Individual Native American Storytelling Paper

Introduction

Folklore and storytelling have been an important tool of communication and preservation of history for all cultures, Native Americans are not different in this sense for they used the same traditions of folklore and storytelling to preserve and promote their historical, philosophical and cultural traditions. This paper explores the link of Native American Literature with storytelling culture.

Purpose of Story Telling/ Folklore in Native American Cultures

The tribal life of Native American cultures understood the importance of storytelling as a means to explore, understand and survive their environment. Importance of folklore and story increased with forced relocations of the native people due to foreign colonizers and settlers; as it remained a way to carry on customs, religious values, native languages and importance legacies. In a way, it was a form of preservation of the Native culture's life itself. The folklore played the following role for the people of Native American cultures.

Mythology: Mythology has always been an important part of the native American religion and one of the most common traits of all the native tribes of America, it was important because much of the natural world explored through science today was unknown to the people and they created myths and storytelling to explain the natural world and their own beginnings. (Wistrom, 2012)

The Native American folklore included Folklore music, poetry and forms of dances to connect the tribal members and illustrate vivid images of mythical beings, which were according to their myths, involved in the functioning of human life and earth.

The folklore was used to pay tribute to important heroes or elders and pass down their legacy to the future generations for inspiration and preservation of the tribal greatness. These stories were learnt, shared and passed down to generations to build a great legacy of the native's historical roots. (Wistrom, 2012)

Literary Conventions of the Native American Folklore

All forms of literature possess literary conventions which serve the purpose of creating stories with particular highlights of their genres, plots and kind of expectations to be held from them, the same kind of literary conventions go for the Native American folklore traditions where intricate details of the types of tales serve different purposes such as entertainment, consoling, success, failures, tragedies etc. As cited by Margret Astrove, 1962 that the American Native prose and poetry can be grouped according to their purpose because the natives believed word to be powerful (Muray, 1985). With this distinction, the Native American folklore can be safely concluded to posses literary elements which are similar to the modern literary elements of heroism, entertainment, romance, tragedy etc. the groups of Native American literature specially belong to songs can be as categorized as songs of Individuals (Memoirs/Legacy), healing, growth, dreams and visions (Murray 1985) serving the purpose of providing romantic or heroic entertainment, consolations in events of tragedies like war or natural disasters, preserving history of the tribe and also providing a vision and mission of what the tribe should be for the coming ...