Chapter Two: Assignments and Readings

GOAL: To learn from today’s poets whose works revise earlier creation and origin stories. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Listen to Poet Derek Walcott’s reading from his poem Origins and identify its elements and references to the tradition of origin stories. OER Poetry Reading of “Origins” – a Caribbean poem by Derek Walcott

GOAL: Begin to identify how different social groups share similar themes. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of ‘interpreting’ a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Review your notes on Walcott’s elements of origin stories and compare them to the mythological stories of the Taínos, The Creation by the Haudenosaunee, or Man’s Dependence on Animals by the Ojibway. What are the similarities? And, most importantly, what are the differences?  TED Talk on Taino Storytelling by Bill Keegan 2020, The Creation Story by Haudenosaunee, or Man’s Dependence on Animals by Anishinaabe

GOAL: Practice identifying and explaining ‘theme’. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of ‘interpreting’ a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Share your findings in Activity 2 with peers. Add your understanding of the literal and symbolic significance of each character who represents ‘conflict’ or ‘imbalance’. Here you can begin to add your ideas, reflections, and insights on how origin stories fundamentally want to establish ‘order,’ or balance. End your post with a question to your peers in how Native American mythology inspires present generations to think more carefully about how we engage with nature and wildlife.

GOAL: To practice critical interpretive lenses of ecocriticism. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: An exercise to write overall thoughts of aspects of the Native American mythological narrative: characterization, setting, plot, theme, even irony. Share your insights on storytelling as a tradition that represents the experiences of its communities and future generations. Then, review several goals on sustainability and brainstorm on topics that correlate with those in the stories and that we associate with sustainability in the present day. How does storytelling address the work we in our communities can do to address sustainability (UN Sustainability Goals aka SDGS)?

GOAL: To appreciate the difference between the creation in Biblical scripture and one of the provided creation mythological stories by the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, or Taino. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: 1) Choose a mythological story by one of the Indigenous cultures featured in Chapter Two. 2) Compare that creation story with the Biblical story of Genesis. 3) Address: What are the differences in character, setting and beliefs? And 4) Write a comparative short paper demonstrating your findings. Links to Genesis: Look into how the beginnings of the Earth is imagined in Genesis, Source on Genesis from The Old Testament, https://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/GEN+2.html Or, look into how the first two humans in the Garden of Eden compare with Antaensic’s first two humans, Hah-gweh-di-yu and Hah-gweh-ga-et-ga, http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/GEN+3.html, and via paintings https://voices.uchicago.edu/witnessingmedievalevil/2020/05/15/a-progression-of-depictions-of-the-expulsion/ and on Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve https://lectio.spu.edu/ending-it-all-and-starting-over-genesis-41-622/.

GOAL: To generate research paper topics that both address a theme on Native American mythology and a topic from UN’s SDFGS. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: This reflection can be conducted in class in small groups so each group may compare notes and brainstorm topics for further inquiries and research. Then, review articles recommended below to continue to build on how works of literature, in this case of Native American mythology, intersect with challenges and concerns on sustainability. For example, work with the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe mythological story Man’s Dependence on Animals and focus on their value and beliefs in how “language is the life-blood of the soul” (Part Two of introduction in article: OER Article on the Beliefs of the Anishinaabe / Ojibway & Nature) to develop a concrete understanding on how early Native American mythology shows a social group’s efforts towards engaging with nature with a more deliberate and sustainable approach. And then address the question, “How may we learn from Native American mythology on current sustainability needs and approaches to engage with nature with mutual respect and long-term health?”

GOALS: This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of ‘interpreting’ a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Compare the poetry of Walt Whitman to Ofelia Zepeda: Walt Whitman as a Romantic poet represents the iconic ‘open road’ in his work. Operating as a trope of his poetry, critic Audrey Goodman’s comparison exemplifies the differences between both poets, the ideological difference in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Ofelia Zepeda.

Consider Zepeda’s road poem, “Blacktop,” which relates to and revises the trope of Whitman’s “Open Road” to engage in a deep comparison between the lure of possibility and the meaning of a tribal homeland. The blacktop carries the speaker beyond the built environment and into the desert’s shimmering, inarticulate territory, places where the voices of weavers “drift into/The tangle of desert where all language goes” (Where Clouds Are Formed 65). By yielding to the road as Meloy yielded to desert and sea, Zepeda opens herself to disorientation and the possible discovery of language’s future destination. “Leaving the debris of my life under a mesquite tree,/I rush towards an imaginary new life”, she writes. Zepeda then continues to specify the intimacy of her relation to the road: “The blacktop carries me in all directions./It knows my name./I never told it my name./It calls me” (65). Suddenly, the road becomes animate, a companion, an embodiment of equal, if contradictory desires. And when it speaks to her, it offers the promise that she will carry the places she values, such as the mountain sacred to her people, and her mother tongue with her:

It wants to carry me in all directions.
     It whispers, “You will always see Waw Giwalik
     In your rearview mirror.

(qtd. in OER “Blacktop” by Zepeda, 2011)