Aliquipiso's Where The Girl Saves Her Brother

Native Americans have long been interested in maintaining cultural traditions they inherited from their ancestors. For Native American tribes with strong oral traditions, the primary sense of history comes from the narratives, stories, and accounts told by tribal elders. Indigenous peoples' stories are as varied as the clouds in the sky and yet have many common elements, whether told by the Cherokee in North Carolina, or the Chimariko in California. In the assortment of Native stories, we find legends and history, maps and poems, the teachings of spirit mentors, instructions for ceremony and ritual, observations of worlds, and storehouses of ethno-ecological knowledge. They often have many dimensions, with meanings that reach from the everyday to the divine. The stories fill places with
Aliquipiso submits herself to the line of fire and is killed in the slaughter of the enemy, but her story is one that is still remembered today among her people. Her hair is transformed into woodbine, a medicine, and her body produced honeysuckle, known as the "blood of brave women" (Myths 253). The image of a youthful warrior in this story is significant because it shows the failure of the old to lead in times of crisis, when the community is just short of becoming a wasteland. Similarly, in Where the Girl Saves her Brother, a Cheyenne myth of courage, a young woman saves her young brother with a high pitched, alarming war cry. Quickly, in the midst of the battle she swoops up her fallen brother and saves him from the guns of the white men. Seeing the young girl's bravery (which is unexpected), the white men back off from the Indian tribes, fearing what the even stronger fighters could do. "If their women fight like this, what will their warriors be like? Even if I win, I will lose half my men" (Myths 266). The Indians embraced Buffalo-Calf-Road-Woman's power and willingness to sacrifice herself so much so that the battle in which she committed this