2
"There Was Just Animals Before"
Animals and Temporality
So
it happens
in the time
when people start to . . .
before there was no people.
Well anyway people start to . . .
Well, there happen to be people in these times.
There was just animals before.
Way back there was no people, just animals.
Well, I guess the people move into our country, this side of the country.
So they notice there was people.
In Rock Cree cosmogonic thought, animals existed before human beings in the first condition of the Earth, the age of the narratives called acaðohkiwin . Some Crees say that the superior being Kicimanitow made the Earth and the animals. Others speculate that the Earth and its animal inhabitants are without beginning, that they have always existed. Human beings were created and moved into the Churchill River country after the animals. Beyond this, there exists little unanimity or interest regarding the temporal ordering of such primordial events as the flood, human creation, or the differentiation of humans and animals.
"Acaðohkiwin " refers to a narrative recounting events that occurred in the early period of the world, a past both continuous with and detached from the present. During this era, animals talked and behaved in other respects like iðiniwak 'human beings', and this, in fact, is the char-
acteristic that Crees emphasize when describing it. The early world is also talked about in terms of the activities of the trickster-transformer character, Wisahkicahk, whose exploits transformed the social and biophysical environments. A blurring of human and animal categories and a changeful plasticity differentiate this epoch from the ensuing period that extends into the present. No event of abrupt transition between the two periods is identified. Acimowin refers to a narrative of events transpiring in this more recent condition of the universe. These incorporate spiritual events and presences, nonfactual from a Western perspective, as well as more prosaic stories of battles, trapping, hunting, marriage, and travel. The category is not limited to formal narratives but also includes gossip, reports of recent events, jokes, and humorous stories understood as fabrications. Whereas acimowina may be either true or false, acoðohkiwina are usually regarded as true accounts of factual events. The stories are said to have been passed down by word of mouth from the time of the events they describe or to have been dreamed long ago. The characters of acimowina are human beings, tied to geographic, genealogical, and other social contexts with which tellers and hearers are familiar. The characters of acaðohkiwina are not contextualized in this way: they include both animal and human (or humanoid) characters, but these are never identified as persons with whom the tellers have genealogical ties or immediate personal knowledge from waking experience.
The acaðohkiwina include stories of two distinguishable types from the point of view of their dramatis personae. The first type is exclusively concerned with animal characters, imaged in part theriomorphically but possessing also such characteristics as speech, fire, social organization, technology, and clothing. The second type focuses on what appear to be human characters who interact with each other and also with animals. The Wisahkicahk stories, for example, focus on the trickster-transformer, variously identified as a Cree Indian or as an ahcak 'spirit', and his encounters with both human and animal characters. Some Crees speculate that the "human" characters in these myths were not beings of the same kind as modem Indians. Representations of animals in these latter stories are variable. Some animal characters converse and otherwise participate in culture while retaining animal attributes. In the myth of Ayas, for example, the hero successively encounters a frog and a mouse who live in three-pole lodges and provide food and sewing services for their human "grandchild." Each repairs the hero's damaged moccasins but does so in a fashion consistent with her species'
characteristics. The frog woman sews the moccasins in the way that she jumps, such that the stitches are too far apart. The mouse woman sews with the stitches dose together, like mouse tracks in the snow (Brightman 1989b ). Other animal characters seem not to differ from their modem counterparts. Crees say that stories with exclusively animal characters describe events that occurred earlier than those in stories of the trickster and other humanoid heroes.
Animal Origins
When asked about animal "origins," Crees usually say that each modem species is the transformation or descendant of an individual animal being (or a class of such beings) who existed in the mythological age. The origins of these individual or multiple protoanimals, the characters of the first class of
I don't know any stories about how the animals were first made. They say they were here before the first people. But my father told me something that the old people learned in their dreams long ago. The animals came into the Churchill River country flying from the four directions. Some kinds came from the south and some from the north and east and west. All the dangerous animals came from the north. That happened before the time that Wisahkicahk [the transformer] was alive.
Johnny added that bears, wolverines, snakes, frogs, and misipisiwak 'water panthers' were the harmful animals associated with the north. The association of animals with the four cardinal points here evokes the complex directional symbolism in a Swampy Cree cosmogonic myth recorded by Cree Anglican clergyman James Settee in 1823 (Brown 1977), but the latter narrative lacks an account of animal origins. Myths describing single generalized creations of the modem animal species exist among Plains Cree groups, but these suggest the effects of Assiniboine or other infuences since they are without known parallel in the literature of Western Woods Crees. In the Plains Cree stories, the
modem animal species are transformed by hero characters from humanoid beings (Bloomfield 1930:82, 120, 295) or from the cimiskwanak , anthropophagous animals who ate the early humans (Ahenakew 1929:323).
The Rock Cree conception that modem animals derive by descent from the timeless protoanimals of the first condition of the world is supplemented by certain myths that identify some individual modem species as the transformation of humanoid characters. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1988:6-7) has recently drawn attention in the mythologies of South America to doctrines that animal species are derived from human or protohuman ancestors, a conception noted long ago by Speck (1935a :49) as characteristic of Eastern Cree evolutionary thought. For example, the hero character, Ayas, after bringing about an epic conflagration, voluntarily transforms himself into the first crow and his mother into the first woodpecker (Brightman 1989a :111); a Swampy Cree version (Skinner 1911:95) substitutes the gray jay and robin, respectively. The macabre rolling head that pursues Wisahkicahk and his younger brother becomes in Rock Cree myth the first sturgeon (Bright-man 1989b :12-13; cf. Russell 1898:203, Vandersteene 1969:47) when it falls from the back of the aquatic animal carrying it across a river. Wisahkicahk's adversarial father-in-law, Wimisos, becomes after his defeat the first northern pike in one account and the first tamarack tree in another (Brightman 1989a :26). The conception of human characters as the ancestors of animals is not, however, consistently elaborated or even very frequent in Rock Cree and other Western Woods Cree myth and is focused on fish and birds rather than on mammals.
Since Crees say that bears and beavers are closer in their attributes to human beings than other species, it might be expected that some myths would assign these animals human or humanoid ancestry. Johnny Bighetty speculated humorously on one occasion that bears might once have been human beings who stayed out in the bush too long, a conjecture based on the Cree custom of addressing bears as nimosom 'my grandfather'. The Crees' Saulteaux neighbors to the south related to Nelson in 1811 a myth identifying beavers as descendants of an Indian family, this ancestry then accounting for the sociality and architectural proclivities of the species (Brown and Brightman 1988:121-122). Some idea of the variability of these conceptions is afforded by the account obtained by Thompson from Saulteaux or Crees fourteen years earlier: "The Beavers had been an ancient people, and then in the remote past lived on the dry land; they were always Beavers, not Men"
(Thompson 1962 [1784-1812]:155). The idea that animals derive from transformed humans is intermittently explored in boreal Algonquian thought; the reverse conception is absent.
The protoanimals possessed social and linguistic attributes today exhibited by human beings but possessed also the physical and behavioral traits of animals and are spoken of as pisiskiwak 'animals'. It is significant that the indigenous cosmogony figures modern humans as the descendants of images fashioned out of earth while tracing the animal species to beings who may always have existed or whose origin is beyond the scope of knowledge. Animals, unlike humans, have no specified beginning; they are of broader cosmic provenience. It is also significant that the cultural accomplishments of humans—speech, fire, food preservation, clothing—are represented as originally the possessions of animals, long before human beings existed in the world.
The World of the Animals
The first acaðohkiwin category represents social animals inhabiting a world devoid of human beings where they interact with members of their own and other species. When I asked people what the animals in these stories looked like, their reactions sometimes suggested that the question had not previously been entertained. Some said that they looked like animals but with such hominid attributes as upright carriage and clothing. Others said only that they looked like contemporary animals. The stories about Omiðahcis 'Wolverine', for example, make pointed reference to his tail, which he used to chisel beaver lodges. The way of life of the animal characters is overtly cultural. Animals are represented as talking, making fires, arranging marriages, living in lodges, exchanging food, making dry meat, practicing sorcery, and using such manufactures as toboggans. Since human beings were not yet in the world, these myths implicitly suggest that Cree designs for living are to some degree carried over from the animals who originated them. At the same time, the myths are strongly etiological: features of the appearance and behavior of modern animals are explained as resulting from the experiences of the prototypes. Representations of animals in this first category of myth need to be distinguished from images in the transformer cycle and other hero narratives in which the animals interact with humanoid characters. In these latter stories, the
animals are often physically more theriomorphic and less overtly cultural, although they continue to be shown as possessing speech. Like the protoanimals, they are subject to transformations.
Most protoanimals possessed as their proper names the nouns that refer today to members of the same species: Omiðahcis 'Wolverine', Mahihkan 'Wolf', Sakwisiw 'Mink'. Other animal characters possessed different names: Cicihkwaðos 'Narrowtail', the ancestor of dogs; Misiskanatos 'Great Skunk', the monstrous prototype of modern skunks; and Apiscisakwisis 'Small Mink', the weasel. The animals that figure as primary characters are carnivores: there are no individuated caribou, moose, hare, or beaver personalities, although prototypes of these species are talked about as having been present. The bear, otherwise eminent in Cree religious thought, is conspicuously absent. Aside from Wolverine, it is not always clear whether Crees imagine the individual animal characters in different stories as the same person. The speech styles of animal characters possess distinctive characteristics: Dog, for example, interjects a growly "wanam " in utterances otherwise delivered in a polite and formal style. Wolverine interjects "cin-cin-cin-cin " when pleased or excited.
