Applied Ideas to Trickster Tales

                  On Tuesday we watched the brief 5-minute video of Gerald Vizenor discussing the Trickster and oral tradition as a primary literary source. He clarified that myths have no pattern, but involve a lasting need to tell stories that are intended to bring people together through hope and love and a brilliant act of imagination. After watching the short film, we broke up into groups, where we discussed our assigned sections. My group had three very different stories that involved the skeleton man and because we ran out of time for my group to speak, I wanted to point out our observations, because our three stories didn’t necessarily fall into the either category of agreeing with Vizenor or not.

                  Our stories had no meaning or morals and all abruptly ended, similar to other trickster tales that we have been reading in the last few weeks. One of the dissimilarities we pointed out was that our main figure (the skeleton man) was not an animal like we have normally come across in previous tales. In addition, our trickster was one-dimensional, focusing on their desires only and lacking personality.

                  The one story that stood out the most in our eyes was How Masaaw Slept With A Beautiful Maiden, which had no foundation, along with being very disturbing. Many of the other trickster tales we’ve read have told stories that explain how things came to be or a moral, but this one tale had no aim. The skeleton man took over a grandmother’s body and proceeded to trick the granddaughter to sleep with him, and then returned the grandmother to her body. The grandmother and granddaughter then discover they’ve been tricked and the story ends.

                  Vizenor mentioned that trickster tales never contained a cruel or unkind trickster, but this story discards that thought because of the actions of the skeleton man on the granddaughter. Generally trickster tales are told to give meaning to contradictions, love, mortality, and many other uncertainties, but this story, along with the other two in our assigned section, lacked significance or meaning.