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

 

("Sun Worship" by Kevin Dooley via Flickr)

The story that I chose to focus my reading notes on for this post is “The Worship of the Sun” by Katharine Berry Judson (1914). This story is about a young boy named O-na-wut-a-qui-o who ended up meeting the Sun in the “Sky-Plain” and living with him for a while. The Sun was a mighty character that was worshipped amongst the people of the “Earth-Plain” and often interacted with the humans from the sky. The young boy lived with the Sun for a while and was able to see all the things that the Sun was able to do from up in the sky until eventually the boy grew weary of the place and asked to be sent back down. Similar to my other reading in this section, this story had some vocabulary that I was unfamiliar with such as “wigwam” however upon some research, I was able to find out what the words meant. The Sun and the Moon had a sort of magical presence in this story as they were presented as people that could practically do whatever they wanted shown by the Sun harming a child and then later healing him. In this story, there is not much dialogue but enough is added so that you are able to discern the personalities of each of the characters, especially the Sun. One final thing is that the story put a lot of detail into the description of the Sky-Plain and on the events in the Earth-Plain so that it was really easy to sort of visualize the scene in the reader’s mind.