

A maypole, and an expulsion.

AML 0216 Thomas Morton and the Merrymount Quarrel

Thomas Morton, a Devon lawyer who studied the Algonquian peoples among whom he settled, founded Merrymount in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts, arriving with Captain Wollaston in sixteen twenty-four. His colony's maypole and its trade with Native neighbours scandalized Plymouth, which broke the settlement up and sent him home. Morton and Bradford were enemies.

That is the first layer and the second. Part two takes what happened where they met. You can say what the board's first period covers, fifteen percent of the questions, and why its oldest texts reach us with omissions and mediations, on the witness's own caution. You can tell the Iroquois account, which begins in water with a woman falling from the sky, from the Cherokee, which hangs a floating island from a sky of rock by four cords, from the Pima, which rubs a world out of the body of a person floating in the dark. You know the Seneca tale that explains where stories themselves came from, the Passamaquoddy hero who reverses the discovery story by finding Europe, and the Cherokee account in which animals invent disease and plants answer with cures. You can read any of them through four questions, and expect an explanation rather than a moral at the close. And on the European side you can place Columbus, who reported a paradise and noticed the gold, Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote the only Spanish account composed on foot, John Smith, who is his own source for Smith, and the promotional tracts whose optimism is commercial rather than naive. Part two begins with a rising the Spanish lost.