The first human storytellers observed their immediate neighbors in the animal kingdom (bears, lions, deer, birds, fish, bison, etc.) as a matter of survival. In Native American traditions, rituals associated with hunting emerged and expressed the relationships between the hunter and the hunted. Salmon in the Pacific Northwest and buffalo in the Plains were the focal point of foodways and folklore alike for the nations that depended on them. In the absence of writing systems, images expressed essential truths that influenced the development of Native American storytelling. Objects such as masks and headdresses from different regions reflected natural reverence for animals as spiritual beings. These were used during healing and funerary rituals as a way to translate symbol into meaning and to appeal to the divine essence in the natural world. These objects carry participants from the magical to the everyday to garner favor and appease spirits in the supernatural world.
Native Americans frequently drew and sculpted animals as a way of abstracting the spirit world in visual form and considering the spirit separately from the material existence. For example, animals such as bear, eagle, wolf, seal, otter, and deer are characters that bring meaning to the distribution or redistribution of resources in potlatch ceremonies in the Pacific Northwest, in which the host distributes gifts to other participants. Masks, within this context, are more than just works of art; they are semantically understood by their uses. A mask must have the power to convince; the mask and storytelling dancer are essential to the indigenous animal tale being conveyed. Along the northwest coast, Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian women wove the wool of mountain goats and cedar bark fibers into Chilkat blankets worn in potlatch ceremonies. Portrait masks of human ancestors could reflect individuals so revered that the society desired them to remain, and the dancer (tale-teller) uses the mask to retrieve the ancestor’s life. In this context, use is what anoints seemingly inanimate objects with life; only when something has expressed meaning, has it existed. For this reason, many objects of traditional Native American culture are destroyed after they have served their purpose in ceremonies—they are returned to the earth.
Native Americans incorporated animals into their creation stories as contributors to the formation of the existing world. Significantly, these animals occasionally bungle the job. Northeastern Indians depicted the Earth Diver in the form of a beaver, muskrat, or water bird who carried mud from the primal deep to place it on the back of a great turtle. The Lenape (Delaware) Indians’ story of the Great Turtle or Turtle Island, first chronicled in 1678, contained this motif. In this story, Sky Woman falls down to the earth when it was covered with water. Various animals including Beaver and a water bird tried to swim to the bottom of the ocean to bring back dirt to create land, but Muskrat succeeded in gathering the dirt that was placed on the back of a turtle, which grew into the land known today as North America. In the Southwest a great spider wove the universe out of her body and then taught humans how to weave on a loom of her husband’s design. Trickster, or Transformer, animals are down-to-earth deities who often are irresponsible or unethical spirits like the coyote or rabbit; they intervene in very human ways in worldly affairs. In the case of the Pomo Coyote trickster, the humans that he creates out of feathers wind up seeking his ultimate destruction.
As a result of being dispossessed of their land, many tribal entities have not been recognized by federal authorities; therefore, many nations have lost access to tribal objects that found their way into museums or private collections. As a result, tribes have lost cultural knowledge because they were forcibly removed from their original cultural environments, and objects such as baskets were destroyed. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) initiated a process that requires careful sorting, identifying, and consulting tribal leaders regarding Native American objects held in institutions, and the act has been an opportunity to build trust that benefits both educational institutions and Indian nations. Conversations between tribal experts and curators as part of consultations have initiated conversations that have surfaced long-forgotten tribal consciousness about indigenous animal tales.
European Fables in the New World
The fable is one of the earliest forms of animal tales in Western European literature, bridging oral traditions and the earliest stages of written literature. They instruct readers on the ways of the world through stories of animal shrewdness. Fables became a popular device for teaching the newly literate, as they were often generously illustrated. Few today know the extensive variety of functions that fables once served. Since the Enlightenment era, fables have been used as texts for inculcating societal values in young children. A common theme found in fables is the importance of remaining on good terms with those in power while saving one’s own skin. “Reynard the Fox” is a lengthier fable that was first developed during the Middle Ages in Europe. This fable consists of cycles of animal tales containing multiple morals to address human misbehavior.
The most common form of literary fable was the exemplum, a story that illustrates the importance of adhering to moral conduct. A pourquoi story is an allegorical animal tale used to explain the existence of certain ordinary natural phenomena. This kind of animal tale is situational and contains some kind of self-incriminating, foolish, or hasty action to which a moral is affixed. “Henny Penny” is a cumulative fool story that uses the refrain “the sky is falling” to underscore the foolishness of the hen’s hysteria. This tale traces its origins many centuries into the past and was part of the Brothers Grimm collection of German-language folktales in the early nineteenth century. In time, English-language readers in North America came to recognize Henny Penny as Chicken Little. European animal tales were very popular in colonial America, and their popularity continued with the appearance of numerous printed collections of traditional folktales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many of which have been adapted into films.
American Animal Tales
Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–1860), using the pseudonym “Peter Parley” for his narrator, appeared as a kind-hearted old man in books of instruction that attractively presented moral lessons in a chatty style, using animals as characters. In the next generation folklorist Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) wove together many African American folktales in his well-known Uncle Remus stories. Harris described himself as a redactor of folklore of the Southern plantations. Harris’s “Brer Rabbit” tales used outlines of plantation stories and enriched them with vernacular language. During the Civil War, Harris worked for room and board at the Turnwold Plantation near Eatonton, Georgia, where he spent his spare time in the slave quarters absorbing African American storytelling, which utilized animal characters. Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880) featured a trickster Brer Rabbit (Brother Rabbit) who continually tries to outwit his nemesis, Brer Fox. Harris’s Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) linked together a number of stories within an animal tale frame featuring children visiting a land where animals can speak.
In modern American fiction, writers have picked up the folklore tradition of featuring animals and have used this device to steer readers away from moral instruction and toward appreciation of nature. For example, Jack London’s two novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) feature dogs as protagonists. They are set in the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. Call of the Wild’s leading character is a domesticated ranch dog named Buck who was stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. Buck is forced to fight to dominate other dogs in a harsh climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on primordial instincts and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London’s novels and many others illustrate the enduring appeal of animals as a focal point of storytelling and as a way to understand humankind’s relationship with nature.
Animal tales constitute an important segment of folklore in the United States. They feature in Native American, European American, and African American traditions, as well as many other national traditions that have taken root on American soil. Jack London’s stories, such as The Call of the Wild, called readers to a heightened awareness of the problems in the relationship between man and nature. (Library of Congress)
Many children have grown up with nursery rhymes like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” which are part of a larger tradition of rhymes, fables, tales, and stories featuring animals. From Aesop’s Fables to the stories of the Brothers Grimm and beyond, animal tales occupy a broad territory in the folklore tradition and serve as an importance source of cultural production in the present day. The wide popularity and commercial success of Disney’s adaptation of traditional animal tales in animated films like The Lion King (1994), Chicken Little (2005), and The Princess and the Frog (2009) ensure that these tales will continue to entertain and instruct American children far into the future.
Meredith Eliassen
See also Coyote Tales; How the Bat and Flying Squirrel Got Their Wings; Pourquoi Tales; Tiger Tales of the Hmong Americans; Trickster Rabbit
Further Reading
Arnold, A. James. 1996. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Brucha, Joseph. 1992. Native American Animal Stories. Golden, CO: Fulcrum.
Hyde, Lewis. 2010. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Porter, J. R., and W. M. S. Russell, eds. 1978. Animals in Folklore. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.