Ursula K Le Guin's mom is a boss.

v interesting to read abt native american indian folk stories and especially to see the parallels they have with myths from other cultures

Recommended by Susan Aylworth
(wife of MormonTimes.com columnist Roger H. Aylworth)

"Reading the Greek and Yokuts stories, who is to call whom primitive? The raw material from which are spun the the tales that live to be told and retold to children and grandchildren is usually primitive in that it is the concretization of something arising from the unconcscious: a love, a hate, a longing, a fear, a question. And if the tale is so well spun that the love is realized, the hate avenged or dispersed, the longing assuaged, the fear generalized and shared, or the question answered, then the author, the teller, and the audience, whether Yokuts or Greek or modern American, are functioning on a level not primitive nor necessarily sophisticated, but wholly human, which functioning I take to be an early aspect of art."

This book retells nine legends of California Indians, and gives endnotes as large as the text of the legends themselves. The composers of the legends had no agriculture; however, the Yurok of lower Klamath River valley had social stratification, money in the form of seashells, and even slavery (in the first legend, the hero's low-born father offers to be his high-born mother's father's slave). My favorite is a variant of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice told by the Yokuts and Western Mono people of the San Joaquin Valley and western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. In the ancient Greek version of the story, the husband is about to recover his wife from the underworld when he looks at her and she disappears forever; in the Native American version, she disappears when he tries to have sex with her, which was really the reason he wanted to bring her back from the dead. I must say that the Native American version rings more true to me.

If you are traveling through California and wish to educate yourself about the diversity of indigenous peoples this is the one volume you should read. The 9 included stories are curated and discussed by one of the most respected and respectful anthropologist experts, Theodora Kroeber. By reading these stories one can get a good perspective of the wide range of cultures inhabiting virtually every inch of California lands prior to the European/American invasions.

Not only that -- the stories are engaging, complex, and memorable. I rarely, these days, add a book to my permanent collection. Typically I pass my books along - but not this one. I may loan it out, but I'm keeping it, and will reread the stories often.

Nice retelling of some Californian folklore with a clear and respectful voice.

very interesting native American stories from California---some quite emotional in their understatement.

Theodora Kroeber does a great job of presenting, then explaining several native American stories from northern California. This collection is pleasant to hear and to read. I really enjoyed this book.

Amazing book. So glad Rosemary shared it with me.
1959. Forward by Oliver La Farge.
What a perceptive and culturally sensitive person Kroeber is! The stories were easy to read, even though some of the behavior and thinking seemed foreign [as one would expect]. I can hardly imagine better retellings of the stories than Kroeber has created, and she succeeded admirably in her goals as she stated them:

"The plots and persons are the stories' own, but in my retelling the focus of interest changes....We are less interested in the routes they traversed and in the exploits of their heroes than were the Indians, and more interested in the character and personality of the hero or his wife or an old uncle....My objective has been to transmit in some measure the sense of poetry and drama which these tales held for their own people....The alien reader must be given enough background fact so that motivation and behavior are understood."

I hope to read her book of Ishi's story, and see the films as well.

Kroeber's [second] husband was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber [1876 –1960], and some versions of the stories she retells were 'collected' by him.

Kroeber (1897–1979) studied anthropology and met and married Alfred Louis Kroeber, one of the leading American anthropologists of his generation and himself a widower. After his death, Theodora Kroeber wrote his biography. They had two children, writer Ursula K. Le Guin and English professor Karl Kroeber.

Two movies were made based on her account of Ishi:
Ishi: The Last of His Tribe (1978) and
The Last of His Tribe (1992).
[[Alfred Kroeber provided detailed information about Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yana people, whom he studied over a period of years.]]

The Inland Whale. 1959. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Ishi in Two Worlds. Berkley Books.
Ishi: The Last of His Tribe. 1964. Parnassus Press, Berkeley, California.
(with Robert F. Heizer) Almost Ancestors: The First Californians. 1968. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.
Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration. 1970. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Here we get a retelling of nine stories from the Native Americans who lived in the California area, nine tales that are delightful to read as they are well written, engaging, and full of life. The foreword in my book by Oliver La Farge is hideous but that is easily skipped over. At the end there is a little discussion about each tale which is also really interesting, that provides a bit more context and explanation for the stories. Told with much respect.

Absolutely engaging. Nine stories, each different and each powerful, from nine of the 21 different nations (and language groups) who once inhabited California.
The introduction (by Oliver La Farge) shouts prejudice against Native Americans as he condescendingly writes: "The literary value of a great deal of primitive literature, whether myths or tales, is nil." (He even italicized the word 'nil' as if we might not get his point.) And if that isn't enough, he goes on to say: "In my limited experience, I know of no body of such literature of which these depressing generalizations are more true than they are of the enormous mass of stories of all kinds . . . by the tribes and tribelets of California." And this from a man who won the Pulitzer prize for his book "Laughing Boy." What an a****le!!!
Kroeber's only mistake in this work was asking La Farge to write the foreword.