Wolverine is the most complex of the protoanimal personalities. Stories describe Wolverines temporary residence with a band of Wolves, his misuse of the Wolves' gift of fire, his heroic triumph over Great Skunk, and finally his death at the hands of his Wolf affines. A collection of these myths has been published in the language of the narrator's English translations (Brightman 1989a :97-100, 133-134, 143-149). In these stories, Wolverine's character takes on different values: he is variously buffoon, trickster, hero, and villain. These Rock Cree stories are paralleled by a larger cycle of Wolverine trickster narratives known to the Eastern Cree (Savard 1974). In all these respects, Wolverine emerges as the animal counterpart to the humanoid trickster, Wisahkicahk, a parallelism epitomized in an unusual Plains Cree version of the trickster cycle (Skinner 1916) that identifies the two characters as the same. The literary eminence and morally ambiguous persona of Wolverine perhaps reflect the status of his worldly descendants as the respected antagonists of Cree fur trappers. Crees say that the wolverine follows the trapline like the human trapper, plundering sets that contain animals, consuming the carcasses or concealing them under lichen or snow, urinating on trap sets and on caches of fresh or dried meat. As one Cree put it, "When a trapper sees those tracks crossing back and forth on his trapline, he thinks that he might as well turn around [and
go home]. He gets a bad feeling. He knows what's happened already." Because of its skill as a robber of trap sets, the wolverine is regarded as intelligent and enterprising. Also respected as a fighter and traveler, the wolverine is said to be able to cover a fifty-mile area in a day; Johnny Bighetty named his snowmobile Omiðahcis because "it goes all over just like wolverine." Mingled with the respect is genuine hostility. Today the wolverine's depredations cost the trapper time and cash; in the past, families sometimes starved when trap sets and caches were plundered.
Representations in myth of interspecific relations between animal characters are exceedingly varied. In some stories, animals of different species live and travel together, sharing a common language and cooperating in common projects. According to one Cree narrator, "Animals used to travel in bunches like humans . . . all mixed animals: squirrels, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, all the animals." Just as these protoanimals differed less from humans (who did not yet exist) than do their modern counterparts, so did the species differ less from each other. In a Swampy Cree myth from Manitoba (Clay 1938:34-37), the animals live in fraternal solidarity, lacking modern predator-prey relationships and freely conversing with each other. Initially uniform in coloration, they solicit different kinds of skin covering from the transformer and thereafter become physically distinct, losing in consequence the ability to communicate.
Other myths represent interspecific relations between animals as hostile, working imaginative variations and embellishments on modern predator-prey relationships. Thus, one myth posits a motley band of animals—Wolverine, Mink, Weasel, and others—united in flight and defense against the monstrous and predatory Great Skunk. Seeking to learn how closely behind them their adversary is following, Mink and Weasel successively stay behind on the trail and play dead. The scenes in which Great Skunk discovers, examines, and discards the "corpses" suggests the surreal quality of some events in these stories; it was sometimes difficult for me to understand why characters thought and behaved as they did. Turning the "corpses" over in his giant claws, Great Skunk notices their anuses and identifies them as lethal arrow wounds. It turns out that Great Skunk, big as he is, is unaware of his own anus and thus that other animals also have them. When Weasel reports to the other animals that Great Skunk is dose behind them, Wolverine volunteers to face him down at a beaver lodge. He tricks Great Skunk into discharging all his "medicine" and then immobilizes him while the other animals tear him apart; the fragments become the ancestors of
modern skunks. Wolverine, however, is blinded by a last spray of Great Skunk "medicine" and must travel down to Hudson Bay to wash; thereafter, the Bay water is salty and unfit to drink.
Other stories focus on the incompatibility between Wolverine in his antisocial mode and the Wolves with whom he interacts. In each of these stories, the socially acceptable conduct of Wolves is opposed to the objectionable behavior of Wolverine. In one myth, Wolves generously share their magical fire with Wolverine, who proceeds to waste the gift by making fires for his own diversion. Another myth describes Wolverine's temporary residence with a band of Wolves, contrasting the Wolves' solicitous hospitality with Wolverines greed, ingratitude, and overall social defectiveness. The Wolves are pursuing a moose and courteously invite Wolverine and Dog to follow behind at a leisurely pace in the company of the younger Wolves. The party successively encounters objects on the trail which Wolverine sees as refuse but which Wolves and Dog see as manufactures. By the time Wolverine straggles into the Wolves' camp that night, the moose they have killed has been butchered and buried in the snow. Thinking the Wolves have eaten the whole moose, Wolverine hungrily gobbles up blood spots on the snow, muttering about their bad manners. When they bring out the meat to divide it, Wolverine rejects the delicacies they offer him and insists on receiving meat from the rump. Wolverine eats most of his portion rather than sharing it, urinating on the remainder and burying it in the snow. Wolves dry and pound their meat, boiling the bones for marrow fat. Wolverine sleeps through most of this activity, awaking only in time to dry a few chunks of his remaining meat. At the next camp, he discourteously takes leave of the Wolves, complaining that they are too hard to get along with. Throughout, Wolverine represents the egocentric individual as conceived in opposition to the well-socialized person. As a solitary animal, Wolverine is a natural symbol of such individualism, opposed to the sociality of the Wolves against whom he was, in all probability, didactically held up as bad example in pedagogical recitations of the myth. It is also likely that the myth is "totemic" in Lévi-Strauss's particular sense, using natural discontinuities—in this case, differences between animal species—as a metalanguage to represent differences between Crees and other Indians and perhaps between Crees and Euro-Canadians.
The opening scenes in which Wolverine and Wolves have different perceptual experiences of the same objects foreground a theme that reappears in Cree reflections on the modern human-animal relationship. The party encounters an object lying on the path.
There is dung on the ground.
"Well, well, wanam .
A fur coat, big brother, pick it up." [Dog addresses Wolverine]
"I'm not dirtying my hands on wolf dung!" [Wolverine]
"Hey, what's this big brother of ours saying?" [Wolves]
A Wolf vigorously shakes it [dung] free of debris . . . a fur coat.
"Well, a fur coat. I didn't know it." [Wolverine]
They subsequently encounter another object.
Somebody's tooth is sticking there in a tree, a wolf tooth.
"Well, big brother, take it, wanam. " [Dog to Wolverine]
They [Wolves] detach that bone arrow they see sticking there from where someone shot and missed.
Well, he [Wolverine] sees it.
"Get out, I'm not bothering with this little wolf tooth!" [Wolverine]
"Hey, what's this big brother of ours saying?" [Wolves]
He [Wolf] pulls it out.
It's a bone arrow that he pulls out. [Cree]
The narrator's English translation contains an element missing in the Cree version: Wolverine once again acknowledges he was wrong, explaining, "Oh, I didn't know it was a bow and arrow. I thought it was a wolf tooth."
The two scenes are closely parallel in organization, and in each, the narrator uses the same strategy to signal to the listener the events of discrepant perception. First, the objects are reported by the narrator and identified as wolf dung and a wolf tooth. Next, the narrator signals that Dog and Wolves experience the object as something else, in the first scene by quoting Dog's identification of it as a fur coat and in the second by reporting that the Wolves (and Dog) see an arrow. In each case, Dog instructs Wolverine to retrieve the object and Wolverine haughtily refuses, identifying it as something not worth bothering with: the dung and tooth initially reported by the narrator. The Wolves are confused by Wolverine's apparent hallucination. In each scene, a Wolf retrieves the object and the narrator then reports the object as being what Dog and Wolves perceive. Wolverine's perception then seemingly changes, and he acknowledges that his initial identification was mistaken. The language chosen by Cornelius Colomb, the narrator, to report these events of discrepant perception is ultimately noncommittal concerning the differential validity of the two points of view.
Possibly the act of shaking magically converts wolf excrement into a fur garment, and the act of extraction changes the tooth to an arrow. The text itself suggests not a physical change of one object into another
but a change in Wolverine's perception of a single object. The narrative states that Dog and Wolves initially identify the objects as a coat and an arrow, perceiving them as such all along. Shaking and extraction, therefore, seemingly allow Wolverine to Perceive the objects in the same way they do. The verb used is ka-pahpawitat 'he shakes it free of debris', a metaphoric likening of Wolverine's changing Perception to the process by which intervening material is cleared away to disclose the identity of a concealed object. The narrator's identification of the object as a fur coat after it is shaken is thus a report of Wolverines new perception; the listener is invited to share Wolverine's surprise at this unexpected turn of events. This seems to be suggested by Wolverine's chagrined reaction: beginning with perceptual disparity, each episode concludes with Perceptual consensus.
The members of each of the two pairs of objects whose identity Wolverine disputes with the wolves are commutable in certain respects. The metaphoric relationship between a wolf tooth and an arrow is straightforward: both are pointed weapons used in killing animals. The connection between wolf dung and fur coats is more obscure. Wolves excrete rather than digest much of the fur of their prey, as their scats visibly attest (Leslie Saxon, Personal communication). Crees also say wolves roll in their own excrement to keep warm. There exists, therefore, a resemblance between these two objects as well, suggesting that in each case, Wolverine and Wolves are perceiving differently the identical external entity. Metaphorically, scats and teeth are the coats and arrows of wolves. The Wolves see the two objects as useful goods, the salvageable result of deliberate cultural artifice. Wolverine initially sees the same objects as worthless physiological residue, the antithesis of manufacture. It is only after they are physically appropriated—picked up off the trail or pulled out of a tree—that Wolverine acquiesces and shares in the knowledge of the others, agreeing that they are manufactures. The developmental trajectory of Wolverine's knowledge of these objects in the myth thus parallels the transformation in modem Cree experience of such raw materials as animal skins and bones—useless on the face of them—into clothing, weapons, and other valuable and useful goods.
