American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Piudy, a member of a Northern Paiute band often designated as ”Snakes,” is said to have told the following story in the summer of 1930: Almost everything was Coyote’s way. The Indian planted the apple. When he planted it, he said for all the Indians to come and eat. When he told them that, all the people came. The white man was a rattlesnake then, and he was on that tree. The white people have eyes just like the rattlesnake. When the Indians tried to come to eat the apples, that snake tried to bite them. That’s why the white people took everything away from the Indian, because they were snakes. If that snake hadn’t been on the tree, everything would have belonged to the Indian. Just because they were snakes and came here, the white people took everything away. They asked these Indians where they had come from. That’s why they took everything and told the Indians to go way out in the mountains and live. What interests me most about this myth is what most anthropologists at the time would have called its “inauthenticity”; that is, it is clearly a product of postcontact Paiute culture, as seen in the devastating critique of Anglo culture by means of Piudy’s reconstitution and deployment of one of Christianity’s foundational myths. For that very reason, most anthropologists at the time excluded such myths from their collections, even though, as Jarold Ramsey points out, “it [is] precisely at the moment when [the storyteller] beg[ins] to invent and borrow stories and adapt them to [his or] her native tradition (proving its vitality and no doubt revealing its formal ’rules’) that the ethnographer should have been most alert-and most grateful. He could have been studying mythology-in-progress.”