Myth, folk tale and ritual in Anna Lee Walters's "The Warriors."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Marc Steinberg

Ralph, who by virtue of his heritage is necessarily a warrior, is not practically the traditional warrior at all (the tribe, in fact, had been scant by the time of his birth), although he has fought in Korea. For him, war means stability, for warfare is the natural state of the traditional Pawnee. Pahukatawa represents the stability and resistance for which Ralph longs. Pahukatawa says: "I shall live forever, as long as this world exists" (Grinnell 156). But just as the warrior "spirit" leaves the tribe, the spirit of the warrior becomes endangered for Ralph; Ralph becomes the haggard hobo, full of dreams and a basic will to survive, no longer futilely valiant, but necessarily persevering.

The Morning Star Evening Star myth portrays the implicit hope in Walters's story. From the east has come Morning Star,(3) the Pawnee god of war, of light, of fire (Weltfish 64). Evening Star, from the west, is the goddess of night, of germination (Weltfish 64). Morning Star and Evening Star ultimately give birth to the first human being, a girl, but prior to the conception there are great obstacles precluding the mating. In preparation for the climactic encounter in the west, Evening Star places four symbolic animals in the four corners of the world--the four animals "symbolize ... all war and conquest" (Weltfish 262). Other male gods had died attempting to penetrate this foursome, but with the aid of the sun Morning Star overcomes the obstacles, even, finally, Evening Star's "vaginal teeth" (Weltfish 82), which Morning Star penetrates with a meteor.

From this myth emerged a violent ritual that the Pawnees had celebrated each spring in order "to insure a bountiful harvest" (Irving 184). To compensate for Morning Star's struggles, at each of these ceremonies the Pawnees sacrifice a child from a rival tribe. The Pawnees capture the child months before the actual ritual killing and feed and nurture him or her until the appointed time, when the Pawnees bring the child to the altar and the priest anoints it. The same occurs on day two of the five-day ritual, and on the third day the people decorate a scaffold and build a ceremonial pit. On the fourth day they paint the child's body, red and black, symbolizing the two stars, and on day five they order the child to climb the scaffold, where he or she is tied, burned, shot in the heart, and then stabbed in the heart; finally, all the men and boys shoot arrows at the lifeless body.

The star myth refers to creation and, similarly, the star ritual refers to fertility. Following the ceremony there is "a period of sexual license to promote fertility" (Weltfish 114). The sacrifice symbolically allows Morning Star to retrieve the first child he had placed on earth. The ritual commingles life and death because in "the way of the Morning Star, death and life, war and fruitfulness [are] one process" (Weltfish 115). The ritual, a symbolic and veritable combination of expectation, horror and re-birth, ended in 1838.(4)

We see that the star myth comes to reflect a fertility that emerges from the recognition of the past. The star ritual is at once a recognition of the Pawnee past (its pre-history) and an emblematic act of production and survival. The myth, as well as Ralph's need to retell it, points to the significance of the past in the lives of the Pawnees. Paradoxically, while the myth concerns fecundity, the ritual is steeped in the images and ceremonies of death, albeit a death typifying generation. Walters has said: "My future is in my past, the values and visions of a collective past" (Carroll 72). This past remains alive in the story as a result of Ralph; his perception of the necessity to keep the spirit of the tribe intact designates him a warrior, no matter how deteriorated his personal spiritual health might be., Ralph's role as story- and myth-teller must be acknowledged. If matters, little that Ralph is an anachronism--the warrior annals he teaches his nieces may not reflect contemporary concerns, but he relates an undying, endemic hope to his two nieces. He privileges teaching the girls Pawnee words and folk tales as opposed to disciplining them (12), although, in a sense, he does discipline them with an appreciation of Pawnee heritage and values.