These scenes typify epistemological themes that resonate in other myths, in dreams, and in Cree reflections on the quality of their waking perceptions. Beings or selves of two different species or kind may have radically different perceptions and understandings of the same events in which both participate. More specifically, individuals or selves of one
species or kind experience individuals of other species as different from themselves in appearance and practices. The experience that each "self" has of the "other" may be, however, radically different from the experience that that "other" has of its own appearance and practices. Further, selves of different species or kind may each experience themselves in similar or identical terms: as users of fire, speech, and manufactured objects. In the age of the acaðohkiwin , the animals possessed cultural attributes. In the present, it is human beings who possess these attributes and the animals manifestly lack them. The contrast seemingly intimates a "historical" transition in the condition of animals: sometime in the past, they lost the cultural characteristics that the myths assert they once possessed and became as they now appear to men and women in the present. At least today, Cree religious thought postulates no objective transition. Crees speculate that modern animals, whatever they may look like to humans, experience themselves as participating in the same appearances and behaviors that Crees understand themselves to possess. In the myth, Wolverine represents, from this point of view, the human perspective on an animal "other," displaced, in this case, from the animal itself and onto its manufactures. Wolverine sees as worthless detached body parts what the Wolves see as valuable manufactured artifacts. He comes, however, to participate in the experience the Wolves have of themselves.
Wolverine's difficulties with the wolves culminate ultimately in his death.
Once then and long ago, the animals lived like human beings. Once then this Wolverine and he intends to marry the daughter from a family of Wolves. So he goes to where they stay and he asks the mother of that Wolf-girl for permission. Really, she thinks badly of it, but she consents. Then that Wolf-girl goes to stay with Wolverine as his wife. They have several children. All of them resemble Wolverine, except one only, which resembles a Wolf.
Shortly after he marries her, this Wolverine curses the Wolves so that they cannot hunt successfully. Really, he intends that they all should starve. Soon they are close to starving. Wolverine tells them that he is crying for them. "I cry because I have no meat to relieve my mother-in-law," he tells her. But he has beaver meat, that Wolverine. That one boy, Wolverines son, he takes beaver meat and gives it to the Wolves. He doesn't tell his father that he gives them meat. That old woman knows that Wolverine is cursing them. She sends her sons out to hunt moose. Finally they succeed in killing one and bring it back at evening. The old woman cooks that moose; she knows that Wolverine comes to spy on their camp and she wants him to know that they are cooking and eating moose. They have a large feast. Later on that night, they move their camp some distance away.
In the morning, Wolverine comes to spy on the Wolf camp. Well! No one is to be seen there. He returns to his camp. He wakes his wife. "I fear for the welfare of your relatives," he says to her. "Perhaps for some reason they are not successful in hunting." And to those two boys, he says, "Go find where they [Wolves] have made their camp." He sends those Wolverine-boys to look for the Wolf family. They find the new camp, and see that the Wolf family has plenty of moose meat. They find scraps of moose meat on the trail and really they fight over them, those boys.
The Wolverine-boys return to their father. "Our grandmother is cooking moose meat," they say. The Wolverine has a little beaver meat. He intends to trade the beaver with the old woman for some moose meat. He travels on ahead to the Wolves' camp and offers the Wolves the beaver meat. One of the Wolves says, "Our brother-in-law is hungry, we should give him some moose meat." The old woman says, "Why should we feed him? He tried to starve us." Finally she agrees to feed him. "Sit down, my son-in-law," she says. "When we Wolves eat moose meat, we must shut our eyes." "Well, then, I will shut my eyes," he says. Then the old woman strikes him on the head with a stone and kills him. They bury Wolverine in the snow by the trail with just his tail sticking up. Later, the Wolf-girl and those children arrive there, pulling their toboggan through the snow. They see the tail protruding from the snow and begin to cry. The old woman tells her daughter, "Stop crying! We had to kill your husband because he tried to starve us. These children of his, they will behave like their father when they grow older." Then that old woman kills all of the children, except the boy who looks like a Wolf. He has a Wolf nature, that one who brought meat to the old woman [Cree].
This meditation on affinity and miscegenation, by turns comical and somber, is particularly detailed with respect to the cultural practices of the protoanimals. It concludes a cycle of myths that juxtapose Wolverine to the Wolves as foolish to wise, wicked to moral, egoistic individual to socialized person.
Human Origins
While in Europe during World War II, Albert Umfreville took the Cree story of human creation as an occasion for verbal dueling with a white officer who remarked on his complexion.
Now I'm going to tell it again in English.
When I was overseas the time of the war, there was a bunch of officers laying out on the lawn
and I happened to be passing by there with just my shorts.
And I had my shirt off and one of the officers called to me
and he said, "Umfreville, what do you want to get a tan for?
You're black enough."
So I turned around and I told him. I says, "I don't bum like you guys, I'm natural."
And I says,
"You know, when God made the world,
he made men.
He made a man.
The first one he made of his image, he put in the oven.
And while he was working, he forgot all about it. When he did think about it, when he opened his oven and pulled his image out, it was burned black.
Well, that was the Negro.
So the next image of himself he made, he put it in the oven.
And he didn't leave it in long enough. So when he pulled it out it was all pale and that was the white man.
So when he made the third image of himself, he put it in the oven. And went to work for awhile.
He waited for awhile before he opened his oven.
And when he did,
it was just nicely browned.
So that was me," I told my officer,
"just nice and brown.
I'm an Indian."
This is an old story. During the 1770s, W. Wales (Cooper 1934:56) obtained the same polygenetic account from Crees trading into York Factory. The superior being Okimaw 'leader', evidently another name for the deity, Kicimanitow, molds three pairs of male and female figures from differently pigmented clays. The excessively dark and light coloring of the first two pairs causes the creator to discard them contemptuously and they become the progenitors of blacks and whites. The creator retains the aesthetically satisfying "brown" figures, which become the first Indians. By at least the late 1700s, Crees were familiar enough with black Hudson's Bay Company employees to have invented a noun for them (Graham 1969 [1767-1791]:207). Other polygenetic versions date from the present century. An Albany (Westmain Swampy) Cree version collected by Skinner (1911:112) describes the "Great Spirit's" creation of three male clay figures ancestral to the Indian, white, and black races. The pigmentation of the latter two resulted from under- and overcooking, respectively. When Oblate missionary Rossignol (1938:68) queried Rock Crees regarding their ideas
of human origins, he was told that the creator deity had fashioned Crees and Europeans of brown and white earth, respectively. He was also told didactically that Europeans and Crees had been given distinct religions to follow.
In 1823, Nelson (Brown and Brightman 1988:48-49) recorded another polygenetic account that differs from those discussed in identify g Wisahkicahk, the trickster-transformer, as the sculptor and situating the creation as a postfluvial innovation. The stories of the transformers many exploits may be narrated singly or concatenated in longer narratives. Although great variability is evident in composition, three of these stories—the flight from the rolling head, the contest with the sorcerer, Wimisos, and the re-creation of the flooded earth—are understood to describe consecutive events, and they occur sequentially in composite narrations recorded in widely separated Cree communities (Brightman 1989a ). It is after Wisahkicahk has remade the world from mud brought from under the water by the muskrat that he turns his attention to human beings, creating Indian and white males from earth. The Moon creates their female counterparts, fashioning the white female from the rib of the male; Crees were seemingly integrating scriptural ideas into their formulations of where the Europeans came from. Such humanoid characters as Wisahkicahk's parents, wives, and murderous father-in-law figure in events that Crees say preceded the flood, seeming to suggest that these beings were of a different order from the fabricated ancestors of the modern humans.
Although addressing the question of how different "races" originated and also dearly subject to some mediated scriptural influences, these historical fragments presumably represent indigenous Cree concepts of human creation. The details of the different versions indicate obvious connections with the Earth and with baking and pottery, but the Earth, to my knowledge, possesses no female or maternal associations. Nelson's version preserves another aboriginal motif: the creators initial intention to create humans from stone and his contemplative substitution of earth.
Whilst at this work it struck him that by forming them of so hard and strong a substance that in time when they would become to know their nature, they would grow insolent and rebellious and be a great annoyance to each other and of course also would never die. "This will not do, I must make them of a more weak and fragile substance, so that they may live a reasonable time and behave as becomes human beings." (Brown and Brightman 1988:49, cf. Simms 1906:338-339)
The rejection of stone is here consistent with a rationally formulated cosmogonic design, first of all, one implementing a "reasonable" demographic management of the new beings relative to the space and resources of the Earth; a comparative analysis of myths explaining the innovation of death would provide a further basis for elucidation of Malthusian themes in Native American demographic thought. Second, the creator desires to cultivate conduct as "becomes human beings." The association of stone and its physical qualities of hardness and sharpness with antisocial conduct figures also in the character of the culture hero's flint twin in Ojibwa-Saulteaux and Iroquoian literature. John M. Coopers (1934) claim that Westmain Swampy Crees regarded spirit beings as unconcerned with the moral character of human conduct needs to be examined in the context of other evidence for ethical dimensions in Algonquian religion. The possibility of mediated scriptural influence needs to be considered, but there exist, of course, difficulties with ascribing all moral content to borrowing. With specific reference to Western Woods Crees, Thompson (1962 [1784-1812]: 74) was told in the late 1700s that the creator, Kicimanitow, had such compassion for human beings that it hated to see human blood on the ground and sent the rains to wash it away. Thompson was also told a version of the flood myth in which the creator caused the deluge as a punishment for quarreling and bloodshed (ibid.:78, cf. Vandersteene 1969). Nelson recorded in the early 1800s accounts of dreams, visions, and shaking lodge performances in which spirit beings exhorted humans to refrain from violence and sorcery (Brown and Brightman 1988:43, 57).
