Following the wandering hero: The Algonkian story of creation

Abstract

This essay explores a folklore tradition that recounts the creation of the world by the herotrickster figure known as Nanabozho among the Algonkian-speaking Indians. By applying the historic-geographic method to the corpus of materials collected, a point of origin and spread for this tale cycle is explored. It should be noted that this study is both a departure from, and an extension of, previous historic-geographic research, in that it is applying the method to a smaller corpus of texts than is usually considered; the method is also applied to a tale cycle, rather than to an individual tale-type.