American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION This paper stems from two concerns with a long history in Americanist anthropology, one the study of how individuals shape the intellectual life of their community, the other the study of myth "as history." They come together in the particular definition of "mythology" adopted for this paper, namely "all the texts that one narrator tells; his entire corpus of texts." We will discuss a corpus of 24 texts collected from the Yavapai Jim Stacey by E. W. Gifford in 1930 (Gifford, 1933: 349-401). We will be primarily interested in how a narrative unit extending beyond the individual myth text, called the "cycle" by Gifford, articulates the whole of Stacey's myth corpus and puts it into temporal order. It appears that the whole mythology was too large ever to be told at one time (Gifford, 1933:347). so the cyclic units were factors more in Stacey's reflections on the past than in any single recitation strictly for Yavapais that he is known to have given. When this paper is read through its Appendix, it will be seen how Stacey adjusted nine myths, covering better than two thirds of the total pages of the mythology, to the system of cycles. The demonstration need not stop at that point, but that mu ch will cover the key myths in the cycles and will s how how Stacey 's versions of those myths differ from the versions of other Yavapai narrators.