Native American Legends
Creation of the Yakima World
A Yakima Legend
In the beginning of the world, all was water. Whee-me-me-ow-ah,
the Great Chief Above, lived up in the sky all alone. When he decided
to make the world, he went down to the shallow places in the water
and began to throw up great handfuls of mud that became land.
He piled some of the mud so high that it froze hard and made the
mountains. When the rain came, it turned into ice and snow on top
of the high mountains. Some of the mud was hardened into rocks.
Since that time the rocks have not changed - they have only become
harder.
The Great Chief Above made trees grow on the earth, and also roots
and berries. He made a man out of a ball of mud and told him to
take fish from the waters, and deer and other game from the forests.
When the man became lonely, the Great Chief Above made a woman
to be his companion and taught her how to dress skins, how to find
bark and roots, and how to make baskets out of them. He taught her
which berries to gather for food and how to pick them and dry them.
He showed her how to cook the salmon and the game that the man brought.
Once when the woman was asleep, she had a dream, and in it she
wondered what more she could do to please the man. She prayed to
the Great Chief Above for help. He answered her prayer by blowing
his breath on her and giving her something which she could not see
or hear, smell or touch.
This invisible something was preserved in a basket. Through it,
the first woman taught her daughters and granddaughters the designs
and skills which had been taught her.
But in spite of all the things the Great Chief Above did for them,
the new people quarreled. They bickered so much that Mother Earth
was angry, and in her anger she shook the mountains so hard that
those hanging over the narrow part of Big River fell down.
The rocks, falling into the water, dammed the stream and also made
rapids and waterfalls. Many people and animals were killed and buried
under the rocks and mountains.
Someday the Great Chief Above will overturn those mountains and
rocks. Then the spirits that once lived in the bones buried there
will go back into them.
At present those spirits live in the tops of the mountains, watching
their children on the earth and waiting for the great change which
is to come. The voices of these spirits can be heard in the mountains
at all times. Mourners who wail for their dead hear spirit voices
reply, and thus they know that their lost ones are always near.
We did not know all this by ourselves; we were told it by our fathers
and grandfathers, who learned it from their fathers and grandfathers.
No one knows when the Great Chief Above will overturn the mountains.
But we do know this: the spirits will return only to the remains
of people who in life kept the beliefs of their grandfathers. Only
their bones will be preserved under the mountains.
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