Origin Tales

Origin tales explain how we humans came to be.

The ones of Spanish settlers in the Española valley, San Juan pueblo and Jicarilla Apache all began as oral traditions passed from generation to generation. Native American tales remained verbal. Those of the Españoles moved in and out of written tradition. At the time Juan de Oñate led them north into the wilderness, only priests had Bibles, and they were in Latin, not Spanish.

When James I issued an authoritative translation in 1611, twenty-three years after Oñate arrived at San Juan, the English king’s scholars wrote:

"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breathe of life; and man became a living soul."

Roman Catholics at the English College of Douay in France had published an alternative translation in 1609 that read:

"And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

The account of Adam’s creation assumed a single, concentrated source of power that existed before humankind. By the time Genesis was translated into English, that power was male. It stretched in an unbroken line from the monarchs to the popes to the disciples to Christ. For Jews, it extended back through the kings to David and Solomon to Adam himself.

San Juan assumed a world of powers diffused among the unmade people under the lake and the spirit animals living below the ground. The future human the spirit people selected as a leader had to be both male and female, embody the gifts of each.

"Next, the people realized they needed a leader who was both male and female. When they found him, they sent him to explore. Kanyotsanyotse tetseenubu’ta, commonly called Yellow Boy, was the first made person."

The Jicarilla said "all the Hactcin were here from the beginning," but one spirit, Black Hactcin, was more powerful. After he made the animals, he "traced an outline of a figure on the ground, making it just like his own body, for the Hactcin was shaped just as we are today. He traced the outline with pollen" and brought it to life.

Genesis began with God creating a male and making a garden for him to inhabit. Next he formed "every beast of the field and every fowl in the air," but "for Adam there was not found an help meet for him."  So next:

"the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;"

Soon after he commissioned this translation, James made Francis Bacon his solicitor general. The intellectual world was poised for the great leap in thinking patterns signified by the Novum Organum Bacon would publish in 1620. The translators anticipated the neutral discourse of science when they chose the word "cause."

The Duoay version was closer to the Hebrew and the medieval world of witchcraft spells. They wrote:

"Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep, he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it."

The Jicarilla used a trance. They told Morris Opler, the Hactcin used lice to make the first man sleepy.

"He was dreaming and dreaming. He dreamt that someone, a girl, was sitting beside him."

"He woke up. The dream had come true."

The older San Juan man who retold the origin tale for Elsie Clews Parsons did not feel the same need to explain the separation of male and female. They existed, coequal, from the beginning.

History begins in Genesis when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden for testing the tree of knowledge. Life in the outside world is a punishment for being sinful, for being curious, for being human. In San Juan and Jicarilla, the migration from the underworld is voluntary and desired, a reward for curiosity.

Notes:
Douay College. The Holy Bible, Holy Family edition of the Catholic Bible, Old Testament in the Douay-Calloner text, edited by John P. O’Connell, 1950. Sons of the Holy Family are responsible for the churches in Santa Cruz and Chimayó. Genesis 2:7 and 2:21.

James I. The Holy Bible, conformable to that edition of 1611, commonly known as the authorized or King James version, The World Publishing Company, nd. Genesis 2:7, 2:20 and 2:21.

Opler, Morris Edward. Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians, 1938. His sources were Cevero Caramillo, John Chopari, Alasco Tisnado, and Juan Julian.

Parsons, Elsie Clews. Tewa Tales, 1926. She did not name her source for tale 1, but described him as "a man of about sixty" and added "his sister’s daughter, a woman of forty, was a good interpreter."