Trickster In Native American Culture

Unit 1 Essay: Native American Trickster Tales

A Trickster is a troublesome or deceitful character in myth or oral history who typically makes up for not being able to be physically capable to do much with being deceitful and destructive. A Trickster switches around between being intelligent to being dumb, nice to mean, to an imposter playing people to being the one getting played, who broke the rules yet created an incredible culture for the Native American people. In almost every oral tradition in the world tricksters play a vital part in the characteristics of what a trickster actually is. Tradition always begins somewhere and with something, that is what makes every culture and every tradition so unique.

The tricksters took what the African people made in the U.S. which was focused primarily on traditions practiced by small foot, homogenous, rural groups living in

Other stories explain the more distant origin of the world and emergence of the people, the development of the particular Native American population and crucial events in the history of that population, and the uncertain nature of human existence.”( Wiget) We as humans have yet to learn all of what is told and said throughout the years in history. The Native American people had different cultures which impacted the world throughout the years because they were very different from the Europeans. Unlike Europeans, Native Americans could name many more forms of “literature.” Some of them were “ Winnebago trickster tale cycles, Apache jokes, Hopi personal naming and grievance chants,Yaqui deer sings, Yuman dream songs, Piman shamanic chants, Iroquois condolence rituals, Navajo curing and blessing chants, and Chippewa sings of the Great Medici ne Society, to nam only some of the types of the Navtive American verbal expression.”(Baym and Levine