Reading Diary A: Blackfoot Stories

This week I read the Blackfoot unit, which focused on stories from the Blackfoot people. All involved animals in some way, but my favorite was The Wolf Man. In the story, a man has two wives who do very little to serve him. They don't cook or clean because they're too busy having a good time, and so the man decides to move them out away from other people so then women won't be distracted. They move and he continues to provide, but the women grow bored quickly. They decide to build a trap for the man and trick him into falling in a hole. When he does, they run back to the village and pretend he disappeared while hunting. What they don't realize, though, is that the man is still alive. He's dug out of the hole by a pack of wolves, and they use magic to make his head and hands like a wolf's. The man shows the wolves how to steal food from the humans, until he's finally captured and it's revealed that his wives had tried to kill him. I enjoyed the story because of the mix of supernatural and folktale. I liked that in many of the other stories as well, but I thought this story was particularly interesting because of the betrayal by the wives, and then the semi-betrayal by the Wolf Man in stealing food from people that used to be his neighbors.

What Wolf Man looked like, probably

Blackfoot Stories

Extra Reading Diary: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story from the second half of the Eskimo Folk Tales was The Eagle and the Whale. It's the story of an Eskimo family with two daughters and a bunch of sons. The daughters are married off to a whale and an eagle, and live with them for a long time. They sons begin to miss the daughters, so they work on a plan to break them out. The first daughter escapes from the eagle using a rope, and then the brother shoot it with an arrow and kill it. The second daughter escapes from the whale using a boat, and the brother row away fast enough to escape. Ultimately the whale dies after beaching itself. I enjoyed these stories because they involved animals as well as creativity for the daughters to escape. Humans marrying animals is still a tad odd to me but I think I'm slowly adapting.

An Eskimo whaling ship

Source:

Eskimo Folk Tales

Reading Diary A: Eskimo Folk Tales

My favorite story in this unit was The Woman Who had a Bear as a Foster Son. I've always enjoyed stories about animals that get integrated into human life, which is essentially what this story is. A woman adopts a small bear, who grows older and stronger until he is a hunter for the woman and her community. It eventually gets to the point where he is too strong, and ultimately ends up killing a human. It's then that the bear is sent off in to the world, but not before the woman marks him with black soot so that he can be recognized. It was a bit of a sad ending in that sense, but at the end they reference that a bear with a black mark can be periodically seen hunting in the area.

Polar Bear

Eskimo Folktales

Commenting Review Week

I think I've definitely had a positive experience with the commenting system so far. It provides a good chance to get to know other students better, and helpful critiques and advice for the various writings we do. I think it will be most helpful with the Storybook writings because it gives a great outside perspective on the writing.

Every day of the week

Reading Review Week

I don't know that I have a far and away favorite set of stories so far, but I think if I had to pick one I'd select Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria. I'm personally a huge lover of animals so I enjoyed getting to read about adventures that involved them quite a bit. I think something that I noticed is that the stories I liked most weren't necessarily better overall, but they consistently had at least one story that I really liked. I think that was what distinguished them for me.

The story of the Elephant and the Tortoise was one of my favorites.

On the flipside, I don't think a single bad story really impacted my view strongly to the negative. The only set of stories I really didn't like were the Tales of Sindbad, and that was because I didn't really enjoy any of them. To me that suggests that I at least would prefer a variety of themes and ideas in a set of stories, because it's unlikely I'll dislike many of them and there's a good chance that I'll find one that makes the whole set stick out to me!