I was just rereading OMEGA FLIGHT #1 and OMEGA FLIGHT #2--Native-themed comics I covered in 2007. I found a mistake I hadn't noticed before.
Elizabeth Twoyoungmen (Talisman), a Sarcee Indian and shaman of her tribe, is telling the origin of the Sarcee's first shaman. Since her father was the superhero named Shaman, she may mean the first Shaman--a hereditary position with a capitalized title. But that's neither here nor there.
"This is the story of the sweat lodge and the first shaman," she says. "It goes that three men stole horses from the camp"--whoa. Indians didn't have horses till the Spanish brought them in the 1500s. It would've taken centuries for the horses to spread to the northern plains of Alberta, where the Sarcee live.
One source said horses didn't reach Kansas until 1745. Another source said all the Plains Indians (in the US?) had them by the 1750s. I suspect horses didn't reach Canada till the late 1700s, if not later.
So was Talisman saying her tribe has had shamans for only 250 years? How did the Sarcees practice their religion before then? What did the white pioneers in the area think when the first Shaman began doing "magic"?
The writer almost certainly invented the whole legend. He probably meant it to be one of those age-old origin stories set at the "dawn of time." But unless he thinks time dawned in the second half of the 18th century, he made a mistake.
For more on the subject, see Comic Books Featuring Indians.
1 comment:
One source said horses didn't reach Kansas until 1745. Another source said all the Plains Indians (in the US?) had them by the 1750s.
Not that it makes much difference to your thesis, I had always been taught that we (Kiowas) had had horses by 1700. There are Spanish accounts of plains tribes (although exactly which tribes is disputed) having horses by the late 1600s.
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