Reading Notes: Native American Marriage Tales Unit Part A

When I first started this unit I thought it would be happy tales of marriage. However, as I continued to read I was saddened that most of these stories had unfortunate endings and beginnings. While this was sad it inspired me to write a horror story for my weekly story.

I want to focus on the idea of a husband being kidnapped and the wife having to save him. I think this would be a nice role-reversal on the age-old damsel in distress stereotype. For this story I will use the story of the Piqued Buffalo Wife as my inspiration. In this story the son and wife are buffalos who turn into humans. In order for the husband to keep them he must pass several tasks laid out by the buffalos.

This goes into what I want to write about. It might be interesting if the husband's family disapproves of the marriage. And being a wealthy family they pay someone to kidnap their son to keep him from marring her. In the end I want the moral of my story to be that love can overcome anything. I think one thing that is interesting about this plot for a horror story is the lengths that the family will go to to prevent the marriage and how their money can buy anything.

This is a very modern horror story. The money will be the big monster of the story! Within many of the Native American Marriage Tales the evil being is simply an animal or object, so I wanted to stick with this same trend for my story. Money is something that everyone uses, it is a common object. It has both benefits and downsides so it will be interesting to look into these!

Bibliography: Readings from Tales of North American Indians by Stith Thompson.

Money, money, money. Flickr