ABSTRACT

The depiction of Anglos in Native American oral tradition dates back to the earliest Indian/Anglo contacts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and ranges in tonality from awe and wonder at these mysterious, impatient, potent newcomers, to perplexity over their strange ways, to anger and outrage, to sly or open contempt. What Indians have seen in the Anglos over the centuries has been imaginatively refracted in their traditional narratives, according to what they wanted or expected to see and according to the Native literary “rules” and conventions governing the way such alien material was assimilated. Hence the imaging of whites in traditional stories is almost never matter-of-fact or neutral; it is, on the contrary, full of a sense of Anglo otherness.