Reviews

Totkv Mocvse/New Fire: Creek Folktales by Jack B. Martin, Craig S. Womack, Margaret McKane Mauldin, Earnest Gouge

criticalgayze's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

This was a required text for a class I'm taking this summer on teaching "American" literature, and I am thankful as an educator, a reader, and a person to have come across this collection of Indigenous storytelling out of the "American" southeast. While not being raised in or around Indigenous tradition, this was also nice to read as someone with Creek ancestry who can see the origin of some of my family stories that were told to me by the greats and grands in my life as a child.

The two things I think I appreciated most about this text were:

1. They have not been edited in the way European, and even African, mythology has been to be more narratively digestible as a reading experience, so you get the full weight of the oral tradition here that is lacking in our modern understanding of these more "revised" cultural stories.
2. The use of pronouns here could, with proper study, make for an interesting discussion around the understanding of persons prior to a heteronormative "Christianization" of non Christian cultures.