Animal Transformations
Insofar as Crees "explain" the origin of contemporary animal species, it is by identifying them as the genealogical descendants of the protoanimals. Diverse aspects of modern species—diet, habitat, appearance, antipathies—are further explained as the result of transformation experiences undergone by these prototypes. Rock Cree myths of the all-animal and mixed-human/animal character types are rich in such etiological themes. Such themes have been consistently and curiously ignored in British, French, and American anthropologies throughout the present century, presumably in reaction to the different nineteenth-century schools of "nature mythology." In any event, the
consensus among anthropological scholars of myth is that such themes express no aesthetic or intellectual orientation to the nonhuman ecosystem. Franz Boas (1940:468-469) regarded explanatory elements in North American Indian mythology as peripheral stylistic devices, not expressions of "a rationalizing faculty in primitive man." T. T. Waterman's (1914) distributional study was a detailed exploration of the Boasian thesis that the explanations are maximally detachable from the plots in which they figure, playing no part in the composition of myths. Things were no better among the Trobriand Islanders. "As to any explanatory function of these myths," wrote Malinowski, "there is no problem which they cover, no curiosity which they satisfy, no theory which they contain" (1954:110). Likewise devoid of etiological significance were the myths of the Andamaners of whom A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1933:342) asked rhetorically, "Why should the Andaman Islanders want to explain the markings of animals?" Lévi-Strauss (1966a :95) wrote that myths do not explain "nature" as an object but employ its categories as a reservoir of symbols for representing oppositive logical categories (in both social and biophysical orders) and their mediations. Myths from all over the world contain these etiological themes, and the arguments for their nonsignificance are both equivocal and tenuous. Boas (1940:468-470), for example, acknowledged that some etiological myths exist, and Radcliffe-Brown's claim that Andamanese myths express only the "social vaue" of natural entities—their status as symbols of sociality—seems today excessively tortuous. No one denies that etiological themes exist in myths; everyone denies that they exist for their own sake. The analyses of Lévi-Strauss are illustrative. His most recent writing on myth (1988) addresses the symbolic equivalence of potters' clay, marital jealousy, and goatsucker bird in a Jívaro etiological myth, but the etiological themes themselves are interpreted as symbolic metacommentaries or restatements of sociological "anomaly, contradiction, or scandal" (ibid.: 171). Since the volumes of Mythologiques demonstrate a complex articulation of etiological themes with oppositional and mediatory "structure," the relationship between what people take their myths to explain and what structuralists take them to explain remains an important desideratum.
As Boas argued cogently, the distal origins of myths are irretrievable and the proximal origins manifestly the product of diffusional combinatorics. It is impossible to prove that particular myths "originated" in a desire to explain natural facts (or, for that matter, that they did not). This impasse neither exhausts the interest of etiological themes nor explains their neglect in successive distributional, functional, psycho-
analytic, and structuralist phases of interpretation. My experiences with Cree narrators indicate that these etiological elements continue to engage people's interests, that they are central to what Crees find most compelling in the acaðohkiwin literature: the constructive effect of primordial events on the design of their contemporary social and biophysical environments. The etiological themes themselves are symbolically complex, often integral rather than peripheral to the plots that are their contexts.
I was fortunate enough to be present at the probable birth of an etiological element. In the winter of 1978, I recorded in the trapline cabin of Henry and Angelique Linklater the latter's recitation of the hero myth, Mistacayawasis (Brightman 1989a :117-124). The story culminates with the death of the villain, Macikaðawis, who has taken the form of a caribou. The caribou corpse spontaneously transforms into a wiskacanis , the gray jay, "whiskey-jack" or "camp-robber" (Perisoreus canadensis ). The gray jay is a garrulous and personable bird that steals food from camps and is thus imagined by Crees as existing in a condition of perpetual and insatiable voraciousness. Henry found it interesting that the villain, who displays greedy behavior and suffers famine and emaciation in the course of the story, should become a gray jay. He observed that the gray jay eats all day, often by stealing food from camp, but never gets fat. With a tentative air, he speculated that perhaps the myth event explained the hunger and greediness of contemporary gray jays. I asked him whether gray jays existed in the world before the posthumous transformation. He said that they did but that their hunger perhaps derived from the event described. I later noted that "macikaðawis " figures in many people's vocabularies as a humorous synonym of "wiskacanis. "
This etiological theme exemplifies most of the characteristics of others I have recorded. The events narrated in acaðohkiwina are temporally situated in a primordial past within which the biophysical and social environments are not yet entirely in their modern condition. Each etiological passage embodies a paradox that characterizes conceptions of the mythological age throughout North America. The myth time is profoundly impressible in that potential for the inception of new social and cosmological arrangements is always present. It is in this respect that the age is formative: prior states of affairs in the myth age are modified and changed, giving rise to new configurations. At the same time, the mythic period is infused with immutability and conservatism: the new order, once innovated, becomes fixed and perpetual. Only in the earliest time could the transformation of a starving man's corpse
into a single Canada jay synecdochally transfer voraciousness to the whole species, and again only in this age would voraciousness thereafter become an eternal attribute of jays, endlessly reiterated into the present. Some Crees are much engaged with this reciprocal interplay between a past that is an imagined transformation of the present and simultaneously its template and crucible.
Every etiological theme necessarily encompasses four components. The first of these is the worldly "object," the contemporary entity or state of affairs whose innovation the myth accounts for. By tabulating etiological themes in Rock Cree myths with others in published collections of Cree literature, it was possible to compile an inventory of two hundred fifty such passages. Of these, 66 percent address animal origins, attributes, and human-animal relations. This figure includes varying explanations of the same object in different myths or versions of the same myth but excludes recurrent instances of the same explanation. In this sample, the animal accorded most attention in Cree mythology is the humble snowshoe hare, followed by the beaver, the bear, the muskrat, the gray jay, and the common nighthawk. Neither the species nor the attributes that figure as etiological objects in Cree myth are readily assimilable to utilitarian explanation: mythological explanations encompass objects both external and internal to the Crees' foraging praxis. Forty-one percent of the animal explanations concern species not eaten, marketed, or used in domestic manufacture. Typical objects are the blindness of moles, the aquatic habitat of frogs, the red eyes of the American coot, and the wide mouth of the common nighthawk. In the case of species that do figure in Cree production, explanations are divided between attributes relevant to capture or utilization and those that are not. For instance, both the amphibiousness of the beaver and the brown coloration of its incisors are accounted for. The myths scan, as it were, between productively relevant and irrelevant animals and characteristics. Of the other explanatory elements, 21 percent concern topographical, meteorological, and astronomical phenomena, 9 percent concern human beings and social practices, and 4 percent concern trees and other botanicals. Explanations pertaining to humans range from the cosmological questions of the origins of human "races" and of fire through the custom of polygyny to such esoterica as the differences between human and frog anuses. Cree mythological explanations are engaged less with the human than with the nonhuman world and, with respect to the latter, not exclusively or even primarily with those elements that are materially appropriated.
The remaining three components are textual and internal to mythological narratives. Minimally, such passages entail an "antecedent" subject to a "transformation" that produces a "result." It is from the result, an entity described in the myth, that Crees say the contemporary object derives. The representation of the antecedents necessarily involves creative inversions and rearrangements of the characteristics of contemporary experience: entities do not exist, or exist in alternate conditions or in different distributions or in different relations to other entities. The authority and authenticity of the mythical age in Cree experience is attested in its capacity to engender its own explanations. Every etiological passage accounts simultaneously for the structure of contemporary existence and for the nonexistence of alternative structures, the antecedents whose prior existence is presupposed by and well known to those who listen to myths. In some instances, this nonexistence is foregrounded explicitly as the focus of explanation. Rock Cree narratives describe, for example, anthropophagous monsters that preyed on the early humans. One narrator concluded his account of the destruction of one such race—the wihcikosisak 'small cannibals'—with the following remarks:
So that's how this man, he wiped them out. He was hunting them all the time. There was none of them left. He was a smart man. He kept on hunting them. That's how there are no more of these now. He deans them out. (Brightman 1989a :137)
The object here is the contemporary absence of the monsters. In this respect, etiological passages possess a marked duplex structure, since they account not only for what exists but also for the nonexistence of imaginable alternatives. Myths are thus vehicles of a discourse that questions why contemporary social and cosmological arrangements—from among all the possible ones—should prevail. The transformations to which the antecedents are subjected are exceedingly diverse. In the discussion below, "transformation" is deliberately broad in compass, subsuming the sometimes multiple aspects of events represented as transformative. The change may be directly physical, as when Wisahkicahk widens the mouth of the nighthawk. Or it may come about as the result of an experience that imparts to the antecedent a new habitat or disposition. Transformations may be deliberate or seemingly accidental; they may implement a rational cosmic design or transpire through momentary spite.
Analysis of Cree etiological themes requires consideration both of
the relationships among the narrated characters and events and the modes in which these latter are represented as connected to the modern objects. Peirce's (1960-1966, 2:134-173) writing on semiosis and the classification of sign types has provided sets and subsets of distinctions applied in a diverse array of anthropological and linguistic research contexts (cf. Mertz and Parmentier 1985; Silverstein 1976; Singer 1984; Boon 1982; Jakobson 1980). These distinctions permit a certain precision in the exposition and description of Cree transformation themes, particularly in the elucidation of Cree conceptions of the relations between elements. Peirce's three principal trichotomies of sign types are defined by contrasting relations existing between the representamen, or sign vehicle, the interpretant, or mental representation, created by it, and the object for which it stands.
