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Zuni Folktales

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First published: 1901
Pages: 314

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About this book

Frank Hamilton Cushing spent years living among the Zuni people of New Mexico, learning their language and customs from the inside, and this collection preserves the stories he heard told around their fires. The tales range from creation myths and trickster adventures to romances, moral fables, and accounts of gods, animals, and ancestral heroes. Cushing rendered them in English while trying to keep the rhythm and flavor of Zuni oral storytelling, so the voice of the original narrators still comes through. First published in 1901, after Cushing's death, the book remains a valued record of a living Native American oral tradition.

About the author

Frank Hamilton Cushing

Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900) was an American ethnologist and a pioneer of participant-observation fieldwork. Sent by the Smithsonian to the Zuni pueblo in 1879, he lived there for years, was initiated into the tribe, and produced influential studies of Zuni life, ritual, and folklore.

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