The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #51357   Message #1191024
Posted By: Q (Frank Staplin)
21-May-04 - 04:41 PM
Thread Name: Tune Req: Native American Folk Songs for kids
Subject: RE: Tune Req: Native American Folk Songs for kids
Recently reprinted at Univ. Arizona Press, paperback:
Frank Hamilton Cushing, "Zuñi Folk Tales," 474 pp. The tales are written in a form that is easily read aloud to an audience (as these tales were meant to be). The author lived as a Zuñi for many years. None of the tales has been Disneyfied or otherwise distorted. They were collected before 1900, and have not been contaminated by our culture's re-interpretations.Some remind of Aesop, e. g. The Coyote and the Ravens, How the Turtle Duped the Coyote, etc.

Not many songs, but here is one, from "The Boy Hunter Who Never Sacrificed to the Deer He Had Slain: or the Origin of the Society of Rattlesnakes."

A Call for the People to Gather-

Ye, our children, listen!
Ye I will this day inform,
Our child, our father,
He of the strong hand,
He who hunts the Deer
Goes into the Sunset world,
Goes, our Sun-father to greet;
Gather at the sacred houses,
Bring thy prayer-sticks, twines and feathers,
And prepare for him,-
For the Sun-father,
For the Moon-mother,
For the Great Ocean,
For the prey-beings, plumes and treasures.
Hasten, hasten, ye our children, in the morning!

One story, which my kids loved, was "How the Rattlesnakes came to be what they are." It starts out, "Know you that long ago there lived at Yathpew'nan, as live there now, many Rattlesnakes; but then they were men and women, only of a Rattlesnake kind."
The stories were collected before 1900, when the Zuñi People were little comtaminated by modern life.