Reading Notes Week 11: Myths & Legends of the Great Plains, Part A "The Ghost's Resentment" and "Three Ghost Stories"

• "The Ghost's Resentment"
• A Dakota tale
• tells the story of a man who warns his father and his father's two friends not to disturb the burial scaffold of a young Dakota man
• the father does not listen and says that he and his friends will go to the scaffold and cut off pieces of the burial tent to make robes
• because they have no robes
• the man asks his wife to fetch him a piece of white clay so that he may cover his skin with it - making himself look like a ghost
• the woman refuses and tells her husband to let the old men make their robes
• the man is persistent and she eventually gets the white clay
• the man whitened his whole body with the clay and went to the burial scaffold
• took a different route than the old men and traveled faster
• when he reached the burial scaffold the man climbed in the burial tent to wait for the old men
• when the old men reached the burial scaffold they decided to smoke a pipe with the deceased before cutting pieces of the tent to use as robes
• the man leaped from the tent and scared the old men
• the old men ran
• the man chased them
• the father's two friends fell
• the man ignored them and continued after this father
• when the father fell the old man sat astride him and ordered him to load his pipe
• the man smoked the pipe - still sitting astride his father
• the father keeps repeating "oh my grandchild" hoping the ghost (his disguised son) would take pity on him
• the man ordered the old men to leave and not visit the burial site again
• the man again outpaced the old men and returned home before they did
• he washed all of the chalk off
• when the old men returned frightened the man made fun of them and told them that they should've have listened to his warning 
• the man continually tried to get the old men to go back to the burial site and retrieve him a piece of the tent - they always refused
• "Three Ghost Stories"
• "The Forked Roads" - Omaha Story
• tells the story of what happens after death
• a spirit wanders on a path for 4 days
• the funeral fires should stay lit for 4 days so the spirit doesn't wander in the dark
• the trail eventually forks 
• an old man in a buffalo robe with he hair on the outside sits at the fork and directs the spirits which road to take
• one path is short and leads to the land of the good ghosts
• the other is long and the ghost wail along the way
• the spirits of suicides are doomed to hover over their grave forever
• the spirit of a murderer is always surrounded by wailing ghosts and will never have peace
• is always hungry even when it eats

(Little Snake an Omaha Interpreter from Omaha People Wikipedia)

• "Tattooed Ghosts" - Dakota story
• if a ghost wishes to travel the ghost road safely then they must tattoo themselves while still living, either on the forehead or the wrist
• an old woman on the road checks the ghosts tattoos - if the tattoos are present the ghost goes on to the many lodges
• if the tattoos are absent the old woman pushes the ghost from a cloud and it falls back to the land of the living - then it wanders the world 
• these banished ghosts sometimes visit the sick - are chased away by cedar smoke
• cedar is considered sacred
• if one of these ghosts calls to a loved one and the loved one answers they will soon die

(Eagle Dog a Yankton Dakota from firstpeople.us)

• "A Ghost Story" - Ponca story
• tells the story of many people traveling the warpath
• one night they settled and made camp - building a fire
• as they sat around the fire eating, they heard singing
• they pushed ashes over the fire and grabbed their bows
• they surrounded the person singing at the base of a tree
• he did not move just kept singing
• when they reached the tree nothing was there but a pile of bones
• in the Librivox recording, the narrator notes that the Dakota often hung their dead from trees

(Standing Bear with wife and son, Ponca from Ponca Tribe Wikipedia)

• Bibliography: Myths and Legends of the Great Plains by Katharine Berry Judson
• Storytelling notes: I really like these Native American ghost stories. I chose the Great Plains unit because of the connection to Oklahoma. I want to combine these ghost stories into a new story. I like the different ideas of the afterlife from different tribes. I think it will make for a great new story.