A nomadic tale of greed for a global community
This essay is about a folktale from a Koryak-speaking community recorded during the Jessup Expedition, 1900–1901 CE by Waldemar Bogoras. It’s a story family, a girl who takes more than her share, and the girl’s ostracization and death. My argument is that this story serves as a harsh morality tale for nomadic culture that is also appropriate for todays global culture and the dilemmas faced in how greed exacerbates global warming and threatens nuclear winter, and suggest that people who demonstrate greed should be ostracized from positions of political-economic power for the greater good.
The characters in the story are all mouse-girls, and while a group of them are playing, one noticed that the youngest was missing a tooth. When they asked the youngest mouse-girl what happened to her tooth, she replied that ‘The Envious One” had shot her with an arrow from heaven. They brought her inside, told their mother, who told their grandmother, who was a shaman. The grandmother quickly discovered the truth; that the youngest mouse-girl had lost her tooth while secretly pilfering from the shared supplies. The mouse-girl’s mother told her to go strangle herself on a twig. After a short time, the mouse-girl returned and said she could not do it, and her mother told her to go out to the forest and not come back. The mouse-girl did so, and not having the support of her community, died.
We have three layers of immoral behavior, as I see it, enacted by the mouse-girl. First, in the order illustrated in the story, she lied about what had happened to her tooth. Actually, she lied through omission by not telling anyone about her missing tooth until someone mentioned it. Then, she made up a lie about how she lost her tooth.
How often do we see politicians or corporate executives take this basic approach? How often do we see people covering up their crimes or trying to keep it under wraps until finally they are confronted about it in public? It seems to me that we see this sort of thing so often that it seems normal. And then, when they get put on the spot and public attention is suddenly on their missing tooth, or whatever version they have, they quickly try to deflect; calling themselves victims, or trying to use some religious trope, or sometimes both.
The grandmother shaman in this story is a hero. She did not seek to manipulate those who put their trust in her; she used the skills she had cultivated to find out what really happened, and then related the results of her findings in a concrete and understandable way. And then addressed the mouse-girl directly, found evidence (the tooth was among the supplies and it fit the mouse-girl’s missing tooth), and then accused the mouse-girl of pilfering.
The mouse-girl’s mother declared the punishment, and it seems harsh. Telling someone to commit suicide is wrong, and I’m against the death penalty, but there is a way to interpret this somewhat differently. The mouse-girl went off, and then returned after a short time. The fact that the short time was included in the tale allows for an act of penance. If the mouse-girl had spent more time punishing herself, then perhaps she could have been redeemed into her community, her family could have been convinced that she would not pilfer in the future, and they could have moved on as a group.
She did not do this, however. She returned after a short time and said that she could not do it, and then she was banished. She died, it is implied, I think, because she did not have a family or band or clan to work with, and one person cannot survive the harsh elements of Kamchatka alone. It takes a community to survive.
The individualism that has permeated the global political-economy, as manifest in corporate stock trading, individual ownership, and the ideology of personal ambition as natural, is fueling our collective demise. Greedy power-hungry pilfering people are funding a mediascape that encourages further participation in the pilfering; and it is the mainstream media that carries this message, governments that facilitate it, and the vast majority suffer exploitation and oppression as a result; and eventually, possibly, extinction.
If mouse-girl is allowed to stay among her family, and she is allowed to continue eating more than her share, the whole family is at risk of dying, and then the greedy mouse-girl would die anyway, because she still could not survive alone. While the mother’s decision to ostracize mouse-girl seems harsh, and it is reasonable to assume that the mother would be sad to make such a decision, knowing that the mouse-girl would be unable to survive on her own, it is also implied as necessary for the survival of the rest of the family.
Also, the mother gave the mouse-girl two opportunities. The mouse-girl could have made a more sincere effort at penance; demonstrating her remorse and her willingness to put the welfare of the group ahead of her own desires. The mouse-girl also had an opportunity to find another family to take her in, where she could have found redemption.
I am very much in favor of redemption, and very much not into punishment. It seems to me like we have an obligation to find out who is pilfering and to either get them to change their ways or remove them from the levers of political-economic power. I don’t believe that it’s as simple as rich people or politicians; and I do believe that it will take diligent, even heroic, investigation by a lot of people to find out who is guilty of such greed, to present evidence, and to accuse them directly and publicly. I also believe the consequences should be that greedy people should be permanently removed from power.
We are fortunate, in our global political-economy, to have an abundance of supplies, and sturdy buildings made of iron and stone, where these greedy pilferers liars can find redemption while being well fed and well cared for. They don’t have to die a miserable lonely death, but if we don’t remove them or somehow convince them to change their ways, they might seal our collective doom.