A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object . It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of an idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (Peirce 1960-1966, 2:135)
The trichotomy with which I will be most concerned here—the celebrated triad of icon, index, and symbol—is based on the "ground," the relationship of the sign to the object for which it stands. Icons resemble their objects: "Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual or law, is an Icon of anything, insofar as it is like that thing and is used as a sign of it" (ibid.:143). Diagrammatic icons, a subclass, resemble their objects only in the relations of their respective parts (ibid.:159), as with, for example, an architectural blueprint. Symbols stand for their objects "by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas" (ibid.:143), as with the conventional relationship existing between the sounds and meanings of words in natural languages. Indexes are signs spatially or temporally connected to their objects, the shine of an animal's eyes in a flashlight, for example, indexing its presence. Modern animals and attributes are, in the terms of Peirce's semiotic, indexical icons of the narrated protoanimals and their experiences. They are not, I think, for many Crees, conventional representations of them. I once inadvertently gave offense when I asked Henry Linklater how the stories had first begun, meaning how it was that humans first became aware of them. He understood me to be asking him if the stories were
imaginative fabrications, and, usually a jocular man, he became grave and earnest. "No, no," he said, "nobody made them up. These stories really happened. They come down to us from when they happened."
In a basic sense, myths as narratives are experienced by their tellers as icons of the characters and events that are represented in the narration. Mythological events innovated the stories that report them: the stories are understood to have originated as discourse about actual occurrences, either related by eyewitnesses and handed down through the generations or learned about in dreams. The stories are in this sense iconic since it is said to be possible to tell them incorrectly, and the incorrect versions are disparaged because they distort or fail to resemble adequately in their content the real occurrences that gave rise to them, including such details as event sequences and the identity of characters. In these respects, the narrations and the persons and events they describe are alternately signs of one another. Below I will be concerned with more specific relations existing among characters and events in narration and between these and modern animals.
A Cree myth explains the origin of a luminescent fungus by identifying it as the transformation of a vain and beautiful woman who lived in the time of the acaðohkiwin . Within the narrative, the woman is the antecedent, and the fungus is the result; the object is the class of luminescent fungi in the contemporary environment. From one point of view, the narrative itself and the explanatory element are built up from an iconic relationship present to contemporary experience. Beautiful, vain women and luminescent fungi—or vain beauty and luminosity—imaginably resemble one another, and the resemblance is reproduced in the narrative as an identity of a particular beautiful woman with the first luminous fungus. Each of the two narrated terms is an icon of the other. Each is also an icon of its worldly counterpart: the vain heroine of all conceited women and the fungus of its modern descendants. It is necessarily also the case that the narrated botanical is an icon of modern vain women just as the narrated vain heroine is an icon of modern luminescent fungi. As with these two, so with modern and ancient animals, more specifically with the latter as they become results in transformation events. Crees experience contemporary animal species as icons of the protoanimal characters in myth, resembling them in name and in defining aspects of behavior and appearance.
Crees sometimes talk about the relationship between the protoanimal and the modern species that derive from it in terms that suggest the relationship of a sign type to its tokens or, in Peirce's idiom, of a "legi-
sign" to its "sinsigns." The legisign is "not a single object, but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be significant. . . . Thus the word 'the' will usually occur from fifteen to twenty-five times on a page. It is in all these occurrences [sinsigns] one and the same word, the same legisign" (Peirce 1960-1966, 2:143). It follows that each occurrence of a sinsign is an icon of the generalized legisign. Crees represent the specimens of each recognized modern species as though they were so many individuated sinsign-occurrences of a primordial legisign constituted by the protoanimal. Each modern animal is one instance of a class whose intensional properties are imagined as originating in the attributes of the mythical protoanimal. Phrased another way, the relationship is synecdochic: each modern animal is a part of the protoanimal, simultaneously its icon and an individual manifestation. We have here a notion of species and individual or legisign and sinsign played out chronologically between the time of the acaðohkiwin and the present. In the same way, each individual instance of an animal attribute may be the token and icon of a transformed characteristic of the protoanimal.
The conception of the protoanimal/modern animal relationship as one to many, legisign to sinsign, and whole to part is given literal expression in the story of Great Skunk. After Great Skunk is immobilized, the other animals tear it into small pieces and scatter them about:
So they [animals] all came down and said, "Cut him into all small pieces and throw them all over the place so he wouldn't be that big." That's how you see a small skunk now. They tear him up in small pieces and scatter him. Until there was just little pieces. He was too dangerous being the size of a moose. (Brightman 1989a :45)
The result of the disarticulation is a plurality of small skunks, each a miniaturized replica of the prototype. No other Cree myth establishes so directly the connection between the contemporary species and its protoanimal. More typically, narrators presuppose or report the relationship without additional elaboration, as with the assertion that wolves are descended from the lupine brother of the transformer Wisahkicahk.
The iconic resemblance between protoanimal and modern species is further communicated in prophetic dialogues in myth where the quotative first- and second-person pronouns signal the iconic relation of modern animals to their protoanimal objects. In a passage from a
Swampy myth, for example, the first snowshoe hare announces the role of future hares in Cree subsistence and manufacture: "I will provide food and raiment to keep the young families warm. My service will be welcomed by the whole human [race]" (Brown 1977:47, emphasis added). The pronoun "I" expands in the future tense to denote not only the speaker in the narrative context but the plurality of his descendants or replicas in the contemporary world. Similarly, in the Rock Cree myth explaining the enmity between wolves and dogs, Wolf informs Dog that they will be enemies in the future because Wolf envies Dogs protected status as human servant. Wolf says to Dog, ati-nikan, ka-wapamitani ka-nipahitin , 'in the coming future, when I see you I'll kill you'. The person references in the verb denote not only speaker and addressee but all subsequent wolves and dogs that are part of and derived from these two and whose enmity endlessly and iconically recreates their primordial dispute.
In etiological themes, the worldly object is invariably an icon of the narrative result. Iconic relations among the three component narrative elements are more complex. In the example of the vain woman and the luminescent fungus, antecedent and result are icons. Only a very few Western Woods Cree myths describe the creation of a protoanimal from a being of another kind. In the vast majority of etiological themes, the protoanimal is postulated as already existent, and the transformation imbues it with a new attribute. Antecedent and result are, in one sense, the identical character. In these themes, the focus is on the attribute; thus, in a myth in which Wisahkicahk lengthens the legs of Frog, the antecedent is a short-legged frog and the result is a long-legged one. In such cases of substitution or accretion, the antecedent and resulting features are not readily identifiable as icons. It is, however, often the case that elements of the transformation event are icons of the result they produce, as, for example, when differential ingestion of fatty meat results in differentially fatty animals (see below).
If iconic similitude characterizes relations of narrated results to worldly objects, it is the specifically indexical relationships postulated between these that are most significant to Crees. Peirce (1960-1966, 2:135) defined indexical signs as spatially and temporally connected to their objects, as with effect to cause: "An Index is a sign which refers to the object it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object." In Cree thought, modern objects and states of affairs are the indexes of the results postulated in the narrative. For example, in the conclusion of the
Wolf-Wolverine marriage myth cited earlier (in a different version), Wolverine and two of his three children are killed, leaving only a single wolverine in the world.
The old lady wolf got mad. Took an axe and went down. Killed the little ones. Except that one—the little one, the one that always feed them, you know. Saved that one. So he [she] said, "From now on," he said, "there'd be too many wolverines." That's why he [she] killed all the rest of the young ones. And their dad. Left just one. That's why you usually set one wolverine. You never see two wolverines in a pack. There's always one travelling alone. Funny, eh? That's how it started . Yeah, he killed the rest of them. They only had one so there wouldn't be too many wolverines. You never see two wolverines travelling together. But if you have a moose cached, one might get there and there'll be another one coming in. But after, they split again. There's always one wolverine, never two. Well, maybe when they're mating. That's the only time. (Brightman 1989b , emphasis added)
An antecedent condition of plural and social wolverines is transformed by an event of killing into a result: a single surviving wolverine. Today, there are again not one but many wolverines in the world (the myth does not explain how this transpired), and all the modern animals iconically resemble the solitary prototype. More specifically, this theme embodies a duplex iconicity: of wolverine cub to modern wolverines and of the singularity of this survivor to the solitude of modern wolverines. Cree etiological thought predicates this iconic relationship on a more fundamental indexical connection. Modern wolverines are icons of and resemble the myth prototype—their object, in Peirce's terms—only became they are thought to derive from it in some physical modality conceived as continuous through space and time. Wolverines exist today with definite characteristics only became the surviving wolverine cub once existed and possessed the same characteristics. This derivation is often but not invariably identified as genealogical; as later chapters will show, reproduction is only one of multiple ways in which Crees conceive animals to appear in the world. The indexical connection of worldly animals to narrated prototype is the basis for the multiple secondary indexical relations between the attributes of the former and the transformative experiences of the latter, the Lamarckian transmission of acquired characteristics from the prototype to its modern replicas. It is became all wolverines derive from the solitary cub—whether through descent or some unspecified emanation—that they reiterate in their solitary behavior its acquired singularity.
