Pomo Indian Myths and Some of their Sacred Meanings

By Cora Clark and Texa Bowen Williams

In this volume, which was first published in 1954, some forty-odd myths collected at various Pomo settlements are given clearly and concisely by Cora Clark and Texa Bowen Williams. It includes a separate section in which the sister authors provide a partial analysis of the myths based upon the interpretations given them by the storytellers. The meanings attributed to the tales include much nature symbolism: coyote, in an abbreviated creation myth, for example, is said to represent earth; Frog Woman, water; Kingfisher, air; and the Lizard, fire. In other tales, the number four is said to represent the growth principle; arrows, heat rays; and so on. This type of symbolism has not been attributed to the Pomo in previous discussions, and is thus represented here for the first time. A fascinating addition to the literature on Pomo mythology!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Sep 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789122619

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Text originally published in 1954 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

POMO INDIAN MYTHS

And Some of Their Sacred Meanings

Collected by CORA CLARK and her Sister,

TEXA BOWEN WILLIAMS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

FOREWORD 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5

INTRODUCTION 6

WHAT ARE MYTHS? 8

BIRD TOTEMS 9

THE INDIAN GOD, COYOTE 10

CLEAR LAKE, OR KA-BATIN (Big Water) 11

THE STORIES AS TOLD BY THE POMO INDIAN MYTH-TELLER’S 12

THE SONG OF THE WIND 12

THE CALL TO THE ROUNDHOUSE 13

THE BASKET OF PLENTY 14

THE DISOBEDIENT BOY 15

A LULLABY 17

THE SONG OF THE MORNING STAR 18

HOW THE POMOS CAME TO CALIFORNIA 20

THE LIZARD HAND 21

THE BIRDS HAVE A RACE 21

SKOSHELKEL 22

NUKUWEE, THE HERO 26

THE MARRIAGE OF NUKUWEE 30

WHY THE CROW IS BLACK 33

HOW FIRE CAME TO THE BUCKEYE TREE 33

THE BRAVE WOODPECKER 35

THE OFFENDED FISH 35

SUN HAWK AND THE MAGIC SLINGSTONE 35

SUN HAWK AND THE MONEYBAGS 36

SUN HAWK FACES HIS PUNISHMENT 37

SUN HAWK AND TUKANU 38

TUKANU GETS FIRE FOR SUN HAWK 40

SUN HAWK GETS LIGHT FOR THE WORLD 41

SUN HAWK LEARNS ABOUT DEATH 42

SONG TO A DEPARTING SPIRIT 43

TWO LONELY LITTLE BOYS 44

THE RABBIT IN THE MOON 45

THE SONG OF FIRE 47

THE ORIGIN OF SICKNESS 48

A LESSON IN POLITENESS 49

LAZY COYOTE 49

BREAD FROM HEAVEN 50

OH, DOCTOR! 51

HOW BUZZARD LOST HIS VOICE 54

TRUE BRAVERY 56

THE ORIGIN OF MOUNT KONOCTI 56

THE FOOTPRINT OF A GOD 56

THE WANDERING HUNTER 58

WHY THE POMOS VANISHED FROM NAPA COUNTY 60

THE FIRST JEALOUS HUSBAND 62

GRAY SQUIRREL AND THE GIANT 64

THE RAINBOW-CLAD ISLES 67

CLIMBING TO HEAVEN ON THE KO KO 69

THE QUAIL’S CRY 73

SOME OF THE SECRET MEANINGS OF THE TALES 78

INTRODUCTION 78

THE EIGHT GREAT ONES 80

THE ROUNDHOUSE 82

SACRED NUMBERS 82

A PARTIAL ANALYSIS OF THE STORIES 84

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 101

FOREWORD

BY the civilized people of Europe we Indians were called primitive people of North and South America. The red races of both Americas had a rich heritage of legendary lore. All tribes of Indians had rich and meaningful stories, from the birth of man on this continent to this day.

I saw, heard, participated in and learned the ancient ceremonies, songs, dances, games, legends, and laws of my people long before I attended the white man’s schools.

