Native American Legends Appropriated from European/Biblical Sources?

[Dustin Naef]

For the past month I've been writing a series of articles about Mount Shasta's legends for Ancient Origins website, these have turned out to be very popular and well-received, generating a lot of interest and discussion. The most frequent response I get from critics are that the Native American legends I write about must have been appropriated from European and Biblical sources. I'm not persuaded by that argument, but here are my thoughts about it which were published yesterday...

http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/legends-mount-shasta-abode-devil-part-3-prehistoric-traditions-giants-and-021039

###

MOUNT SHASTA'S LEGENDS: CALIFORNIA'S PREHISTORIC TRADITIONS OF GIANTS AND MYSTERIOUS BEINGS

There are countless Native American legends describing prehistoric giants, flood myths, lost civilizations, cataclysms, the star people, and other mysterious beings who belonged to some remote and forgotten era in California’s past, suggesting a radically different chronology and ancient history than what is generally known today.

I’m personally not persuaded by the arguments that North American legends referring to a Great Flood, prehistoric giants, and other mysterious beings were appropriated by Native Americans from European and Biblical sources, and glossed over with their own cultural nuances.

If there are common similarities in these traditions to the legends of other cultures, it’s my assumption that it’s because these legends are based on historical events that occurred in the remote past, which were witnessed, recorded, and remembered by ancient people all over the world.

###

I shortened the post as per forum guidelines, if anyone wants to know my thoughts on this matter please follow the link to read the full article.

[Ahnung-quay]

Hi Dustin. I also don't feel that the Native Americans appropriated and adapted Christian beliefs to their own stories. Being from Wisconsin, I've studied some of the tribal stories here. For example, the Ho Chunks have stories about giants, little people, fairy like beings, mermen, and water spirits. These beings were sometimes linked with stories about the stars. Their oral tradition is that their stories are their own and they are ancient.
In Wisconsin there are mounds, one of which is called the man mound. It depicts a giant man possibly wearing horns on his head. Their are also water spirit mounds with long tails.
My intuition tells me that these beings once existed, probably all over the earth.

[DNA]

Hi Dustin.
I started a thread here about four years ago called "the origins of Mt. Shasta". https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...f-mount-shasta
A few folks contributed and it was a good time in so far as different folks coming together and bringing information to the table. One area I was really disappointed in would be the lack of information regarding Native American myths from the area.
When you read "Hunt for the Skinwalker" by George Knapp and Colm Kehler they do a splendid job of incorporating myths from both the Utes and Navajo tribes in connection to the area that was to become known as the Gorman Ranch and then the Skinwalker Ranch.
I've personally not been able to find such data connected to Mt. Shasta and I've always considered that frustrating.

[DNA]

Posted by Ahnung-quay (here)
Hi Dustin. I also don't feel that the Native Americans appropriated and adapted Christian beliefs to their own stories. Being from Wisconsin, I've studied some of the tribal stories here. For example, the Ho Chunks have stories about giants, little people, fairy like beings, mermen, and water spirits. These beings were sometimes linked with stories about the stars. Their oral tradition is that their stories are their own and they are ancient.
In Wisconsin there are mounds, one of which is called the man mound. It depicts a giant man possibly wearing horns on his head. Their are also water spirit mounds with long tails.
My intuition tells me that these beings once existed, probably all over the earth.

Strange things such as you speak most definitely exist.
I've always had a problem with the legends of little people living inside the earth and using caves to come to the surface. And then I ran into the story of the Pedro Mountain Mummy. This is one of those amazing stories that tends to remove most of the doubt about those little guys existing.






http://www.legendsofamerica.com/wy-littlepeople.html

To the Shoshone Indians of Wyoming , this small race of people were known as the Nimerigar and their legends told of the little people attacking them with tiny bows and poisoned arrows.


The Nimerigar were also known to kill their own kind with a blow to the head when they became too ill to be an active part of their society. Though part of the legend, this practice of sometimes killing the infirmed was a also a regular part of life for many of the nomadic Indian tribes.

The Pedro Mountains of south central Wyoming photo

courtesy Bureau of Land Management.

Though many believe these "little people” to be only the stuff of legends, several discoveries point to the contrary, the most significant of which, was a 14” inch fully formed mummy found in 1932. Called the Pedro Mountains Mummy, he was discovered when two men were digging for gold in the San Pedro Mountains about 60 miles southwest of Casper, Wyoming.

After continually working a rich vein and running only into more and more rock, Cecil Main and Frank Carr used dynamite to blast a section of the mountainside to get at the gold. After the dust cleared, a cave could be seen in the rock face. The small cavern was about 15 feet long and 4 feet high and had been totally sealed off from the outside world by a thick wall of rock.

