The Laughing People: A Tribute to My Innu Friends by Serge Bouchard & Marie-Christine Lévesque

Author:Serge Bouchard & Marie-Christine Lévesque
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Further in the tale, we learn that once the earth formed, the Great Hare created man and woman from animal cadavers. At the source of each line, each human would find an ancestor that was either a fish or a beaver, a bear or a moose … In short, all across the great Algonquin lands emerged the same vision of the world: humanity descended from animals and depended on them. Other great myths also existed in the Innu times of old, like the famous tale of Tshakapesh, which was heard by Father Le Jeune in 1637 (a “ridiculous fable”) as well as by several ethnologists some three centuries later. Rémi Savard studied every stitch of this founding tale. In the 1960s, as a passionate, engaged, and outraged anthropologist, he set out to show against all odds that Algonquin mythology resolutely had its place in the encyclopaedia of great world mythologies. Here is the tale in an overview. Tshakapesh is a little boy whose parents were eaten by a giant bear. In the forest, the “living forest,” to use the title to one of Savard’s books, monsters hid; these immense creatures, these super animals, these cannibals did not hesitate before devouring defenseless humans. To avenge his parents, Tshakapesh made himself enormous to scare the monster (with “such frightening force that trees were used as arrows for his bow,” recounts Le Jeune); he made himself tiny to elude him; climbed to the celestial regions and captured to the sun; was swallowed by a giant fish; transformed into a bird … The myth of Kuekuatsheu, or Carcajou, is also very common among the Innu. He is a trickster, another archetypal figure that comes in various forms in most cultures. Among the Nahuas of Mexico, it is an opossum. For the Apache in the southern United States, it is a coyote. Along the northwest Pacific coast, a crow. This player of tricks who makes and undoes the order of the world, this malicious scoundrel, this obscene buffoon is ready to give it a try, whatever it may be. Of course, Carcajou is funny; this “trickster,” to use the Claude Levi-Strauss’s expression, is clumsy, often comical, and he gets caught in his tricks, but through his adventures and horsing around, he guides humans in their learning.

When the Innu felt the need to explain themselves, not the nature of Europeans (we already stated, they placed them in the category of humans), but how they could integrate these humans into the order of the world, they turned to Carcajou. The myth gave them their answer. One version goes as follows: Carcajou, coming back from a hunt, wanted to sleep with his sister-in-law. His wife, hoping to catch him, changed her clothes and crawled into her sister’s bed. Making love to whom he believed to be his sister-in-law, Carcajou said: “You make love like your sister.” Then his wife uncovered herself. Carcajou got angry and took her by every orifice, then left. Much later, he came back and saw his wife.

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