Quote:
Originally Posted by Phantasm
For the Indians (and remember that no one at the time called them "Native Americans"; they were all "Indians" or occasionally identified by tribe - Navajo, Commanche, etc. - but almost universally regarded by the white man as "savages" because of CF differences), I'd look into their own mythology to pull from, and remember that they didn't have a single continent-wide mythology! The tales of the Great Plains were not the same as the tales from the Deep South which were not the same as the Iroquois of upstate New York which were not the tales of the Pacific Northwest which were not the same as the American Southwest.... you get the picture.
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Yeah, it surprises some people that 'Native Americans' are not really an ethnicity, culture or even a coherent family of such things. There are multiple language families, with cultures and mythologies no more related than Syrians, Kenyans, Hungarians and Icelanders.
The Navajo, Apache and other Na-Dene speakers had relatively recently (within two centuries) arrived from as far North as the Arctic Circle when the Europeans arrived in the New World. They had less in common, linguistically and culturally, with the other tribes where they settled than Anglo-Saxons have with Lithuanians or Greeks.
Other Southwest tribes, like the Comanche, Hopi, Ute and other Ute-Aztecan speakers, were, like the name suggests, related to the Aztecs/Nahuan-speakers far to the South.
And so on and so forth.