How the Sun Made a Promise and Kept It: A Canadian Indian Myth

by Margery Bernstein, Janet Kobrin, Ed Heffernan (Illustrator)

A Bungee (Chippewa) Indian tale tells how, in releasing the captive sun in return for a promise, the beaver came to look like he does today.

Genres: Picture Books

40 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1974

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 2 out of 5]

When the creator god Weese-ke-jak - who made the earth and sky, and all the creatures of the world - attempts to harness the sun, thereby preventing it from wandering away, and leaving his creation in cold darkness, he soon realizes his mistake. With the fiery globe rotating the earth so closely, the heat quickly becomes unbearable, scorching the land, and endangering all of life. It falls to brave Beaver - at great personal cost to himself - to gnaw through the net, and release the sun...

Margery Bernstein and Janet Kobrin, two primary school teachers who worked together at the University of Chicago Laboratory School in the 1970s, collaborated on a number of folktale retellings intended for young readers, How the Sun Made a Promise and Kept It among them. With a simple but engaging text suitable for younger children, and bold line drawings (done on orange paper) from Ed Heffernan, this is a picture-book with both visual and narrative appeal.

I do find the authors' description of this as a tale from the "Bungee" Indians, more than a little confusing. The note lists it as a "Bungee (Chippewa)" tale, which is probably not surprising, since "Bungee" seems to have been one of many incorrect names given to the Ojibwe, over the years. There is also a dialect of English known as Bungee, which is a mixture of Scots English, Cree, Obijwe, and Scots Gaelic.

But Bernstein and Kobrin specify that "their" Bungee Indians are also known as the Swampy Indians, of Lake Winnipeg. I believe that the Swampy Indians, however, are Cree, not Ojibwe. Given the fact that this very same tale, appearing under the title How Beaver Got His Fine Fur, is explicitly listed in Natalia Belting's The Long-Tailed Bear and Other Indian Legends as Cree, I'm going to assume that this retelling too, comes from the Cree tradition, and not the Ojibwe.

Given that confusion, concerning the correct cultural attribution of this tale, I found myself wishing that specific information, as to source-material, had been provided by the authors. I suspect they were using some outdated ethnographic report...

[Krista the Krazy Kataloguer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this Canadian Indian myth very much, especially Ed Heffernan's illustrations, which were simple but effective line drawings. I could almost visualize the people acting out this myth about how the sun came to be orbiting around the earth. It's too bad my scanner is broken or I could have downloaded the cover. Recommended!