The White Mountain Apache tribe currently occupies
a region in east-central Arizona of the
United States. Before the White Mountain Apache
Reservation was established in 1891, the White
Mountain tribe, one of five groups belonging to
the Western Apache, was largely nomadic. In the
1920s and 1930s, scholars Pliny Earle Goddard and
Grenville Goodwin undertook efforts to record,
White Mountain Apache myths and tales 327
translate, and preserve the myths and legends of
the White Mountain Apache.
To the White Mountain Apache, as with the
ZUNI NARRATIVE POETRY, storytelling is a practice
that belongs to the winter months from November
to February and should be done only at night, after
dusk and before dawn. Telling stories in broad daylight
is dangerous, especially in the spring, summer,
and fall months, when all sorts of creatures
are abroad; if snakes, insects, or even lightning
hear stories about them that they do not like, they
may seek to punish the narrator. This belief in the
power of storytelling is shared among many cultures
that preserve and transmit their histories,
teachings, and cultural beliefs through an ORAL LITERATURE/
TRADITION. To societies that largely depend
on a spoken language to communicate,
stories preserve memory, genealogy, identity, and
understanding about how the world works.
Tales of the White Mountain Apache generally
take one of two forms.Holy tales explain the origin
of ceremonies and other religious practices; creation
tales explain the creation of the earth, the
emergence of its creatures, and slaying of monsters,
and the foundation of Apache customs.
While adventure stories about cultural heroes or
fables about the doings of animals may be told for
purposes of entertaining children, the holy tales
are able to confer particular abilities or powers,
and therefore the audience for specific tales was
traditionally limited only to people who were
ready for instruction. Altogether, the myths and
tales contain a great deal of information about the
material culture, economic life, social and familial
organizations, and religious beliefs governing
tribal life.
The White Mountain Apache myths also preserve
a cycle of Coyote tales.While the creation
tales convey ritual knowledge, the Coyote tales
generally use an enjoyable story for a morally instructive
purpose. Like the COYOTE TALES of the
Hopi, the Coyote of the White Mountain Apache is
a prankster, a ludicrous figure who tries to be cunning
but who, more often than not, falls victim to
his own gullibility. Coyote, however, can have an
occasionally useful function. Big Owl, who has a
minor cycle of stories, is usually depicted as slow
and rather ignorant, causing only harm and destruction.
In the holy tales, the most important male figure,
with the exception of the sun, is the hero
Naiyenezgani. He is the benefactor of human beings
who taught them important survival skills.
The most important female figure is Isdzanadlehe,
who taught humans how to plant and harvest
crops. She is variously described as Naiyenezgani’s
mother or grandmother, in keeping with the
Apache practice of tracing descent through the
mother and organizing families around matriarchal
groups. Other holy tales describe the gan, a
class of beings who lived on earth before the White
Mountain Apache and later went away. They are
powerful spirits who, if properly invoked, can provide
enormous benefits, but can also do great
harm if offended.
Like the book of Genesis in the Hebrew BIBLE
and also in the Sumerian poem GILGAMESH, the
White Mountain Apache myths have a story about
a flood, which itself contains many origin stories.
This story explains why the tip of the turkey’s tail is
white, why the area where the White Mountain
Apache live is sandy and flat rather than mountainous,
and how corn was a gift of a turkey that
distributed food to those who had survived the
flood. As the story goes, the turkey provided gray,
red, yellow, and blue corn, simply by shaking his
feathers.
An indication that the White Mountain Apache
folklore continued to evolve and grow as a tradition
is seen in some stories, preserved in modern
collections, that show the influence of the Spanish
and later Europeans. Stories that include horses,
firearms, and written documents all date from the
period after the first European interactions.While
certain stories preserve the origins and histories of
clans or families within the tribe, most of the
White Mountain myths are not clan-specific. Together
the myths represent a rich and flexible literary
tradition and provide a valuable cultural
history of the White Mountain Apache tribe.
An English Version of White Mountain
Apache Myths
Goodwin, Grenville. Myths and Tales of the White
Mountain Apache. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1994.
A Work about White Mountain
Apache Myths
Green, Bernard and Darlene Pienschke. Stories of
Faith: Among the White Mountain Apache. London:
Pen Press Publishers, 2001.