The Secret Of No Face An Ireokwa Epic

Stories of the primordial woman who married a bear, appear in matriarchal traditions across the global North from Indigenous North America and Scandinavia to Russia and Korea. In The Woman Who Married the Bear, authors Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Indigenous American culture, and Kaarina Kailo, who specializes in the cultures of Northern Europe, join forces to examine these Woman-Bear stories, their common elements, and their meanings in the context of matriarchal culture. The authors reach back 35,000 years to tease out different threads of Indigenous Woman-Bear traditions, using the lens of bear spirituality to uncover the ancient matriarchies found in rock art, caves, ceremonies, rituals, and traditions. Across cultures, in the earliest known traditions, women and bears are shown to collaborate through star configurations and winter cave-dwelling, symbolized by the spring awakening from hibernation followed by the birth of "cubs." By the Bronze Age, however, the story of the Woman-Bear marriage had changed: it had become a hunting tale, refocused on the male hunter. Throughout the book, Mann and Kailo offer interpretations of this earliest known Bear religion in both its original and its later forms. Together, they uncover the maternal cultural symbolism behind the bear marriage and the Original Instructions given by Bear to Woman on sustainable ecology and lifeways free of patriarchy and social stratification.

This collection, drawing on Indian memories, symbolism and critical evaluations, adds to our understanding of both the traditional and contemporary literature of and about the American Indian. The whole spectrum of thought about Indian literature is covered here, starting with a Seneca legend on the origin of storytelling; progressing to nineteenth century commentaries by writers such as the Christian convert George Copway (Kah-Ge-Ga-Bowh), novelist William Gilmore Simms, and pioneer anthropologist Daniel G. Brinton; and finally presenting modern-day views by Tristram P. Coffin, Kenneth Rexroth, N. Scott Momaday, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paula Gunn Allen. The subject of Indian humor is delightfully examined by Vine Deloria, Jr., and the now classic texts of scholars such as Franz Boas and Constance Rourke are also included.

Here's quick access to more than 490,000 titles published from 1970 to 1984 arranged in Dewey sequence with sections for Adult and Juvenile Fiction. Author and Title indexes are included, and a Subject Guide correlates primary subjects with Dewey and LC classification numbers. These cumulative records are available in three separate sets.