The discussion thus far has proposed that Crees experience modern
animals as signs of, among many other things, protoanimal objects, specifically, as indexical-iconic signs that simultaneously resemble their objects and are spatiotemporally contiguous to them. The complex of indigenous literature and its etiological themes itself constitutes a complex sign that reproduces this mode of apprehending animals in recurrent contexts of recitation. Peirce (1960-1966, 2:144) proposed another semiotic trichotomy that classified signs in terms of the relationship postulated by their users to exist between the sign and its object. For Peirce, the "interpretant" of a sign is a corresponding sign that it creates in the mind of the person for whom it stands for something. One component of the interpretant is a representation of how the sign is connected to its object, a representation potentially quite distinct from what semiotic analysis might ultimately disclose the sign/object relation to be. The distinctions in this trichotomy parallel those between symbol, icon, and index. In Peirce's arcane nomenclature, an "argument" is a sign conceived to stand for its object by a conventional agreement. A "rheme" is a sign conceived as resembling its object, and a "dicent sign" or "dicisign" "is a Sign which, for its interpretant, is a Sign of actual existence," that is, one whose interpretant represents the sign/object relationship as indexical. Etiological themes are themselves complex signs that include as one facet of their interpretant representations of how the protoanimals of narrative are related to the modern animals encountered in the bush. From this point of view, if we seek to characterize the Cree conception, worldly animals and their characteristics are "rhematic dicisigns" of their protoanimal objects.
From perspectives institutionalized in Western canons of myth interpretation—and these perspectives are potentially objectionable to Crees who construe the acaðohkiwin as a narrative of factual events—the etiological themes are fictions, constructed discourses of the cumulative social imagination. The protoanimals now become literary icons, imaginatively embellished, of real animal objects, simultaneously their symbols in the Peircian idiom because they are identified with them only through the conventions of a literary genre and the indigenous theology of a culture. Cree myths, from this point of view, embody iconic representations of worldly objects and states of affairs. Once the themes are categorized as fictions, they exhibit two typifying characteristics. The first is the utilization within the theme of diverse indexical and iconic relations suggested by experience. The etiological themes are themselves iconic representations of iconic or indexical relations among external objects and states of affairs. A narrative passage, for example,
that identifies luminescent fungi [result] as the transformation of a beautiful woman [antecedent] is itself a diagrammatic icon of the iconic resemblance between vain beauty and luminosity in the world. Their juxtaposition in the narrative is an icon of an existing or emergent trope likening luminescence to vain beauty. Similarly, the relation of the surviving wolverine cub [result] to the solitary habits of modern wolverines object is built on the iconic resemblance of singularity to solitude. The second characteristic is the postulation of iconic-indexical relationships between the themes characters and the worldly objects of explanation. The interpretant of the themes represents modern animals as indexical icons of the narratized protoanimals, and the themes themselves are therefore rhematic dicisigns in Peirce's idiom. There exist obvious analogies with the logic of non-Western magics as these have been expounded by James Frazer and his successors and also with the principles of sixteenth-century epistemology explored by Michel Foucault. If, for example, aconite is good for ocular diseases, this can be known by marking the resemblance of its seeds to the human eye (Foucault 1972:27). Etiological themes concern themselves less with applications than with the satisfactions attending knowledge of the beginning of things.
Etiological themes can be conceived as originating in two ways. The myth may be conceived as building up an account of the origin of some object by postulating that it became what it is through the agency of things perceptibly resembling or connected to it in the present. Alternatively, the resemblance may be identified as one between the events in an existing narrative and a worldly object whose origin these events may serve opportunistically to explain. Crees explain that the aversiveness of wolves to deep water began when the transformers Wolf brother pursued a moose into a lake and was killed there by misipisiwak , underwater panthers. Wisahkicahk has premonitions of his brothers death and warns him to avoid water.
Wisahkicahk said, "That's good. But remember, never run—never chase a moose over the lake, in the water." You know, water . . . a wolf wouldn't chase a—a moose m the lake. It's not true [that a wolf won't enter water at all], but as soon as a wolf—I mean this much water [two feet]. If a moose gets down in the lake about this much water, he'll—he'll turn around on the wolf. A wolf, he's got a hard time to move around in the water so he [moose] starts pounding him. That's why you never see a wolf do something to a moose in a lake 'cause they kill 'em right there, the moose'll kill him.
The narrated event in which the protowolf pursues prey into water and dies (result) is an icon of the modern wolves' aversion to water (object). Possibly, the etiological passage is an embellishment on an existing text in which a wolf dies in water. Alternatively, the "selection," in the first instance, of a wolf character who drowns in water may have been conditioned by awareness of the species' antipathy to water, the myth therefore embodying the object it serves to explain. The latter interpretation assigns to etiological themes a more decisive influence on the narrative content of myths.
Full semiotic consideration of etiological themes would necessarily comprise consideration of the iconic and indexical relations among the elements of antecedent, transformation, and result and between all of these and the worldly object of explanation. The examples already discussed suggest that the selection and composition of these terms are conditioned by indexical and iconic relations conceived to exist between the object and other entities and agencies in the world. The skeins of metaphor and metonymy in some etiological themes are quite complex. The Swampy Crees tell a story that accounts for the varying fat content of the different animal species. In a version told at Grand Rapids, Manitoba, the hero kills a bear and prepares the meat and grease for a solitary feast. Carnivorous animals and birds steal the meat, and the hero subsequently loses the grease when the muskrat he deputizes to cool it in the water gnaws a hole in the bladder container and allows it to escape:
Wisagatchak, unable to save it, called all the animals of the forest about him. Taking the rabbit, he threw it into the stream but withdrew it as soon as a little fat had adhered to its neck and breast where it remains to this day. All the animals were dipped in the river; the bear, being allowed to remain longest, secured the most fat. (Russell 1898:208-209)
In a different version, the muskrat successfully cools the grease, but the transformer again loses his feast. While trees imprison him, animals come and devour both the grease and the meat: "Of all the animals, Seal got the most grease and Rabbit the least. That is why Seal is so fat and Rabbit is so lean" (Skinner 1911:87 [Fort Albany]). A Fisher River version (Clay 1938:85-88) explains only the fatty necks of snowshoe hares: the hero petulantly throws the hare into the water where the grease adheres to its neck.
The object of the myth is the differential fat content of the boreal
fauna, a matter of both practical and culinary interest. The abbreviated version focused on the hare reflects the northern saying that "you can starve on rabbit" (because of their relative lack of fat), as well as the anatomical locus of the species' meager fat deposits. The antecedent condition is a community of species with uniform fat content, or perhaps no fat content. The transformation is effected by the animals' ingestion of or immersal in the liquid bear fat. The result is animals that have acquired different quantities of fat, a distribution thereafter perpetuated among modern animals descended from the prototypes. The antecedents are homogeneous with respect to fat content, while the results are differentially fatty and are not readily analyzable as icons, unless the oppositive values of sameness and difference or presence and absence are assimilated to iconicity. The transformation event is, however, itself an icon of the narrative result and of the worldly object: each represents a proportional distribution. More specifically, the etiological transformation and result are diagrammatic icons of the object since the relations between the parts of each element are replicated. The theme specifically identifies bear fat as the medium of transformation, employing a mode of synecdoche that represents one part of the object as its source. Crees say that bears have more fat than other animals, a fact the Grand Rapids myth makes clear in circular fashion by stating that the bear became the fattest animal by remaining longest in the pool of bear grease. The fat of all other animals is thus represented as an indexical icon of that of the fattest of animals.
Etiological themes sometimes aggregate explanations of mutiple objects whose semiotic relations cross-reference one another. Rock Crees share with boreal Algonquians to the east a cycle of stories about the hero, Cahkapis (cf. Brightman 1989a :140-142), the innovator of solar periodicity. Originally, the sun passed continually overhead and there was no night. Cahkapis sets out with a snare made from his sisters pubic hair and hangs it over a large trail. Subsequently darkness falls over the world. Investigating his snare set, Cahkapis discovers that he has snared the sun and enlists the aid of Boreal Red-Backed Vole to release it.
So he come into the place and he see he couldn't go close to the sun. Too hot. Couldn't do nothing. So he hired this little mouse. This one mouse that we see in the winter time. Stupid mouse. On the trail, if he comes into the trail—well, the snow stiffens [forms crust] right away. He doesn't have no idea to punch a hole in the side to get into the warm [soft] snow. He stays in the bottom. Once he gets on the road, he got no idea to get off the road. So he freezes. You see
lots in wintertime. It's brown as if its burned. But that's the Only one. The rest of them, you don't see these mice like the ones that stick around the house. Big ears. Kind of brown, light colored ones. And the ones with long tails. The ones with long noses. You don't see those freeze in the road. But this special one, it looks like it's burned. Brownish color in the back. It's got a small tail. That's the one. That's the one that went and cut that rope.
Cahkapis said, "Don't worry. I'll pull you through. See if you can cut the rope [snare holding the sun]." So he [mouse] went and cut the rope but he was burned on the back. So he put him back to life. "But every time," Cahkapis said, "after this, every time you run into a trail, you'll die." So every time you see that mouse, he comes into the road and you'll see him laying there dead, frozen. That's the story of the mouse and the sun. That's why it's dark at night now. Before it used to be straight daylight. After Cahkapis snare the sun, that's how it comes to—the sun is weaker. It stops now and then because it's—not enough energy to make it. He's got to stop to rest every twelve hours. Every twelve hours he stops to rest. That's why you see dark. Because Cahkapis wanted to have it that way. (Brightman 1989a :139)
This myth addresses three objects: the alternation of day and night, the voles coloration, and the dearly more engaging question of its immobilization on frozen paths. Beginning with an antecedent condition of perpetual daylight, the story leads to the result of contemporary solar periodicity by means of two medial transformations: the imprisonment of the sun by a pubic hair trap and its release—in a weakened condition—by the vole. Each of these two transformation elements is an icon of the result. The myth contrasts an antecedent condition of continuous daylight with the modern alternation of day and night. The significance of the pubic hair snare is its indexical contiguity to menstruation, and menstruation is, in turn, an icon of solar periodicity (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1978:390, 395). The narrative juxtaposition of solar periodicity (result) to pubic hair (transformation) as effect to cause is itself the icon both of the iconic relationship of menstrual to solar periodicity and of the indexical relationship of menstruation to pubic hair. Additionally, the narrative opposes the "strength" of the aperiodic solar antecedent to the "weakness" of the periodic result, an icon of the postulated antagonism between menstrual blood and other powerful agencies in the world (chap. 4).
