"The Story of the Bear" as related in Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy
"A long time ago the Cherokee forgot we were a tribe. We thought only of ourselves apart from the others. Without any connections. Our hair grew long on our bodies. We crawled on our hands and knees. We forgot we had a language. We forgot how to speak. That's how the bear was formed. From a part of ourselves when we were in trouble. All we had was fur and meat to give." (176)
This story is unlike any I heard while growing up in a white household. When I was a child, my mother read me stories like many mothers do. However, it was always made clear to me that these were just stories, make believe, not real. I learned through the different Native American novels that we read this quarter that stories mean something very different in Native American cultures.
"'You women have to have talk,' another man said, 'so you make a story. You have to have something to carry yourself in. What are we without something to say?'" This is another quote from Glancy's Pushing the Bear. According to Glancy, the stories of Native Americans reminded them of who they were. My instructor (who was one of two Indians that I have had as instructors) explained how the stories that the whites called myths are actually believed to be true by Native Americans.
This strange new view of stories opened up a whole new world for me. At first it was difficult to "suspend disbelief" while reading stories about Raven talking to people, or box turtle and deer racing. But, after putting all skepticism aside, the stories began to make sense to me. The stories brought nature closer to me, and gave me a higher respect for animals. They also gave me some support on my feelings that supernatural things occur in nature, especially within the animal kingdom. I would never have had the courage to admit, even to myself, these beliefs until I learned that other people also believed these things.
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