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Native American cultures are rich in myths and legends that explain natural phenomena and the relationship between humans and the spirit world. According to Barre Toelken, feathers, beadwork, dance steps and music, the events in a story, the shape of a dwelling, or items of traditional food can be viewed as icons of cultural meaning.
In some myths they are benign, in others fearsome and malevolent. [12] The Sun is an important deity; [13] [14] other supernatural characters include Morning Star [13] [8] [14] and the Thunderbirds. [15] [12] [16] A common theme is the making of a journey, often to a supernatural place across the landscape or up to the parallel world in the sky ...
The motif-index and the ATU indices are regarded as standard tools in the study of folklore. For example, folklorist Mary Beth Stein said that, "Together with Thompson's six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, with which it is cross-indexed, The Types of Folktale constitutes the most important reference work and research tool for comparative folk-tale analysis. [1]
The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index) is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies.The ATU index is the product of a series of revisions and expansions by an international group of scholars: Originally published in German by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1910), [1] the index was translated into English, revised, and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson (1928 ...
American mythology is the body of traditional stories pertaining to America's most legendary stories and folktale, dating back to the late 1700s when the first colonists settled. "American mythology" may also refer to the modern study of these representations, and to the subject matter as represented in the literature and art of other cultures ...
Some claim that author Roger D. Abrahams perpetuated these in his book Afro-American folktales. He pushed the point that African-American folklore is an "immoral reflection" of African religions and "animal tales are a reflection of African's childlike mannerisms". [7] African-American folklore was predominantly used for guidance and protection.
The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales is a 1985 collection of twenty-four folktales retold by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. They encompass animal tales (including tricksters ), fairy tales , supernatural tales , and tales of the enslaved Africans (including slave narratives ).
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed [1] [2] —a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes [citation needed] and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") [3] or ...