By observing nature’s teachings down through the ages, we wove our stories around Mother Nature and the animal kingdom. The authors of the following work have kept the stories of the Pomo Indians pure in every way. To my knowledge no other writers have ever done this. Rather they idealize the legends to such an extent that they lose their meaning and purpose.

Knowing these stories as I do, I cannot praise the authors too highly, for they have given you in this book stories that are truly Indian legends in their purest form.

CHIEF EAGLEWING

KAROK TRIBE

A member of a branch of the Pomo Indian tribes, Eaglewing lives near the border where northern California and Oregon meet.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Narratives related by the following Pomo Indians:

Harris Holmes, Kiou or Yomta (chief) of the secret religious Kuksu cult at The Big Valley Village.

Mateo, uncle of Harris Holmes, and chief of the Mashelkel village at Sulphur Bank. Chief Mateo is a very old man.

Modun, head chief presiding over all of the Pomo groups, resident of Kabel near Upper Lake (an arm of Clear Lake, which is 30 miles long and 10 mi. wide.)

Katana, doctor and chief of the Yokiah tribe of the village about two miles north of Ukiah, Cal.

Elwah Tupi, Kiou of the Kuksu cult and tribal chief of the village near Middletown (at the lower or southern end of Clear Lake).

Some white residents of the Clear Lake region who are students of the Pomo Indians around the Lake:

Mrs. Evaline Jordan, Pomo Games.

Mrs. Clarence Beck, Pomo Language.

Lydia Maria Lathrop, M.G. Vallejo, Defender of the Frontier of California in the University of California Library.

INTRODUCTION

THE kinship of the Pomo stories with those of ancient races is much more definite than one would expect it to be after being so far removed in time and space from its ancestral source. But the life of a tale well-told is of all things the most enduring! Civilizations with mighty temples and palaces builded by powerful rulers spring up, endure for a while, and crumble into decay; but the work which men fashion of a mouthful of air defies the centuries and keeps its form, its quivering substance, its life and meaning; altering its form, maybe, becoming colored by its surroundings as a flower fits itself to the soil and climate, but with its essence unchanging.

In all theology there is an indefiniteness and an uncertainty that lends fascination. Tantalizing theories constantly present themselves, theories which the student of folklore may follow through many a tangled maze as one follows a will-o’-the wisp over a marshland without ever coming up to it. Very little can be caught and pinned down and tagged as fact, as can be done in the more exact sciences.

Pomo religion has its roots embedded in the earliest religious faiths known to mankind, faiths which have been passed down by another route to us of today, and have become incorporated in Christianity.

One extremely interesting feature of Pomo folklore is that the Pomos have preserved intact many of the ancient, original myths complete; whereas only the fragments of such myths have been discovered elsewhere.

With no written language by which to record the history of their yesteryears, no complete and accurate account of their past has been preserved. But they have clung tenaciously to their religious life and to its beliefs and customs. In this field they are rich in memories.

From what land, from what people and from what age the Pomos developed, or maybe borrowed, their religious myths, are questions that may never be answered satisfactorily. When we are told that Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed,

Where Alph the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea,

we may enjoy the story and admire the telling without feeling obliged to trace the exact location of the river. But all of us have natural, human—perhaps one should say divine—curiosity. The human mind with its divine curiosity likes to speculate on hidden meanings. These Pomos have a way with them of exciting, of stirring to its depths this human inclination to probe meanings. For right in Pomo land, so the Pomos say, is this same dark, cavernous river that the spirit of man must cross when he goes into the Great Hereafter. Across this chasm is a narrow threadlike bridge which the new spirit must cross, so say the Pomos, the ancient Celts and the Persians. This and other stories innumerable which are today current among the Pomos reach back for thousands of years into a past so remote one can hardly conceive of it.

