Week 9 Extra Reading

This week I chose to read the American Indian Fairy Tales Unit for my extra reading, instead of writing an essay (mostly because I didn't do either of the reading diaries). These stories were taken from American Indian Fairy Tales by W.T. Larned, with illustrations by John Rae (1921).

The Boy who Snared the Sun

American Indian Fairy Tales, p. 106

by W.T. Larned, found on Internet Archive

• The story of a mischievous little boy and his older sister who took care of him and made him a bow so he could learn to shoot.
• The little boy is in need of a warm coat! It's chilly outside! He tried to kill a bird, but had not yet mastered the bow. For days he practiced, and finally he killed 10 birds which he brought to his sister to sew him a coat out of. With his new coat in hand, the little boy asked if he could go searching for other people. Surely they were not the only two people on earth! 
• The little boy goes on his search, but grows tired and decides to sleep in a sunny little patch. While he's sleeping, the sun shrinks the fresh skins of his coat. The little boy is pissed and vows to get revenge on the sun. The boy laid down for 20 days and thought up a plan to get his revenge. He asks his sister to make him a noose to catch the sun. She used her hair to make a rope which he put between his lips and turned into metal somehow. He took the noose and placed it right where the sun would rise, and he caught it!
• When the sun didn't rise like normal the animals got restless. The west wind pleads to the animals to cut the cord. None of them could figure out how until the War-Eagle chimed in that he knew just what to do. He flew and woke the Dormouse. The coyote tells the dormouse to save them all by cutting the sun loose, after all, the dormouse was so big that if some of him burned away there'd still be plenty of him left. The dormouse is not a smart animal. He went and nibbled on the cord, slowly burning away as he did, until the cord was cut and all that was left of the dormouse was the little mouse we all know today. 

How the Summer Came

Summer

Found on Pixabay 

• A squirrel tells a boy to shoot an arrow in the sky and bring summer down to Earth. A group of men/animals travels to the top of a mountain where they jump up and crack the sky open. They jumped in and found a beautiful oasis. They brought spring, summer, and fall back down to earth as well as some birds, but one of the travelers was captured by the sky-dwellers and did not return to Earth. However, the nice weather was there to stay.  

The Fairy Bride 

Wonderland Native Princess

by Cindy Thorrington Haggerty, found on Fairies World

• Neen-i-zu = chief's daughter
• They try to protect her, but she likes to wander off and walk by herself. She's a romantic and a dreamer. 
• Puk-Wudjies = mischievous little fairies, tricksters
• Neen-i-zu wants to visit the land of the fairies. She comes up with a song to sing to them, and hears it echoed back.. she thinks. She begins fantasizing about a life with the fairies, but her mother continues to bring her back to reality and insist she marry a hunter. 
• Her mom arranges for her to marry a man from the tribe, but Neen-i-zu doesn't like him. She dresses in her bridal outfit and heads to the hills for what may be the last time. However, she never returns. She vanished into the land of the fairies and became a fairy bride after all.