Nabokov Selections

Gods and animals raced long before Indian men and women did. Thereafter the gods told the people to do it. and the animals showed them how. "There is nothing that Indians like so well as to run races," a Zuni Indian told Anna Risser. "Maybe that is because the gods in the far past settled so many difficult questions by races." In practically every tribe's oral history, running folklore instructed and entertained. Mythic races helped to order the world as we know it, providing a model and mandate for the activity which human beings would perpetuate. Racing contests decided the first temperaments and physical characteristics of animals, and played a part in allocating their territories and status in the emerging world. Often these creatures themselves were clan originators, whose groupings would then be mirrored by man's social organization.