Week 11 reading: Sioux Legends, part B
Today I finished up the Sioux Legends unit. I really enjoyed these stories, and they were a fun contrast to the other stories I read from the Tejas tribe! While the Tejas legends focused on nature and why certain things are the way they are, the Sioux legends focus more on characters and deceit.
In my notes I mainly want to focus on the story Unktomi, The Two Widows, and the Red Plums. Like I noted in part A of the Sioux Legends, a lot of these stories don't have happy endings or even a true moral. This story ends by saying the widows were "foolish enough to let Unktomi tempt them with a few red plums," which, if it's even a moral, is pretty depressing.
Instead of centering around the widows, the story is told from Unktomi's point of view, and he is made out to be quite clever. He tricks the widows into searching for the plums, into eating the soup made from their babies, into believing he was a different person, and into falling down the hole. I found it interesting that Unktomi didn't really have any motive to kill this family other than murder just for the sake of it.
When I think of my own writing, this story and the ones similar to it help to remind me that not every story has to have a lesson or a happy ending. Sometimes, a story can just be a story. It can be neutral or even sad or rage-inducing. Sometimes, the ends don't have to tie up as neatly as we think they do.
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| Red plums. Source: Andrei |
Instead of centering around the widows, the story is told from Unktomi's point of view, and he is made out to be quite clever. He tricks the widows into searching for the plums, into eating the soup made from their babies, into believing he was a different person, and into falling down the hole. I found it interesting that Unktomi didn't really have any motive to kill this family other than murder just for the sake of it.
When I think of my own writing, this story and the ones similar to it help to remind me that not every story has to have a lesson or a happy ending. Sometimes, a story can just be a story. It can be neutral or even sad or rage-inducing. Sometimes, the ends don't have to tie up as neatly as we think they do.
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