Legends of the Longhouse
by
[Lippincott, $2.00]
Legends of the Longhouse are the letters of Jesse J. Cornplanter, Seneca Indian, to Sah-Nee-Weh, the White Sister (Mrs. Naomi Henricks). Carl Carmer has written a notable introduction. The legends are illustrated with simple vigor by the author.
This descendant of the great Cornplanter lives on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation in New York and is one of the small group of Longhouse people there who hold to primitive paganism. His legends are ‘based on facts with a touch of morals.’ Like fairy tales, they are unconcerned with reality, strong in poetic imagination and supernatural marvels. Here are stone giants, dwarfs, sea monsters, wicked stepmothers, and ghosts. As in fairy tales, the moral is unobtrusive. The Senecas are a subtle folk, with a religious explanation for everything.
A number of the legends deal with creation myths. These are beautiful and involved conceptions, more detailed than Genesis. The Sky Woman, pushed from the celestial world, gave birth to twins: Good-Minded, creator of such blessings as fish and rivers, and Evil-Minded, who placed bones in the fish and rapids in the rivers.
Other legends relate the sources of tribal ceremonies still practised. In lighter vein, Mr. Cornplanter gives us ‘wise animal’ stories, such as the ’Legend of the Rabbit or the Beginning of the Pussy Willow,’ as whimsical as those of Uncle Remus. His ghost stories — the unseen walk ever beside the red man — are powerful in their childlike envisioning of the horrible.
The letters are written in an easy, rambling style. They contain personal comments, Indian turns of speech, and occasional white man’s slang to spice the unusual dish. No one interested in the folklore of primitive peoples, their philosophy, customs, or psychology, should neglect Legends of the Longhouse. Those without anthropological leanings will equally enjoy Jesse Cornplanter’s versions of stories which were old before the white man came. Mrs. Henricks is to be thanked for passing them on just as they arrived from the Seneca reservation, without attempting to formalize their quaint oddities.
ARTHUR POUND