wild cats etc

[Randolph Graczyk]

In a message dated 07/18/2002 1:28:43 PM Mountain Daylight Time,
John.Koontz at colorado.edu writes:


> On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Anthony Grant wrote:
> > Maybe this is why terms for 'whiteman' and 'trickster' (and both of
> > these from 'spider') are the same in some Northern Plains languages.
>
> It's not quite that simple, since the two cases of 'spider' = 'Trickster'
> that I know of off the top of my head are Cheyenne and Dakotan, and the
> Cheyenne case includes 'whiteman', while the Dakotan case doesn't.  On the
> other hand, as far as I can recall Mandan also has 'Trickster' =
> 'whiteman', but not 'Trickster' = 'spider'.  A further dimension, of
> course, is whether Trickster is called Whiteman in English by persons of
> the group in question.
>
> In the Dakotan case the term for 'whiteman' (was^i'c^huN) does, however,
> suggest a category of supernatural beings (s^ic^huN), though the 'steals
> fat' analysis is widely accepted by speakers, and apparently some people
> object to the s^ic^huN analysis, on prescriptive moral grounds ("people,
> and certainly not white people, can't be spirits") or on grounds of logic
> ("who would have thought a dumb thing like that?!").  Of course, I'm not
> sure if everyone who has made a contrary argument to me has been a Dakota
> person.  I suspect in most cases they haven't been, in fact.  Dakotanism
> doesn't seem to be an evangelistic movement except among 'whitepersons'.
> (I didn't mean the 'whitepersons' sarcastically.  It's just the plural.)
>
> I'm still getting caught up on my mail, but did want to point out that the
> Crow trickster term Isa'ahkawuattee 'Old Man Coyote' is also used, not for
> whitemen in general, but for the Catholic priest/Catholic Church.  A common
> explanation is that the early missionaries had things like mirrors and
> matches that were evidence of magical powers, hence the comparison to Old
> Man Coyote.  Another point of comparison mentioned by some is that Old Man
> Coyote taught the people how to live properly, and the priest does the
> same.


Randy

>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20020726/7f17124d/attachment.htm>