The True Lineage of “Juan Oso”

Abstract

“Juan Oso,” known as “John the Bear” in the English tradition, is a cohesive narrative, a tale type, with apparent European origins and wide distribution among native communities of the Americas. Here I inspect the thesis that the native American narrative corpus originates in European sources. “Juan Oso” would seem to be the poster child for this argument, but after considering its presence in two New World collections, Robert Lowie’s Assiniboine myths and my own Kamsá mythic narratives, I propose that “Juan Oso” is an outlier, a special case, in an endemic American corpus of tales featuring amorous bears.