Reading Notes: Blackfoot Unit, Part A

Hi!

This week I chose to read the Blackfoot Unit. Of the stories, I enjoyed the "The Wolf Man" and "The Camp of the Ghosts" the most. In both of these stories I enjoyed the morality and lessons that the plot seemed to support. They reminded me of Aesop's Fables although they seemed to be more complicated lessons than those addressed by Aesop's. For a story this week, I would like to use similar plot lines to convey similar lessons and morals. Additionally, the view into Blackfoot society and culture was interesting. I would like to do my best to maintain the aspects of their culture in my story. I think that to make it original I could gender swap the characters, or modernize the tale. I have paper notes that I took while reading the stories that I can review when it it time to write my own story. Here are just some of the plot points that I wrote down for each of the stories.

"The Wolf Man"

The two wives are lazy and only socialize
The man moves them away from other people
The wives get lonely/angry and trap the man in a pit
The women return to camp and say he never came back from hunting
Wolves and other animals find the man and help him
Old blind wolf is powerful - heals him and transforms his head and hands into those of a wolf
Wolf man helps wolves steel food from the humans
Humans know it is a wolf man that is taking the food
They trap him and he tells them what his wives did
The humans think the wives should be punished and they are never seen again

"The Camp of the Ghosts"

Man's wife dies and he is inconsolable
He leaves his son with the grandmother and goes to find his wife
He meets an old woman that tells him to find another old woman and gives him mysterious things
The second old woman calls his relations from the ghost camp and tells him to go with them but keep his eyes closed or he will not return
He goes to his father-in-law who says he must stay there for four days, then his wife will carry the worm pipe and they will travel back for four days to the old woman's place
On the last day of travel the man can open his eyes and the wife is alive and with him
When they get back to the camp they have to sweat themselves clean of the ghost world
The father-in-law warned that if the husband ever harmed or threatened his wife she would disappear again
This came to pass sometime later when he raised a hot iron like he was going to strike her

A picture that I could use for the story would be this one of an angry Blackfoot woman if I wrote a story like "The Wolf Man"

Bibliography

Blackfeet Indian Stories by George Bird Grinnell (1915).

Waiting and Mad, Charles Marion Russell, 1899. Painting of a Blackfoot woman. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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