This week I read the Blackfoot Stories, and one of the
things that really stood out to me was the “bad guys”. There were several villains
that Kut-O-Yis, a warrior Indian born from a buffalo’s blood clot, had to face.
There were four different stories pertaining to Kut-O-Yis and the bad guys he battled.
However, I will be focusing on the bad guy in the story Kut-O-Yis, The Blood Boy (cont.).
In this story, the son-in-law of an old man and his wife was
the evil doer. Although he was similar to the other bad guys in that he was
oppressive in nature, there was one thing that was very different about the
son-in-law. He started off as a “good guy”; he loved his wives very much and
always provided for them and their parents. However, something changed and he
shifted to the dark side.
The son-in-law was notorious for requesting that the old man
go out and help him hunt by driving the buffalos out of the log-jam of the
river. The old man always obliged, but was never rewarded with any of the meat
from the killing. Once Kut-O-Yis was grown and he saw how the son-in-law
treated the old man and his wife, he took it upon himself to be the one to put
a stop to his tyranny.
One day Kut-O-Yis and the old man went to the log-jam
without the son-in-law so that whatever they killed, they could keep for
themselves. Once the son-in-law heard that the old man had gone down to the
log-jam without him, he was very angry and set out to kill the old man once and
for all.
The old man and the son-in-law had a brief battle that
Kut-O-Yis watched from a hiding place. Once the old man and the son-in-law had
shot each other four times with their arrows, Kut-O-Yis stepped in to end the
battle. The son-in-law was very afraid of Kut-O-Yis and tried to deny that he
had ever treated the old man badly, but Kut-O-Yis would not be fooled and
killed the son-in-law.
In the end, similar to other “bad guys”, the son-in-law died
a coward, begging for his life to be spared. Once Kut-O-Yis had done his deed
for the old man and his wife, he went on to battle the evils of the next camp.
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| Blackfoot Indian, painted by Karl Bodmer. Source: Wikipedia |
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