Native American Mythology gathers foundational accounts of Indigenous sacred narratives, ceremonial traditions, cosmologies, and heroic cycles as recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving among origin stories, animal-transformer tales, ritual explanations, and accounts of encounters with powerful beings, the volume displays considerable generic and regional range. Its most compelling selections reveal mythology not as static folklore but as a living framework for explaining land, kinship, morality, and the relation between human and other-than-human worlds. The contributors—Lewis Spence, James Owen Dorsey, Frank Hamilton Cushing, Washington Matthews, James Mooney, and Erminnie A. Smith—belonged to the formative era of comparative mythology, ethnology, and folklore collecting. Their records preserve material associated with diverse Native nations while also bearing the marks of their period's scholarly assumptions, transcription practices, and colonial conditions. Read critically, these varied documents illuminate both the depth of Indigenous intellectual traditions and the history of their mediation through early anthropology. This volume rewards readers seeking an expansive introduction to Native American narrative traditions and to the archive through which many such traditions first entered print. Students of folklore, religion, Indigenous studies, and literary history will find in it a valuable occasion to compare motifs, narrative forms, and cultural worlds. Its juxtaposed voices foster productive dialogue about preservation, interpretation, and responsible reading.
