For millennia, humans everywhere have created a diverse body of imaginative narratives and images to make sense of the night sky’s canopy of stars. In Reachable Stars, folklorist-anthropologist George Lankford explores the ways in which North Americans have attempted to find patterns and meaning in the mysterious lights in the sky, from myriad points of light in the Milky Way to the imaginary pictures we call constellations. Lankford’s ambitious and masterful study is marked by breadth, impressive research, and a purposeful, conversational writing style. A valuable contribution to folklore studies, as significant for its approach as for its content, this volume should also appeal to anthropologists, Native American scholars, historians of science, geomythologists, ethnologists, and scholars of archaeoastronomy. Lankford succeeds in writing for “any reader with an enthusiasm for the night sky and human ways of thinking about it” (19).
For many Native American groups, stars were reminders of mythic traditions, mnemonic guides for elders who recited tales recalling the past and teaching culture and world views. To other groups, the stars were not cosmically distant lights but mystical, “reachable” places visited by spirits and the dead. Lankford compares stories told in the Plains and Eastern America, looking at similarities and differences in ways of identifying, organizing, and employing constellations to illuminate ancient traditions and events.
Why did some groups see a star pattern as a Great Bear or a Canoe, while others imagined a Great Serpent? How could human spirits travel the Milky Way, the Path of Souls? Lankford’s meticulous work sheds new light on the prehistoric relationships between preliterate Indian groups over generations and geography, tracing affinities among cultures that discerned the same star images and told the same narratives.
In his introduction, Lankford differentiates ethnoastronomy and archaeoastronomy, which investigates ancient observations of the celestial world, resulting in accurate star charts, solar calendars, and other proto-scientific interpretations of astronomical evidence. Lankford’s ethnoastronomical project asks how many Native American astronomies existed in the Plains and Eastern Woodlands. The answer to this complex historical/mythical question lies in analyzing surviving oral traditions and belief systems about constellations, gathered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lankford has three goals--to uncover historical relationships, to understand general and cultural limitations of cosmic concepts, and to uncover mythic origins and continuities. He clearly outlines his methodology and lists all the types of celestial puzzles addressed in the myths he evaluates.
The book is organized by a combination of constellation and tale type. The first two chapters introduce ethnoastronomy. The first shows kinds of tribal diversities in interpreting celestial material, by summarizing four astronomies: Arikara and Crow of the northern Plains and Cherokee and Creek of the Southeast. Stars are featured in creation stories, tales of twin adventurers, girls who became bears, women who married stars, dancers swept into the sky, ancestors who became stars, and so on. Chapter 2 discusses eighty-six Native American texts of the widespread tale type, the Star Husband. Motifs are compared in tables, here and in subsequent chapters. Lankford concludes that the Star Husband is not tied to a specific star or constellation, but different versions offer insights about early conceptions of the sky as a solid place with levels reached by portals.
The next two chapters center on Morning Star tales and beliefs about bright stars (or planets) visible at dawn. Chapter 3 presents Star Boy tales among northern Plains peoples and Morning Star Cosmogram stories among the more southern Pawnee, Osage, Caddo, and Wichita. Maps illustrate distribution patterns of these two major myth types, a swath from Canada, Montana, and the Dakotas, south to Oklahoma. Lankford’s discussion of tantalizing, incompletely known Pawnee beliefs and understandings of astronomy is fascinating, especially in view of notorious Pawnee human sacrifices to the Morning Star.
Chapter 4 looks at the Morning Star story of one tribe, the Winnebago of Wisconsin. Much of the material was collected by Paul Radin from Winnebago storytellers; Lankford includes an interesting sidebar on Radin’s important ideas about how “artist-philosophers” transformed traditional folklore into individualized showpieces of literature, in the development of great folk epics. Winnebago motifs appear in Children of the Sun storylines among tribes of the Southwest (Ute, Pueblo, Apache, Navaho), and Lankford traces some distinctive motifs in numerous other tribes. Again, comparative analysis is very technical, with each tale coded into motif equations, but even the general reader is in good hands, aided by tables, maps, and crystal-clear prose.
Familiar asterisms are investigated in chapters 5 and 6. Lankford’s analysis of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major or Great Bear, sometimes viewed as a coffin or a boat) and Polaris, the North Star, suggesting the global antiquity of the Celestial Hunt type, makes for intriguing reading. The Pleiades, the unique cluster of seven stars, is also familiar around the world. Native American myths fall into two groups, Dancing Children and Brother and Sister overcoming obstacles. The surprising similarities of Dancing Children myths in Eskimo, Blackfoot, and Amazon tribes suggests a diffusion pattern over two continents.
A single myth type told by Iroquois and Huron-Wyandot in the north and by Shawnee, Cherokee, and Kuna of Central America, the Star Women (and its ancestral tale, Swan Maiden), is the subject of chapter 7. Chapters 8-10 present tales associated with the Milky Way, seen almost universally as a spiritual path across the heavens. Lankford notes links to the ancient Greek Orpheus myth, and in chapter 9 he speculates on the origins of ideas about how souls gain access to the Path of Souls. Chapter 10 is a stimulating exploration of beliefs and myths about the Great Serpent or Scorpio constellation, as the portal to the Milky Way. Chapter 11 is a welcome, enlightening synthesis of the patterns and findings in Lankford’s majestic sweep of the starry skies in human belief and myth.
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[Review length: 963 words • Review posted on April 9, 2008]