Meadowlark

Meadowlark belongs to the company of the First People of Maidu narrative, the animal-persons of the mythic age before the world was finished. In one of the variant accounts of the origin collected by Dixon, the creator and Coyote drift on the water singing and hoping to find land, and it is Meadowlark's nest that they discover and stretch out to make the beginning of the earth. The meadowlark recurs through the wider Maidu tale-cycle as one of the talking creatures of that first age; here it has a small but distinct part in the very making of the land, assisting the creator's work.

Domains

• creation
• birds

Powers

• to furnish from its nest the stuff that is stretched out to form the first land

Relations

• ally: Earth-Initiate (Kodoyanpe, the Earth-Maker)Meadowlark assists at the creation, its nest providing the material that the creator and Coyote draw out into the first earth.Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV (E. J. Brill, 1912) (secondary)

Sources

• Meadowlark is a creature of the Maidu origin narratives whose nest, in one version, is stretched out by the creator and Coyote to form the beginnings of the earth.: Roland B. Dixon, Maidu Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society IV (E. J. Brill, 1912) (secondary); William Shipley (ed. and trans.), The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc'ibyjim (Heyday Books, 1991) (secondary)