Telling about Bear in N. Scott Momaday's "The Ancient Child"

Abstract

In oral literary traditions across the Northern Hemisphere, the bear, like no other animal, has worked as an intermediary between humans and animals for many thousands of years. Across geographical, social, and racial boundaries, and across time and space, the bear as a literary device has mediated between humans and animals and the above and below worlds of life and death, as well as between individuals and groups of humans. Using such a literary device, storytellers have told about the bear to help work through the tensions of female and male forces, both natural and social. Throughout Native American and Old European traditional oral literatures, the bear has borne such metas phorical possibilities for human-animal relations and transformations through the storytelling process. N. Scott Momaday, long recognized for his juxtaposition of Native American and European traditional oral literatures throughout o N his work, retells the Kiowa story of Tsoai, the boy who turned into a bear, in The Ancient Child.1 Momaday not only structures his novel . 149 around this Kiowa myth, but to a significant degree he also weaves northern Plains and Athapaskan elements of Bear Boy or Bear Woman motifs into his characterization of the two protagonists: the painter, Set, and the young Kiowa medicine woman, Grey. In addition to using bear elements recognizable from these Native American oral traditions, Momaday also carefully synthesizes references from Old European traditional oral literatures to depict bears throughout the novel.