The Whirlwind Is Coming to Destroy My People
Symbolic Representations of Epidemics in Arikara Oral Tradition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4773868 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mark Van De Logt (corresponding author), Mark van de Logt Mark van de Logt |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 52 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5250/amerindiquar.39.1.0052 |
| OpenAlex | W349522619, W4379804793 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Arikara Indian folklore is full of monsters: scalped men, cannibals, witches, water monsters, spirits, ghosts, and monstrous man-eating animals.But the most powerful monster of Arikara tradition was a devastating whirlwind.Appearing in several versions of the Arikara creation account, this whirlwind destroyed and scattered hundreds of people who had neglected to make sacrifi ces in its honor.Only some people were saved from total destruction through the intervention of neešaanu načitákUx, Great Chief Above, who fell out of the sky as a rock, and Mother Corn, the Arikara culture hero, who turned herself into a cedar tree to provide the people with shelter.Th e study of religious symbols has long been the territory of folklorists, religious studies scholars, anthropologists, ethnologists, and psychoanalysts.Historians usually leave the interpretation of such symbols to scholars in the aforementioned fi elds.Th e purpose of this ethnohistory is to encourage historians to study these symbols and link them to actual historical events.Th is article contends that the monstrous whirlwind, as well as a few other symbols such as snakes and bears, in fact may have represented a series of epidemics among the Arikaras in the eighteenth century.If this hypothesis is correct, this would mean that the Arikara creation account not merely tells the story of Arikara creation in the distant past but in fact covers Arikara history over an extended period of time, at least until the great smallpox epidemic of 1780-81. 1 A Note on the Arikara Sources Analyzing Arikara oral traditions poses certain challenges.Th e stories were not recorded until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Geography · Meteorology · Oral history · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Symbolic · Whirlwind · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Livestock and Poultry Management · Psychology · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts
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| Highly cited | No |
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