The narrative "selection" of the boreal red-backed vole as the animal that effects the sun's transformation is an icon of multiple relationships. First, most trivially, it is an icon of the vole's "burned" coloration, which, in turn, indexes prior contact with fire. Second, the voles proclivity for spatial confinement on frozen trails is a terrestrial icon of the
sun's temporal and spatial confinement to a solar path that it now traverses at periodic intervals. The vole's fate is also iconically connected to periodicity since it is seen in winter. The etiological theme represents all these relationships as index to object or cause to effect. The voles periodic confinement indexes the confinement of the sun that engendered it, just as its coloration indexes the sun's heat.
The Language of Transformation
Cree narrators employ a standardized repertoire of devices to signal that an event is to be understood as a transformation, that is, as the first instance of a condition that will endure into the present. In many cases, the transformation is indicated in the quoted speech of the transformer character. These discourses typically refer to the future with the verb ati-nikan , the preverbal element ati indicating progression and giving the construction the sense of 'as the future unfolds'. The transformer also refers with verbs in subjunctive mode to the ascendant humans who will populate the future and utters a proposition about the future state of affairs. Most of these devices are employed in an etiological passage in which a bear-woman's drowning brother announces that he will become a place-name (Brightman 1989a ).
here in the future when they speak of him people they will say just this
this one her younger sibling male,' just this myself
The association of naming with the innovation of new species Poses the question of how Crees understand the transformers utterances to be related to his creative acts. Consider the following utterance that Wisahkicahk addresses to the severed head of his mother.
here in the future people when they dwell here sturgeon they will call you
"Here in the future, when people dwell here, they will call you 'sturgeon.'" This utterance is in indicative rather than imperative mode
and appears superficially to express a proposition, perhaps prophetic, concerning an independently engendered state of affairs. These discourses do not contain such performative verbs as "command" or "name" which in some constructions simultaneously refer to and effect the speech acts of commanding or naming. Crees, nonetheless, understand these utterances to be performative in the sense that they are thought constructively to have innovated the states of affairs they describe. In Cree ideology, they are "declarations," John Searle's (1976) term for a speech act that introduces changes in the nonlinguistic context of the utterance. Superficially, Wisahkicahk simply utters a proposition about what human beings will call the head in the future. However, Crees say that the utterance possessed two perlocutionary effects, both innovating namiw as the Cree name for "sturgeon" and physically transforming the head into the first sturgeon.
The same conception informs a passage from a Plains Cree myth (Bloomfield 1930:75-76, 82) in which the hero, Snow Dart, transforms his wife's brother into the first lynx:
you my brother-in-law humans when they are born when they grow
'lynx' they will call you in the future. you in the bush you will subsist
"As for you, my brother-in-law, in the future when humans are born and grow up, they will call you 'lynx.' You will subsist in the woods." Here again, the ascribed perlocutionary effects are equivalent to those of English "I ordain that humans will call you 'lynx,'" "I ordain that you will become the first lynx," and "I ordain that you will dwell in the woods." The event of naming is conceived to have effected the physical transformation. This is made dear in a passage from a similar myth whose narrator, after quotatively retiring the hero's acts of naming, adds summarily, "Thus he made all the animals" (Bloomfield 1930: 120). Plains Cree myths describe generalized creations of the modern animal species by these means. The Rock Cree literature, as discussed earlier, treats the existence of most of the protoanimals as given but describes the creation of some individual fish and bird species, as with the severed head/sturgeon transformation above. An Eastern Cree version of the Ayes hero myth likewise associates naming with the transformation of the protoanimals into their modern forms (Skinner 1911:
108), as does a Plains Cree myth (Ahenakew 1929:320). To characterize these transformation events first in Cree terms, they are creations of objects effected by uttering the names of objects. The narratives represent the connection between names (and perhaps other lexical forms) and their worldly denotata as grounded in innate resemblance and contiguity rather than in convention.
In this sense, modern animals—or certain of them—are indexes of their names because it was originally through the utterance of the name that the animal was innovated. The indexical juxtaposition of naming and transformation in the etiological theme is therefore itself the icon of a postulated indexical-iconic relationship between words and things in Cree linguistic ideology. The significance of names in etiological themes is further embedded in the postulated indexical-iconic connection between propositions uttered by the transformer and states of affairs that then come into being in the contemporary world. When asked how Wisahkicahk could make things happen by saying them, one Cree said that he was an ahcak , spirit, implying such was the way of these beings: "He use his mind to do things. So when he say it, it come to be like that." There exist obvious parallels between this ideology and Cree conceptions of "magical" speech as it occurs in the present (chap. 4).
Ecological Design
Certain transformations of animals and other entities are represented as implementations of a cosmogonic design already envisioned by Wisahkicahk or the deity, Kicimanitow. This design is sometimes signaled the heroes' references to themselves as cosmogonic architects. For example, the Plains Cree hero, Snow Dart, explains his transformations by stating "ntaw-oyasoweh e-kiy-itikawiyan " 'I was instructed to go and introduce order' (Bloomfield 1930:82). Not all etiological passages exemplify this conception of design: Cahkapis, for example, snares the sun unwittingly, and solar periodicity is seemingly innovated as an unintended consequence, although it is interesting that one narrator (see above) assimilated the event to the concept of design. But in many etiological themes, it appears as if the transformer acts upon an axiomatic conception of how animals should exist in the future, declaring without rational justification that an alternative state
of affairs to the existing condition is preordained. "Moða kowitiðimikowisin ," Wisahkicahk explains to Bear in a Rock Cree myth as he cuts his long tail off: 'You are not shaped that way'. In the same myth, he imprisons Frog, and the latter lengthens its legs in trying to escape. Later, he announces:
just so my employment. Not you you will walk around frog,
you will hop around just so from this I will lengthen your legs
"Such is my employment. You will not be able to walk around, Frog, you will be able to hop around. So just for this reason, I will lengthen your legs."
Often, the transformers' motivations are broadly "ecological" in the sense that they concern predator-prey relationships, adaptations of species to niches, and the possibility of species extermination. A Swampy Cree myth relates how the transformer rewards the mouse who has sewn his clothing.
And when Wesukechak saw Appekoosees, the Mouse, come out he stooped down and took it up in his hands, and he made its nose long and soft. "That will help you to ferret out your food," said Wesukechak. Then he brushed the hair on the Mouse's body, and made it sleek and smooth. "That will help you to run through your little holes in the earth," said Wesukechak. (Clay 1938:66-67)
Concern with predator-prey relations are expressed in other myths where the transformer rewards the weasel by replacing his bright colors with alternating brown and white coats "so that your enemies cannot see you" (Russell 1898:212) or prevents the rabbit from drinking fattening grease so as to reduce its attractiveness to predators (Dusenberry 1962:240). The monstrous Great Skunk is cut into small pieces—the origin of modern skunks—because "he was too dangerous being the size of a moose" (Brightman 1989a :45). The myths also address demography. In the Wolverine-Wolf marriage myth, the old Wolf-woman kills two of the three Wolverine children because "from now on there'd be too many wolverines." Similarly, in a version of the myth of human creation, Wisahkicahk makes humans from earth rather than rock so that "they will live a reasonable time" (Brown and Brightman 1988:49).
A version of the hero myth of Ayes contains an especially elaborated account of design and ecological transformation. After destroying the
existing world with fire, the hero sets about transforming the surviving animals.
After the fire was over, there were lots and lots of animals on the patch of ground. The man named some of them. He put the beaver to live in the water. The rabbit wanted to be a beaver, but he wouldn't allow it. The rabbit even jumped into the water, but the man pulled him out and drained the water off of him. He said his legs were too long and even if he did eat willow like a beaver, he couldn't go about in the water properly. The squirrel wished to be a bear. He did all he could to be a bear. The man said he wouldn't do, he was too noisy. He said, "If you were a bear, when people got numerous again, you will get thinned down too much. The bear must be a very canny animal and keep quiet; he has too many enemies." The squirrel began to weep. He wept a great deal until his eyes were white. If you take a notice the next time you see a squirrel you will notice that his eyes are bright and swollen from weeping. The man made the bear then because he was nice and quiet and canny. Somebody else wanted to be a deer [caribou] but I don't remember who it was, but the deer was put in too. The real deer was appointed because he was swift and could run from his enemies. (Skinner 1911:108 [Eastern Cree])
The story exhibits with unusual clarity the imaginative deconstruction of the modern world that enters into the representation of antecedents. It addresses the contemporary structure of the world but also the question, often implicit in etiological themes, of why this from among all the imaginable alternative structures should prevail. The transformer operates on an existing set of animals, each of whom already possesses individuating attributes and will become the prototype of a modern species. The hero has in mind a set of correspondences between their existing traits and the envisioned characteristics, habitats, and predator-prey relations of the modern species he intends to innovate. But individual protoanimals possess aspirations to become the prototypes of newly established species for which their existing traits make them pathetically unsuitable. Thus, the animal that becomes the squirrel—and that already possesses the garrulousness of modern squirrels—is prevented from becoming the modern bear became the transformer intends the bear to have characteristics that will give it "too many enemies," an implicit reference to humans, who are the bears only predator. He reasons that the squirrels chattering is incompatible with these characteristics and would result in the species being "thinned out"; he appoints instead a protoanimal already possessing the wariness appropriate to bears. Similarly, an already swift protoanimal becomes the first caribou, and Crees are spared the spectacle of an amphibious rabbit-beaver.
