Reading Notes: Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes, Part B

Bibliography: Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes unit. Myths and Legends of the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes, edited by Katharine Berry Judson (1914).

Reading notes for this unit of legends continued! I want to focus on character names in these stories.

One name that stuck out to me was from "The Worship of the Sun" story in the Un-Textbook. In the intro, readers meet a character with a great name: "an Ojibwa Indian and his wife lived on the shores of Lake Huron. They had one son, who was named 'O-na-wut-a-qui-o,' 'He-that-catches-the-clouds.'" In this story, the boy is taken to the "Sky-land" and is gone from his earthly home for a while. In this way, the name really fits what happens to the character. The naming in the introduction gives clues to the subsequent plot; rather than just being an interesting or beautiful name, it literally tells readers what the character will go on to do! This would be a fun way of using names in my stories.

In another short story, this one called the "Sun and Moon," I really enjoyed the name of the moon: "ONCE upon a time, Ke-so, the Sun, and his sister, Tipa-ke-so, the Moon, the 'last-night sun"."

The idea of the moon being called the "last-night sun" was creative and seemed conceptually interesting to me. The way this society associated the sun with the moon demonstrates a beautiful way of thinking about the natural world that I would enjoying implementing into my telling of stories.

A story called "The Lone Lightning" features a character named just that! However, he isn't given that name until the end of the tale. The author concludes the story by saying "Thus at once he changed the boy into Nazhik-a-wawa, the Lone Lightning." This name not only sounds cool, it really is the culmination of the story. It would be a great idea in one of my stories to have the plot build up to the giving of a significant name.

Names can be so powerful! Interesting, strong names are a great way to draw-in readers to a story. I enjoyed this unit on Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes stories.

Picture of Lake Huron "taken from east of Port Dolomite, MI 

in the upper peninsula." Source: Wikimedia