So, one can only theorize as to where, when and how the Pomos come to have among their tales, a Garden of Eden story, and a flood story equal in importance and destruction to our own Hebrew flood story. Since they tell many of the same stories with which we are familiar and which are found among other races, there must have been at an ancient date some sort of contact. It was probably before the dawn of history. The Pomos frequently refer to certain events as having occurred across the ocean before we came into California. They seem to have a definite memory of the land of their ancestry. They say they came from a land called Elam or Ulam, a word which means spider; that the land was so called because of a net-work of canals like a spider’s web which intersected the land; that the land lay eastward across the ocean.

There is one thing as certain as life, their myths have meaning and are not just idle tales. But they are so like tales of other countries, one can scarcely deny their common origin, an origin of which the world is yet ignorant, both as to race and the home of that race. Concerning the parent stock from which the Greeks inherited their mythology Lord Francis Bacon says:

The mythology of the Greeks which their oldest writers do not pretend to have invented, was no more than a light air which passed from a more ancient people into the flutes of the Greeks, which they modulated to such descants as best suited their fancies.

The Greeks, preserving some memory of their great country and its history, converted its kings into gods, and depicted this ancestral land as the heaven of the race, just as the Hebrews saw it as a Garden of Eden, the birthplace of the race. It looks as if the Pomos, inheriting from the same source, no doubt, as the Greeks and Hebrews, have likewise modulated these same tales as their temperaments directed.

Lord Bacon has also said,

We may be sure that there never was a myth without a meaning; that mythology is not a bundle of ridiculous fancies invented for vulgar amusement; that there is not one of the stories, no matter how silly or absurd, which was not founded on fact, or which did not hold a significance.

WHAT ARE MYTHS?

MYTHS are the effort of primitive man to explain natural phenomena. They embrace man’s complete culture—his religion, education, history, and his morals. The products of his imaginings and his dreams, they represent the accumulated beliefs, superstitions, and customs which have developed through the ages. They are the answer given by primitive science to the questions put by the primitive child.

Myths are the stories of the gods and their doings, of the spirit in created things. They endeavor to explain the origin of fire, the cause of the shooting star and of the rainbow. According to the Pomo Indians, the storm and rain, for example, are brought by the Thunder-Bird, a great black-winged creature, who carries rain on his outspread wings.

In myths we also find relics of lost arts and sciences. And they contain reports of actual events—facts with fanciful embroidures and emblazonings. They often represent the traditions and memories of geological changes and catastrophies. Even lost civilizations may be preserved in such handed-down memories as lost Atlantis or a sunken Lemuria.

BIRD TOTEMS

EACH Indian believes that he is related to some special animal or bird, the deer, bear, or wolf; the flicker, woodpecker, or quail. He will not kill the animal or bird with which he claims kinship, for it would anger the Turtle-Creator, who would in turn destroy the entire tribe.

Similarly there is a tabu upon killing those animals which are believed to be related to the sun and consequently are called the sun animals.

These beliefs are undoubtedly an inheritance from the ancient zodiac of the Sumerians, and passed down by them to the Chaldeans. Among the animals upon which there is a tabu are the white deer, the earthly symbol of the virgin of the zodiac; the panther, substitute for Leo, the lion; the wolf, which is likewise an ancient symbol of the sun; the bear, the material manifestation of the Earth-Mother; and the fish, the tabu affecting only the silver salmon with purple spots. This sacred purple-spotted salmon is also described in Irish myths. It was the fish that lived in Conla’s well at the bottom of the ocean beside the roots of the World-Tree.

THE INDIAN GOD, COYOTE

IN the Indian Why Stories, tales of the Blackfoot Indians collected by Frank B. Linderman, there is found the ever-present character, Napa, often designated as The Old Man.

Linderman calls him the strangest character in Indian folklore. Sometimes he appears as a god, The Creator; again he is a fool, a thief, a clown. To the Blackfoot Indians, Napa is not the deity, but one who occupies a subordinate position, possessing many attributes, however, which have caused him to be confounded with Manitou himself.

Blackfoot Indians possess the highest veneration for Manitou, the great God. Their attitude toward Napa is different. A strange mixture of the fallible human and the powerful undergod, he appears to