Humans and Animals in the Early World
Some Cree myths address aspects of the human-animal relationship, and without exception, they anticipate a world in which animals will be the prey of human hunters. Transformations bearing on this relationship occur in stories with both all-animal and mixed human and animal characters. As should now be clear, the social animals of the earliest mythological period are in no respects less cultured than modem humans. Like the myth discussed above, the Pock Cree myth that explains why humans and not animals possess fire poses the question as an ecological problem of potential species extermination.
Well, that's this Wolverine, the guy with the . . .
Him and the
Wolves, they were out hunting one day.
Only the Wolves had the matches,
they make a magic fire.
They just jump over the dry wood and that thing explodes.
And the Wolverine never had that kind of . . .
He didn't have that kind of—
power.
So he asked the Wolves to have some of the power. So Wolves said, "We'll try it, brother." Because of course he was the brother of the animals.
So he tried it
and that damn thing exploded.
And they said, "Alright, brother, long as you don't play with it."
And he said, "No, oh shit no! I wouldn't do no such a thing!
I need a fire!"
So as he was monkeying around always on the shoreline.
Sometimes old beaver houses, that's where you see lots of dry wood.
Everytime he sees dry wood, he wants to make fire.
Pretend that he's cold.
Throw a few sticks together and jump over them and it explodes.
Few minutes with the fire and away he goes again.
So every morning, everywhere he goes you see about five or six fires.
That's Wolverine
making fires all morning for nothing.
So the Wolves got mad at him:
"I guess our brother is making fun of our match.
Every time we seen him going, he always fires all the way
here and there."
So they say, "We gotta cut off the match."
So, it so happens
the next fire, he couldn't start a fire.
Tried it again, no.
So one cool morning he went up on the hill and seen lots of fires.
All kinds of animals, you know.
All different kinds of smoke.
One animals got a different kind of smoke than the other.
And him, he had nothing. It was cold.
So he hollered, "Oh, my little kid brothers, sisters.
Best if we don't have any lights, no match, no way of making fire.
There'll be people years ahead.
They're going to clean us up if they seen our fire.
All they'll do is start hunting us when they seen our fires, yeah.
Best if we don't have any fire. This way
we'll make it.
But if we have fires, they'll clean us up."
Oh, all the animals agree with him.
"Oh, I think it will be true.
If there's going to be any people, they're going to clean us out
because they're going to see our fires."
So they holier at him, "OKAY, BROTHER, NO MORE FIRES!"
So that's how come there's no fire. Otherwise
it would have been lots . . .
Now people would be making lots of money.
Fire fighters, you know, these days make money.
Animals would be putting on forest fires [laughs].
Okay, that's the end of it.
Although Wolverine's prophecy is probably motivated more by jealousy than ecological wisdom, this myth again dwells on the themes of predation and extermination and contains intimations of antagonism in the hunter-prey relationship.
Hunters and Prey
The relationship of the trickster-transformer Wisahkicahk to animals encapsulates the ambivalence characterizing hunting and human-animal relations in the contemporary world. Several stories (Brightman 1989a ) describing Wisahkicahk's volitional transformation into a fly, a goose, and a moose may express both speculation and envy. Although he is selectively benevolent to individual animals who assist him, most Wisahkicahk stories detail his attempts to kill and eat animals
by tricking them. Predictably, the animals' responses are antagonistic, and the trickster is himself sometimes represented as a victim. If human and animal relations are understood in some contexts as adversarial, Wisahkicahk is clearly aligned with the interests of human beings. His sponsorship of human hegemony is consistent both with his own predatory conduct and with his role in the myth of the flood (Brightman 1989a ). Wisahkicahk's younger brother and hunting partner is a wolf. The hero experiences a dream prompting him to warn his brother not to pursue moose into the water. Disregarding this premonition, the wolf is killed by the aquatic misipisiwak , underwater panthers, feline beings with horns and long tails. To avenge his brother, Wisahkicahk kills their chief, an event unleashing a flood that inundates the Earth. Wisahkicahk survives by constructing a raft on which, in some versions, he installs animals to repopulate the world. He re-creates the Earth by magically expanding a bit of mud brought from the bottom of the waters by the muskrat. After the flood, in a version obtained in the 1820s,
Weesuck then blessed the others [animals] and sent them away telling them to multiply "and be good, not vicious or ill-inclined, nor secret or hide themselves too much from my little brothers (the human beings which he was about to create) when they might want to eat." (Brown and Brightman 1988:48)
In other Cree versions of the flood myth, mistamiskwak 'great beavers' and misikinipikwak 'great horned snakes' join or replace the panthers as the hero's aquatic antagonists. In Cree and Algonquian cosmology more widely, these underwater and subterranean monsters are represented as the antagonists of the piðisiwak 'thunderbirds', signaling a vertical opposition between the sky and the spaces below the surface of earth and water. The flood myth introduces two further oppositions situated on the horizontal rather than vertical plane. First, the water monsters are opposed to terrestrial beings and spaces: they kill Wisahkicahk's wolf brother, an animal that today does not enter water, and unleash from their bodies a flood that inundates the Earth with water. A second level of significance is expressed only obliquely in some versions of the myth and turns on the motivation of the underwater panthers for destroying the lupine brother. Christopher Vecsey (1983:94-96) has argued cogently that the parallel myth in the Ojibwa cycle is implicitly concerned with hunting: certain versions state that the underwater panthers kill the lupine brother because his excessive predation threatens to exterminate game animals. Most versions of the
myth state that the lupine brother is a successful hunter, and he is aligned as a metaphoric human with Wisahicahk in oppositions of predators to prey and humans to animals. The killing of the wolf is thus an act of stewardship by the underwater panthers on behalf of terrestrial animals, suggesting an archaic association of all animals with water (chap. 4). The same theme occurs in at least one Western Woods Cree version of the flood myth (Clay 1938:16). This theme of antagonism between predators and animals is not consistently maintained throughout the myth since it is Wisahkicahk who saves the animals (as a resource population?) on his raft, and it is amphibious animals who collaborate with him in restoring the world after the flood.
Rock Cree myths represent the early humans as themselves the victims of carnivorous predators, both the primitive mimiðitihisiwak 'hairy heart people' and the wihcikosisak , small witikos or cannibals (Bright-man 1990). Images of a prehistoric period in which all animals were carnivorous, and perhaps anthropophagous, are shared by Thickwoods Crees (Vandersteene 1969:43) and Severn Ojibwa (Stevens 1971:25). The Plains Crees specifically identify animals themselves as the original predator-aggressors and humans as the prey species. One Plains Cree myth explains both the origins of modem animals and the innovation of the modem hunter-prey relationship (Ahenakew 1929:320). In an earlier condition of the cosmos, the protohumans are eaten by anthropophagous animals called cimiskwanak , short-nose beings. The transformer accomplishes their destruction by instructing the protohumans in the use of bows and arrows and then creates modem animals from their corpses. Picking up each in turn, he pronounces its name, and the moose, deer, skunk, mouse, and other species are created and flee into the bush. The myth exhibits a threatening image of the ascendancy of anthropophagous animals over humans, which is "displayed" to demonstrate the relative excellence of the contemporary human-animal relationship that is the iconic opposite of its antecedent. Animals that prey on humans are changed into animals of which humans themselves thereafter become predators, and the transformation is catalyzed by the use of bows and arrows. The Short Noses, terrestrial in the myth just described, appear elsewhere in both Plains and Rock Cree versions of the flood myth as the transformers aquatic antagonists (Brightman 1989a , Ahenakew and Hardlotte 1977), replacing the underwater panthers who usually occupy this role. The substitutability of the Short Noses with the panthers appears strongly motivated: both question the inevitability of human hunting, either by punishing or inverting it.
Rock Crees today have no account of a transition in which the anthropomorphic animals of acaðohkiwin assume the characteristics of modem animals. Other subarctic Algonquian traditions relating to this question were, however, recorded by fur traders in the eighteenth century. These do not explicitly represent animals as anthropophagous but foreground themes of competition, suspicion, and hostility; the animals lose speech and other cultural attributes as punishments for aggression against humans (Henry 1969 [1809]:204-206, Thompson 1962 [1784-1812]:155). But an alternative design was also envisioned in Cree mythological thought and expressed in the version of the flood myth told to Thompson (ibid: 76-78) in the late 1700s. The myth represents the superior being, Kicimanitow, as a benign and rational entity who deputizes Wisahkicahk to instruct humans and animals how to live peacefully. The latter instead incites humans and animals to quarrel and shed blood on the ground, and the creator tells him that he will take everything from him unless he keeps the ground free of blood. Wisahkicahk ignores these instructions and continues to incite men and animals to quarrel, whereupon the creator makes good his threat and raises the waters to wash the ground dean of blood. In another context, Thompson observes that the creator being felt kindly disposed toward human beings, hated to see human blood on the ground, and sent rain to Earth to wash it away. The scriptural parallels suggest that this conception of the flood as a divinely willed punishment was borrowed into Cree cosmogony from Western sources; it is also found in a version told by Thickwoods Crees in Alberta (Vandersteene 1969:47). The significance of bloodstained earth as a tangible sign of conflict between humans or between human and animal beings appears to be a distinctively Algonquian rather than European element. The creator being here appears to desire a bloodless world in which human beings and animals live in harmony without discord and perhaps without the predator-prey relations presently indispensable in the world.