What has been said of the African tales applies in large degree to those which have been borrowed by the North American Indians. We are dealing in the latter case entirely with contacts established within the past four centuries. The areas within which these contacts have taken place can be rather easily defined. Certainly most important for the dissemination of foreign tales among the Indians has been the presence of the French in all parts of Canada and, to a lesser degree, in various sections of western America. The Spanish from Mexico and New Mexico have also brought a considerable number of European stories into circulation among the Indians of the southwest. There has been some borrowing and lending between Negroes and the southeastern tribes. These are the main routes by which European stories have come to the American Indian.

The negative side of this picture is quite as interesting as the positive. Unless our collectors have been very negligent, we seem to be forced to the conclusion that that group which was to become dominant in Canada and the United States, and which carried the British tradition to this country, has contributed nothing to the folklore of the American Indians. Many things help to explain this, but the most important fact is that the British never fraternized with the natives, and particularly did not intermarry with them as did Frenchmen or Spaniards. There has apparently been a slight impact of Scandinavian tradition on the tribes of western Canada, and there is the [p. 287] bare possibility that some folktale motifs came to the eastern Indians from Iceland through the Eskimos. [454]

As far as the animal tales are concerned, they appear among the Canadian and southwestern Indians almost without change in the form in which they were learned from the French or the Spanish. The Tarbaby (Type 175), which is found in at least 23 American Indian versions, has been frequently borrowed from Negroes and then further spread by the Indians themselves. When we come to the regular wonder tales, we find that some of them are much more popular among American natives than they are in Africa. Particularly beloved are a few of the most complicated of such stories. For instance, there are at least 14 tales of The Dragon-Slayer (Type 300), 16 of The Three Stolen Princesses (Type 301), 33 of The Girl as Helper in the Hero's Flight (Type 313), 15 of The Youth Transformed to a Horse (Type 314), and 29 of The Quest for the Lost Wife (Type 400). Taken all in all, these American Indian borrowings involve at least 104 out of the 718 of the Aarne-Thompson types.

Just as is true in Africa, the degree of adaptation to the native lore differs profoundly as we go from tribe to tribe. Particularly among the eastern tribes where there has been long contact, the French tales have suffered little change. The opposite extreme is found in some of the Pueblo stories where an almost complete adaptation has been made to local religious and mythological patterns. A study of these European tales as taken over by our native Americans is interesting not only for showing exactly how much of the foreign folklore has been borrowed, but for the light it throws on the general problem of tale migration. We see here the results of varying attitudes between members of simpler and more complex cultures, the freedom of movement where there is easy fraternization and intermarriage and the exactly opposite effect produced by the lack of these.

The Indonesians, the Africans, and the North American Indians have been chosen to illustrate the way in which European tales have traveled to other cultures and have adapted themselves there with more or less success. These areas, of course, do not exhaust the possibilities for this type of study, since some tales have penetrated into Oceania, into northeast Siberia, and into the native folklore of Latin America. [455]

A general view of the dissemination of European tales in these three major areas can be had from the table appearing at the end of this chapter. [p. 288] For the Indonesian, the figures in De Vries's study mentioned earlier [456] have been used as a basis. For the African, the material is taken from an unpublished study of Dr. May A. Klipple [457] which covered the literature up to the date of writing. The American Indian figures are not quite so recent, since my study of this subject has not been brought down further than about 1930. It is certain that the list of these borrowings could be considerably increased from the literature of the last fifteen years.