I’m having a frustrating time trying to research* folklore from the Native American tribes that lived in my area. (according to a book on my town’s history, those tribes were the Winnecowett, Piscataqua, Newichannock, Squamscott and Pennacock) If you look those tribes up on google or what have you, you’ll find very little about them at all, which makes figuring out what sort of folklore/mythology they had next to impossible. However, they were Algonquian tribes. “Algonquain mythology” is considerably easier to find.
Is it unreasonable to think that various Algonquian tribes had a similar mythology? Or did the way that the tribes spread out across the US and Canada isolate them too much for there to have been much communication amongst them? I just took out a library book that claims to be about New England Native American tribes, but disappointingly is in fact just about MA, Conn, and RI, probably because of the lack of information about tribes in the rest of New England - but would the beliefs held by these other Algonquains have really been all that different just one state north of MA?
And on a related note, when a source just says something is an “Algonquain myth or folklore” is there an area of the country we can assume that they probably mean the myth came from if they didn’t share a single mythology? Or could it be from any one of those tribes in New England, Canada, NY/NJ, and/or the Great Lakes region? Wiki says that they were most concentrated here in New England, so is it probable they’re referring to myths from here?
*to lend plausibility to a work of fiction, not something as that needs to be as rigorously fact-based as for inclusion in a research paper.
Folklore comes about in three basic ways: inherited, borrowed, and created. Every human culture has a blend of all of these.
Folklore is intimately connected with language, so yes, insofar as they have closely related languages, it is plausible to suggest that they have a similar inherited body of ideas. This is far more likely to be true on the macro level (overarching concepts) than the micro level (specific traditions) — folklore tends to vary a lot. I note that Proto-Eastern-Algonquian’s date of split is around 2500 years ago, but obviously the split between your groups and their nearest neighbors would be much more recent.
Inherited material is only kept so long as it remains relevant. A new environment and / or new technology changes folklore, and of course it tends to change over time, anyway. Are you asking about the point of contact, the nineteenth century, or when? If you’re talking about, say, 1650, there would have been very little pressure from outside to change religion or technology in a way dramatically different from their neighbors.
It would help to know what you mean by folklore: narrative, customs, belief, festival, religion, speech, games…?
I guess I mean belief and religion as it pertains to creator spirits, mythological creatures, ghosts, and other things of that nature that would seem alien to Christians. And as for when historically, this area was settled in the late 1600s, early 1700s, so I’m thinking of beliefs they might have been able to communicate with their new intrusive neighbors from that point on. I know from a particularly terrible incident in the 1720s (a supposed peace talk resulted in 400 people being imprisoned and half sold into salvery) that they were able to speak to the white settlers from at least that point on.
Stop me if I get too technical… I’m procrastinating on grading folklore exams.
The first thing you want to do is make a distinction between mythical and legendary creatures. Myths are generally set outside of time, and the kinds of beings found in them are often relegated to narrative, and only “believed in” the way Christians might believe in the super-weird stuff in Genesis in the Old Testament. So belief in particular monsters is unlikely to be affected by initial contact, but those aren’t the sort of things your average Indian would expect to encounter. Likewise, gods and spirit beings are probably fairly consistent. As long as the traditional religion remains intact, the basics of the system are likely to be pretty stable and consistent with their neighbors. Chances are that when they first heard about Christianity, they attempted to make sense of it within their own worldview: Jesus was either mapped onto one of their own spirits, or considered to be a tribal deity. There’s lots of data on this for other regions of the world.
Legendary creatures are those beings outsiders would call “supernatural,” but within the culture they would have just been considered a different order of the natural world. Some of them would be a species (e.g. leprechauns, mermaids) and some a one-off (e.g. the Spirit of That Rock Over There). Chances are these things would survive contact fairly easily, and even survive a highly syncretized or changed belief system. The classes of beings would probably be similar among the different tribes, while the one-offs (not a technical term) would be more dependent on specific ambiguities in the geography.
Anything where there was common ground with the English is likely to have held on longer, but they’re also likely to incorporate English beliefs (as well as influence them). The English at the time of settlement had a strong belief in the devil and witchcraft.
Is the book you have out The Algonquin Legends of New England
or, Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes
by Charles G. Leland[1884]? Leland is sort of an interesting character, not above massaging the data, but should be reliable enough for this project.
The book is “Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620-1984” by William Simmons. I can get a hold of “The Algonquin Legends of New England,” though. Thanks for the recommendation on it
