please note that this is a traditional story of the White River Sioux and was originally related to Richard Erdoes by Jenny Leading Cloud at White River Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1967, and later published in the book American Indian Myths and Legends by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (1990). It is retold here with the utmost respect, simply in the hope that more people will be able to experience and appreciate this wonderful myth.
Once upon a time when the world wasn’t quite finished, a rabbit was taking a nice walk. It is important to note that in this time, many people could understand the animal languages, and the line between the two wasn’t quite as concrete as it is today. Together a rabbit and a man might be able to chew the cud, or the man could turn into the rabbit or the rabbit could turn into the man and that could be their entertainment for the evening. It was a great time to be alive because all sorts of exciting things were happening and beings were being created.
In any case, on his walk this rabbit discovered on the ground a little clot of blood. Apparently it looks a bit like a bluster. The rabbit started playing with it, giving it a good kick around, and in the process managed to invoke Takuskanskan, the mysterious power of motion. Takuskanskan exists in the spirt of anything that moves; it grants them life and animation.
In terms of how this affected the little blood clot, well, to the rabbit’s wonderment, it started to grow little arms and legs, and then eyes, and a beating heart. Eventually, it became a little baby boy.
guess I'm a father now, thought the rabbit, and named the boy ‘we-ota-wichasa’ (much blood boy) although for obvious reasons he is mostly known as rabbit boy. Because he was raised by rabbits. And indeed, the rabbit took the baby boy home to his wife, who was thrilled, because rabbits love babies. They gave the boy a buckskin shirt, painted red (because red is sacred) and decorated with a porcupine design (because it looks fucking sick).
So the boy lived happily with his rabbit parents, idling through his childhood and adolescence until he was almost a man. This was when his rabbit father said to him, ‘son, I have something to tell you. This may come as a shock, but you are not a rabbit, you are a human man.’ To which Rabbit Boy said ‘oh what,’ but nevertheless rabbit senior continued, ‘we love you very much and we hate to see you leave but it is probably time for you to go and find some other people, not rabbits but people.’ Naturally Rabbit Boy was very sad to hear this but thought it was probably wise as because he was a human man and not a rabbit it had been a bit of a struggle fitting into rabbit warrens and doing certain rabbit things that required you to be rabbit sized.
So the next morning he bade his rabbit parens adieu, and he started to walk. He walked until he came to a village of humans. As he entered the village everyone stared at him because although his clothes were very stylish and beautiful, they were very strange.
‘Where did you come from?’ they asked him.
‘Oh, um, you know, the other village,’ said Rabbit Boy vaguely.
The villagers smelt shit because as we said earlier, the world was at its beginning and there was no other village. Just one village was a pretty big achievement, and if there was another one, I imagine a lot of people would have something to say about it. But nevertheless they didn’t question it and they welcomed him because he had very good manners and was very good looking. Whew, thought Rabbit Boy, glad having been able to avoid explaining that his parents were rabbits and he had been living in a rabbit village for the past however many years, because that would have been complicated and they might have thought he was a bit odd.
In the village, there was a beautiful girl. She fell in love with rabbit boy, because he was strange and charming, and as we have said, beautifully attired and very handsome. We haven’t said this before but he was also very powerful. This will become clear later. So the girl’s family were very keen to marry this boy into the village.
‘Hang about,’ said Iktome, the wicked spider trickster. For context, he is a wicked spider trickster because he can take the form of a spider, but he can also take the form of a man, and also of lots of other thing. His daddy was a very powerful man, Inyan, who existed before things existed. So maybe this in combination with his amazing transformative power went to his head, because he was very manipulative and sometime not very nice.
Iktome wanted this beautiful girl for himself so he began to speak smack about Rabbit Boy. ‘Hey,’ said Iktome to the first person who would listen, ‘don’t you think it’s a bit rude that this new guy is showing off his fancy buckskin shirt to us POOR people? I think it’s super rude.’
‘Huh,’ said the villager. ‘I guess it kind of is.’
And then to another villager he said, ‘Hey. Don’t you think it’s a bit suspicious that this rabbit boy came out of nowhere and is super powerful? Like, what’s up with that?’
‘Huh,’ said the other villager. ‘I guess that is kind of true.’
And to someone else he said lots of other mean things like Rabbit Boy has smelly breath and I just used the toilet after Rabbit Boy and woweeee, and other puerile stuff like that. And so like that the village was turned against Rabbit Boy, who was none the wiser.
‘Iktome, what should we do about him?’ said one of the villagers who had been swayed by Iktome’s smear campaign.
‘Well, it’s good that you ask that because I actually have a magic hoop we could throw over him and it would make him totally helpless.’
Great, said the villagers, and they found Rabbit Boy and began haranguing him. They rallied around him, starting to fight him, throwing Iktome’s magic hoop over him. Rabbit Boy was unaffected, and only pretended to be helpless to amuse himself.
‘Oooh I’m so heeelpless’ he said.
This riled the villages, so they decided to take their butchering knives and cut up rabbit boy.
‘Oh,’ said Rabbit Boy, not expecting that. ‘Well, if you’re going to kill me please at least let me sing my death song first.’
‘Okay, fair enough,’ said the villagers. They were brutally murdering him but they weren’t uncivilised.
The death song, as it turns out, as offered a foreboding warning for the angry villagers.
‘friends, friends,
I have fought the sun
he tried to burn me up
but he could not do it
even battling the sun,
I held my own.’
Yet the villagers were not deterred. Yes, it was a very badass song to sing, and yes, what they were doing was pretty grim, but nevertheless they cut him up and put his remains in a soup pot.
And I suppose they were about to make soup, but before they had put the water on to boil, a great storm arose, and clouds hid the face of the sun. The night was turned black.
When the storm ceased, the chunks of meat that had once been Rabbit Boy were gone from the pot. Those who had been keeping watch saw them form back into a human body, and go up to the sky on a beam of sunlight.
‘Well fuck,’ said the wise old medicine man, hands on waist, looking up. ‘He’s gone up to see the sun. And soon he’ll come back stronger than ever replenished by the sun’s power. Better marry him to that girl of ours.’
Iktome was outraged. ‘EXCUSE ME,’ he said. ‘I’m FAR more powerful than him. Cut me up, i’ll prove it.’
Don’t worry, Iktome said to himself and also the reader, I’ll just sing that song that Rabbit Boy sung before, and that’ll probably do the trick. But when it came to it, he got the song wrong. he thought Rabbit Boy had been talking about the moon. Silly Iktome.
So they cut him up, but he didn’t come back to life. This is because, according to Jenny Leading Cloud, the evil trickster had outsmarted himself. ‘They always do.’
