Reading Notes: Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes, Reading A

 

("Polar Bear" by Tambako via Flickr)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “The Great Flood” by Katharine Berry Judson (1914). I chose to focus on this story because I actually remember reading about this story at the beginning of the semester while researching Storybook projects so I thought it would be interesting to see the original story. This story revolves around the trickster Manabush and how he gets his revenge on the evil spirit beings called Anamaqkiu. While reading through this story, the thing I noticed the most was the number of unfamiliar words and characters. I would say that if you have no prior knowledge of characters from Native American stories or no background information at all, this story might be a difficult read as I know it was for me. I had to do a little background research in order to really understand the stories but once you become familiar with the characters that are mentioned, then the story becomes a whole lot clearer. This story capitalizes the names of all the characters in the story including all the animals that appear to help Manabush. Manabush uses the help of all these different animals to escape the Anamaqkiu, who are in the form of bears, after tricking them. This story is seen through and outside perspective (third perspective) however there is dialogue between the characters so that we are able to get to know more about the personality of each character.