Mik'maq version of Cinderella

The Indian Cinderella

What a Native American retelling of the classic fairy tale tells us about the origins of American culture.The story was apparently originally told in the mid-1800s by a member of the Catholicized Mik'maq tribe in Nova Scotia. It was written down by Silas T. Rand, a Baptist missionary, and published in 1884 by a scholar named Charles Leland. It is clearly influenced by Charles Perrault's Cinderella, which the Mik'maq teller had certainly heard. But it is ominous and melancholy in a way Perrault never was.

The tale is called "The Invisible One." The title refers to a being of great power who no one can see. He lives in a lodge by a lake with his sister, and it is said that if any girl can see him, she will marry him. Many try, but they all fail. Finally, a girl named Oochigeaska decides to make the attempt. She lives with her sisters, who treat her horribly—they even pushed her into a fire at one point, so that her face is covered with scars. Nonetheless, she gathers together some rags and goes off to try to see the Invisible One ... and as she goes, all the people of the village laugh and mock at her.

Finally she reaches the lodge, and she does indeed see the Invisible One—who rides through the air on a sled tied with the rainbow, a symbol of death. Having seen him, Oochigeaska's burns are washed away, and she prepares to marry the being—though no one ever seems exactly happy at the upcoming nuptials. Indeed, it seems possible that we are to take the Invisible One as death; Oochigeaska may have escaped her tormentors simply by going to the grave.

Paula Giese, a native author, argues that this tale is a bleak satire. Certainly many of Perrault's assumptions are systematically and bitterly upended: that blood-kin do not perpetrate injustice; his appeal to fine apparel as salvation; his reliance on the ultimate goodness of the nobility. Family cannot be trusted, money and its trappings are useless, and hierarchies mean nothing. What matters instead are vision and faith, which lead to awe, to knowledge, to death—and perhaps to joy, or renewal.

This tale, made out of European materials, but decidedly un-European, is—obviously—a Mik'maq tale.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Hercules vs. Coyote:  Native and Euro-American Beliefs and The Best Indian Books.