I wanted to do a bit of research into my favorite Indian tale we’ve read so far “Arrow Boy.” The book says this story was told by the Cheyenne Indian tribe, who were largely located “in what is now Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota” (http://bit.ly/1eeNLDF). This tribe placed a huge emphasis on buffalo as their main food source. The source above states that “Because hunting was so important to the Cheyenne, they were able to pack up all of their belongings and disassemble their teepees in a matter of minutes in order to follow a buffalo herd.”
This makes sense when reading the story, as it is a tale of a powerful boy causing the buffalo to disappear and later return. The buffalo all leave when the boy is disrespected, having the buffalo kill he earned taken away from him by an elder, which causes him to kill the elder and be chased out of camp by the warriors. The boy went on to become a powerful medicine man that brings back the buffalo to save his starving people. Which seems to me to be either a warning against the power of seemingly insignificant people; or more mythic if the boy is representing nature and respect for the buffalo corpse.
With the buffalo being the Cheyenne’s main source of food having a story to tell around hungry campfires when they disappeared could be the purpose of “Arrow Boy;” functioning as a way to give the people hope that their own medicine man could show up and bring back the buffalo by finding another herd. Because of the Cheyenne’s eating habits they were also one of the tribes to really utilize horses to better chase after herds. The source (http://bit.ly/1eeNLDF) also emphasizes how spiritual this particular tribe was, and the book states that the ritual dance the Arrow Boy did to bring back the buffalo is still enacted during the Sioux Yuwipi ceremonies. Keeping a ritual this long after the story was originally told shows its importance to the tribe.
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