Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1916. — 325 pp.If the term be understood as signifying a systematic and conscious arrangement of mythic characters and events, it is certainly a misnomer to speak of the stories of the North American Indians as "mythology." To be sure, certain tribes and groups (as the Iroquois, the Pawnee, the Zuni, the Bella Coola, to mention widely separate examples) have attained to something like consistency and uniformity in their mythic beliefs (and it is significant that in just these groups the process of anthropomorphization has gone farthest); but nowhere on the continent can we find anything like the sense for system which in the Old World is in part evidenced and in part introduced by the epic literatures — Aryan, Babylonian, Greek, Norse.
Mythology in the classic acceptation, therefore, can scarcely be said to exist in North America; but in quite another sense — belief in more or less clearly personified nature-powers and the possession of stories narrating the deeds and adventures of these persons — the Indians own, not one, but many mythologies; for every tribe, and often, within the tribe, each clan and society, has its individual mythic lore.
