Discover Top Posts Tagged with #origin myths

Sina and the Eel: The Polynesian Myth Behind the Coconut Tree

Every coconut carries a face. Look closely at the base of the husk and you’ll see three distinctive marks—two smaller indentations resembling eyes and one larger mark like a mouth. For the peoples of Polynesia, this face tells one of the Pacific’s most enduring love stories: the tale of Sina and the Eel. Known as Sina ma le Tuna in Samoan, this myth of origins explains how the first coconut tree…

#Origin Myths #Pacific Island Culture #Polynesian Mythology #Samoan Legends

The Rewatch 217: The Chase

Series: Star Trek: TNG Episode: 6.? The Chase (04/26/1993)Rating: 5/5Redshirt Status: 0/19/54Notable Guest Stars: Salome Jens (Progenitor) – Salome Jens is probably best known in Star Trek for her role as The Female Changeling who acts as the head of the Changelings and the Dominion. She’s an essential character to DS9 and Odo’s story arc. John Cothran, Jr (NuDaq)– Another long term Star Trek…

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#origin myths #science fiction #season 6 #Star Trek #Star Trek: The Next Generation #television #The Rewatch 2020 #tv reviews

#origin myths #archaeology #British Isles #Britain #England #Miles Russell

Early one morning, driving south, James Cordero described his grandfather’s crossing story in terms of the Mexican Repatriation, the 1930s f

“When I am in California,” Theodore Roosevelt said in 1905, “I am not in the West. I am west of the West.” Years later, the British painter and Los Angeles resident David Hockney would call Malibu “the edge of the Western world.” A place that had once been Native American and Mexican was now mostly talked about in whiter terms—in part because the City of Angels had been, for a while, very white, both Anglo-inclined and Anglo-worshipful, appearing to many eyes as a unipolar place that had languidly transitioned from dreamy Spanish colonialism to mighty American democracy, all tied to the evocation of “going West” that was the rally cry for so-called pioneers, i.e., making it as much a matter of fantasy as orienteering, to be claimed by any “Okies” or pensioners from Iowa. And there was no lack of examples of LA’s whites being disinclined to acknowledge nonwhites, any non-Euro-seeming.

In 1925, as recorded by William Alexander McClung in Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, the Allied Architects Association of Los Angeles endorsed a set of propositions stipulating “that the region is Mediterranean both ecologically and culturally; that its architecture and landscaping should perpetuate the ‘collective memory’ of Spain, Italy, and the south of France; that, however, the ‘seductive influence’ of those regions should merely influence, not dictate, architectural designs; that Southern California is a land of romance; but that its founding was ‘sordid,’ achieved not by Spanish aristocrats but by ‘Indians, half breeds, and negroes, conscripts and undesirables.’” Such whitewashing even had its own term, Spanish fantasy past, suggesting a land found west of the Mediterranean, not north of the equator or east of the Pacific. As Joan Didion wrote in “Notes from a Native Daughter,” “It is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it had simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west.”

#california #southern california #the border #origin myths #lithub

The La Cristianita saga is barely remembered — even by its putative caretakers at Camp Pendleton.

La Cristianita’s story set the unconscious template for how Californians treated and considered the state and especially people of color for more than two centuries — not as communities with agency, but wretches in need of salvation.

It was little surprise, then, that the legend crumbled into historical shards as California diversified. The reenactments ended; the plays gathered dust in the archives of local historical societies. Faye Jonason, Camp Pendleton’s history and museum director since 1996, wrote via email that civilian requests for tours to La Cristianita now average only three a year.

It’s not a legend of Old California worth resurrecting, I felt. But I needed to see the La Cristianita tribute myself before dismissing it completely.

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As California moves toward an uncertain future, we need to learn from the death of the Indigenous infant we remember as La Cristianita, not her baptism. We can’t treat the state anymore the way Crespí and nearly everyone else who followed him used the martyred girl — as a plaything on which to live out our dreams, with no care for who gets in the way.

#california #origin stories #origin myths #camp pendleton #Spanish colonialism #native american #la cristianita #la times

Once there lived a king's daughter in China. She had a dog. When she was grown up she played with the dog and was with child. The king was very angry about this, for it was accounted a great scandal. He put the maiden into a boat, placed food in it, and sent it drifting down a great river. The boat floated down to the sea and came to rest on an island. Here the princess gave birth to a boy. She fed him for two days, and then he was already a grown man. Then the mother said to her son: "Take thy fishing spear and walk along the shore to the other side of the island; there will thou find a wife for thyself." The young man went away. Then the mother turned into a young maiden, and went the other way round the island. The youth thought that she was the maiden of whom he had been told, and made her his wife. She gave birth to the first of the Moken.

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, ‘The Origin of the Moken’ in The Spirits of the Yellow Leaves: The Enigmatic Hunter-Gatherers of Northern Thailand, trans. E. W. Dickes.

#origin myths #moken #indigenous #thailand