Native American Tales

The native American culture has always been one that I appreciated and found to be especially beautiful for its focus on and integration of the spirituality of all things in nature. The story about the grizzly bears explains some of the reason Native Americans would never kill a grizzly bear and I appreciate the respect for the animal which was also extended to the buffalo in the story about the four brothers who turned into rattlesnakes. I'm curious as to what about the grizzly bears actually made the people have enough respect for the animal in order for the story of the grizzly bears to even come about - why the grizzly bear was chosen to be the ancestor of all Native Americans. I suppose it may have been due to the location of the original storyteller and their proximity to and familiarity with grizzly bears and them being the animals which most resembled humans there. Perhaps if they had seen gorillas the story would have been about gorillas. It's interesting to read the story of the grizzly bears and compare it to other stories of creation because, by the title of the story, it isn't explicitly a story of creation but rather a story of when the bears began to walk on two feet. The foreword did say that oftentimes Native stories followed that pattern. It's also notable that this story doesn't account for solely something heavenly for the makeup of humans but also something earthly, unlike Christianity which sees earthliness and human nature as fallibilities and unclean or impure. The story about the arrowheads confused me at first because I thought Ground Squirrel was a ground squirrel but I think it may have been a person and I also did think it ended abruptly, same with the story of the quillwork girl and her seven brothers, because I expected there to be some type of retribution for Ground Squirrel being deceptive. I also thought there could have been a different reason used for Ground Squirrel feeling ill than because a bear sat on his lap and asked him to feed it.