As the men entered the cave they were surprised to see a small a pygmy-like man sitting cross-legged upon a ledge. The tiny mummy was only about 6 ½ inches tall in its seated position, and estimated at 14 inches tall in a standing position. Its skin was brown and wrinkled, its forehead low and flat, its features displaying a flat nose, heavy-lidded eyes and a very wide mouth with thin lips. The face looked like of an old man. It was so well preserved, its fingernails could still been on its hands and the top of its head was covered in a dark jelly-like substance that was still pliable.

The two prospectors took their find to Casper, Wyoming and in no time, scientists came from all over the nation to have a look at the mummy. Sure that it was a hoax, extensive tests were performed when the professionals assumed it was a pieced-together work of taxidermy. However, the anthropologists would soon be surprised to see that x-rays displayed a perfectly formed, manlike skeleton. The tests also showed that the mummy had been killed violently, as the spine was damaged, a collarbone broken, and the skull had been smashed in by a heavy blow. The soft substance at the top of the head exposed brain tissue and congealed blood. After the tests were complete, the scientists estimated that the mummy was a full grown adult who was approximately 65 years old at the time of his death. One odd finding was that its teeth were overly pointed, having a full set of canines.

I will add that a dentist bought the mummy after viewing it as authentic. He continued performing tests and X-Rays until he was mysteriously murdered and the mummy stolen never to be seen or heard from again.


I'm in agreement with folks who think the Smithsonian has been scooping up the remains of giants from all over the United States since the 1800's. I think as time went on various parts of the government decided to extend the secrecy afforded to the remains of giants to other creatures such as Sasquatch and apparently little people. Any life form that would upset the apple cart of Darwinian thinking is now viewed as something that can not be allowed to see the light of day and as such influence public opinion as to the existence of.
So in short, there appears to be a conspiracy of sorts to aquire all physical bodies that are not in the Darwinian line of thinking.

[Words of Joy]

Interesting OP... Noticed a link with this: http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-par...history-110054

[Dustin Naef]

Posted by DNA (here)
Hi Dustin.
I started a thread here about four years ago called "the origins of Mt. Shasta". https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...f-mount-shasta
A few folks contributed and it was a good time in so far as different folks coming together and bringing information to the table. One area I was really disappointed in would be the lack of information regarding Native American myths from the area.
When you read "Hunt for the Skinwalker" by George Knapp and Colm Kehler they do a splendid job of incorporating myths from both the Utes and Navajo tribes in connection to the area that was to become known as the Gorman Ranch and then the Skinwalker Ranch.
I've personally not been able to find such data connected to Mt. Shasta and I've always considered that frustrating.

Thanks for that I'll check out that thread. I went through the same ordeal when I began to research my Mount Shasta book, a lot of the sources I used were Native-authored books and ethnographic narratives which you can't easily find online or Google, you have to actually go to libraries and hunt for them in the archives. Outside of New Age and channeled material, a lot of the information about Mount Shasta is not online. That's why you see the same stuff about Mount Shasta coming up over and over again, because people are just Googling it and pulling all that stuff out of all the material generated by channelers, and other New Age sources. Not to say it's wrong, but it's not the whole story. There's much more to the mountain's history than just the modern New Age material, it probably goes clear back to the Ice Age. Most of the history about Mount Shasta that people rely on today was written by people who were never there in prehistoric times. Their ancestors were never there beyond a few hundred years ago. My eBook contains an appendix of nearly 100 pages of additional historical material about Mount Shasta which most people have never seen or heard of, including a lengthy document where local Native Americans were interviewed in a government sponsored study (for the Forest Service) about their ancient traditions surrounding Mount Shasta - most people have never seen or heard of this, but it's a major source I relied on.

The other thing too in examining all of these sources, I have read and heard all the strange tales about Little People and other mysterious beings, and such things do exist, but you also have to be careful how you interpret them. There were language barriers. When a Native American elder, for example, was being asked a question about their traditions by an anthropologist a hundred years ago, who was writing a book, the elders might have had trouble trying to describe some things or find the correct expression, because English was not their normal language, and the anthropologist just wrote everything down verbatim. When an elder mentioned the "ant people" or "little people" they may not have been trying to describe Leprechauns or insect-like humanoids, but just been trying to find a way in their limited knowledge of English language to describe a person of small stature. Same thing with "giants". A hundred years ago, a Native American elders way of saying that someone had died and been buried might have been that they "turned to stone", and they might have referenced some unusual geological landmark as an example. That doesn't necessarily mean the person literally turned into a rock structure like in a fairy-tale, or that they were talking mythological nonsense, it was just their way of trying to describe something to someone in a foreign language [English] they didn't fully understand.