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ABSTRACT: "Juan Oso," known as "John the Bear" in the English tradition, is a cohesive narrative, a tale type, with apparent European origins and wide distribution among native communities of the Americas. Here I inspect the thesis that the native American narrative corpus originates in European sources. "Juan Oso" would seem to be the poster child for this argument, but after considering its presence in two New World collections, Robert Lowie's Assiniboine myths and my own Kamsá mythic narratives, I propose that "Juan Oso" is an outlier, a special case, in an endemic American corpus of tales featuring amorous bears.
The Inca tales that have come down to us are all either origin myths or historical legends; there is no indication in the chroniclers of the existence of animal fables such as the modern Aymara and Quechua tell. It would be possible to make a very good case for the European origin of these animal fables, on the basis of the distribution of common motives and the silence of all the older writers, but the question is perhaps better left open.
-John Rowe
WHEN TALKING ABOUT a creature half-human and half-bear, issues of lineage inevitably arise. Juan Oso, John the Bear, the off-spring of a union between a male bear and a female human, straddles the divide between human and animal and usually passes as a strong and slightly-to-rather uncouth human being. But in this essay I am less concerned with the bear-child than with the wide sweep of mythic narratives about him, which raise their own problems with regard to lineage. "Juan Oso" as told in Spanish America, and "John the Bear," as told in the English-speaking portions of the Americas, highlight the interplay between European and Native American narrative prototypes. Is "Juan Oso" of European descent? If so, does it represent a prevalent trend in Native American narrative, the adoption and naturalizing of European tale elements? Are Native American tale repertoires built upon European foundations? Or does "Juan Oso" bespeak an identity forged in the Americas? How can we go about ascertaining its true lineage? These are the questions I set out to address in this article.
Folktale scholarship has been much concerned with the origin of particular tales and tale repertoires....