Studying Duff's "Nothing Comes Only in Pieces" and Sproul's Primal Myths
Thad Curtz (for Humans and Nature in the Pacific Northwest)

As with last week, some of the preparation for Wednesday's seminar isn't reading, but various activities exploring the reading.

So far, we've looked at three accounts of creation myths, as well as a range of myths. For this seminar, we want to explore a fourth account in some more detail. Here's a brief summary of the fundamental idea, taken from a famous book called Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths (Spring Publications, Zurich, 1972), by one of Carl Jung's students, Maria Von Franz.

Because the origin of nature and of human existence is a complete mystery to us, the unconscious has produced many models of this event... ...wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image.

Creation myths ... represent unconscious and pre-conscious processes which describe not the origin of our cosmos, but the origin of man's conscious awareness of the world.

She says that when some "...new understanding, [or] sudden realization" occurs in your consciousness, it "...was prepared some time ago in pre-conscious processes..." The "patterns of creativity" projected and expressed in creation myths are, in her view, the representations of these various pre-conscious processes. Thus, for example, she says these motifs appear in dreams "...whenever the unconscious is preparing a basically important progress in consciousness," and that the study of creation myths is useful to psychologists who want to work with particularly creative people like artists, inventors and scientists because knowing creation myths will allow one to understand their psychological processes better. (This edits and simplifies her account a good deal for the time being, just to give us a place to start. Her book is on the reserve shelf for our program in the library, and you can take a look at the first chapter, which is ten pages or so, if you want to know more about what else she thinks...)

Step 1.
Read Duff's "Nothing Comes Only in Pieces".

Some things to think about after you read it:

A. How would you describe the relations between the author of this story and the original Haida story, "Raven Travelling"? What do you think or feel about these relations in comparison to Underwood's relation to the story the Grandfather tells in "Who Speaks For Wolf?" In comparison to Sproul's relation to the stories she includes?

B. How does each of these authors talk about, or present or handle his or her relation to the original material they include as part of their own new work. (This may look like question A at first glance, but it isn't the same.)

Step 2.

This story contains some remarks about ways to think about stories, suggestions about what stories are about. Go through the story and make a list of as many of these remarks as you can find. Then take a little walk, like Ray does, and find somebody else to talk about the story with. Compare your lists. Then try thinking about the story and its details in the different ways suggested by the remarks, one at a time. See how far you can get with each of these approaches to understanding the story.

By now, you probably have thought some about ways in which Duff seems to be drawing on Von Franz's theory, and suggesting that "Raven Travelling" may really be a story about "patterns of creativity". Think about the story and its details in that way and see how far you can get.

Step 4.

Go to the library and spend at least two or three hours looking at and reading the books about Haida culture on the reserve shelf for the class. Look at them all briefly to start, just to see what they are like before you start investing your time.

Many of the books are about art. This is partly because this story is partly about becoming an artist, and partly because the recent history of Haida art is pretty fabulous, and partly because Haida art seems like a rewarding and relatively easy avenue toward learning more about the world of the Haida (compared, say, to trying to learn about Haida kinship structures and social life.) Brief comments on a few follow:

Swanton's Haida Texts and Myths contains the full text of Swanton's transcription of John Sky's telling of "Raven Travelling", from pages 110-147. Duff uses the first page or so.

Stearns' Haida Culture in Custody is detailed and not very lively. It does give you a lot of information about the history of the Haidas' relationships with the Canadian government and about the social and political situation in one Haida community at about the time at which Duff sets his story.

Stewart's Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest is textbook stuff - look over it quickly if you want bare fundamentals, but it is much less sophisticated and interesting than most of the other books.

Cole's Captured Heritage is about how the old Haida works shown in some of the other books ended up in the city museums that now own them - about the people, finance, politics and ethics of collecting.

You will have to look at two books in the Reference section, since reference books don't go on reserve. A Guide to BC Indian Myth and Legend (REF R78/B9/M38/1982) is about how the old Haida stories printed in some of the other books ended up in the anthropological volumes that now contain them. You might find the section on Swanton and the little section in the back about what the author claims are recent unauthentic imitations of Haida stories, including Daughter of Copper Woman, particularly interesting. The Handbook of North American Indians (REF E77/.H25) is organized by area. Volume 7 has the articles about the Northwest Coast; look at the Table of Contents first to see how its organized. This is a sort of sophisticated encyclopedia, summarizing what the anthropologists agreed on at the time.

I'm told Kirk's Tradition and Change on the Northwest Coast has generated considerable controversy - it's an attempt by an outsider to survey the range of contemporary Native American life in the region - lots of pictures and bits of interviews. The Eyes of Chief Seattle, a somewhat similar book created by the Suquamish themselves, is checked out at this point so we couldn't use it this week. (You can get it from Timberland library downtown...)

Step 4.

Make a sketch of one of the patterns shown in the art books. You can draw a whole piece with a pattern on it, or just find a plate that shows a pattern by itself and make a drawing of that. Use a real pattern, though, not one of the textbook examples in Stewart's book! Don't worry about how it looks in the end... Pay attention to how the lines of the pattern go as you are drawing.

Step 5.

Any ideas about what Haida visual art and sculpture might have to do with Haida storytelling? What light, if any, does what you have learned about the Haida and Haida art throw on "Raven Travelling" or "Nothing Comes Only in Pieces"?

Step 6.

Read the section of African myths in Sproul (pp. 31-76)

Step 7.

Pick any one of the myths that you have read in Sproul, except the one you worked on hard yourself last time. (Pick whichever one seems the most interesting to you.) Explore this myth, or some section of it, in the way that von Franz and Duff have pursued - that is, try to see how it might be a myth about what your own psyche's creative processes are about.

First, try the following exercises with it.

A. Listen to it differently. Find somebody who reads well and go to an empty stairwell. Stand at the bottom of the stairwell; have them stand at the top and read the myth to you, slowly. Shut your eyes and listen to it. Have somebody whisper the myth to you.

B. Make a picture of the myth, or of part of it.

C. Pick some object in the myth and freewrite about it as if you were the object. "I am a smooth, white pebble. I am completely smooth and very heavy. I sit at the very bottom of the waters. They heave and shift in the dark, but far, far above me. .... Like that..."

Then, get together with a partner and discuss each other's myth. See what ideas about how human creativity works the details of the myth might suggest. Make a note of whatever ideas you have to share in discussion

Step 8.

You have now read a selection of creation myths from three areas of the world - the Near East, North America, and Africa. Look back over these sections and make notes on whatever hypotheses you can come up with about what the myths in a each region share. That is, are there things that the Near Eastern myths tend to have in common which are different from what the North American myths tend to have in common, and so on? Assume Sproul is right, and our creation myths "organize the way we perceive facts and understand ourselves and the world." Which of these groups of myths do you think would best promote a desirable relation between humans and nature, and why? What can you see, if you push the question, about possible shortcoming or undesirable consequences of that way of organizing our perception and understanding ourselves and the world?