VOTING FOR DEATH - THE ORIGIN OF DEATH IN THE NATIVE AMERICAN MYTHS

Like in other mythologies around the world, people were meant to live eternally in the creation stories of the Native American people. The first death came as a total surprise and people didn't know how to handle it. The paper analyses this recurring theme through the comparative method. Different approaches to death among the Indian tribes are emphasized: from cyclical returns of dead people among the living ones to the need to turn the death into an eternal state, from the pervasive reason behind the eternal death to the significant role played by the Coyote in the final vote for eternity. The research concludes that voting for death leads to the supreme authority of man over the human fate.