Two Spirit Myths: Comanche Theory of the Universe
Many Native American Tribes or collective Bands had ideas of good and evil, proper or hostile behavior, and the nature of the universe. The main ideas of their traditions and origins were embedded in their oral history. The Comanche, however, had no such verbal constructs.
As a whole the Comanche’s had no dominant, unified religion, nor anything like a single God. According to ethnographers, Wallace and Hoebel, the Comanche were extremely skeptical of any creation myths that involved a single spirit, unifying God, or “evil one.”[1] They believed that “we are here;” therefore, “our thoughts are mostly directed toward understanding the multitude of spirits” out there.[2]
The Comanche lived in a world alive with magic and taboo; spirits lived everywhere, in the rocks, in the trees, and in the animals. The main idea of their “belief system,” if you could call that, was to find a way to understand the powers of the many spirits. Such powers, once grasped and harnessed, thus became “puha” or strong medicine. There was no specific Comanche dogma to recite, no priestly class to impose systematic religion, no tendency to view the world as anything but a set of isolated episodes, with no deeper, mystical meaning. These were behavioral codes of living, to be sure — they believed, for example, that a man could not steal another man’s wife without paying penalties. And for every action, there were reactions and consequences, injuries and damages due.[3]
Many enemies of the Comanche had been hated rivals for centuries. The Utes, for example, were always hunted and captured by the Comanche to torture to death, without question. The grievances among tribes seemed ingrained and not part of folklore or oral history. A Comanche warrior captured by a Ute would expect the exact same treatment. The Sioux warriors treated the Assiniboine the same way, the Crow did it to the Blackfeet. Thus, as Samuel Gwynne points out in his book, Empire of the Summer Moon, their inter-Indian Tribal torture and punishment tactics were weirdly consistent with the European “Golden Rule.” Their tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye brutality extended to their very last breath. On the battlefield, to the astonishment of invading troops of Europeans and emigrants to North and South America, these warriors would rather die than surrender.[4]
To their enemies, the Comanche were implacable, fierce, buffalo-horned killers. They were grim apostles of darkness and perpetrators of devastation. Inside their own camps and Bands, however, they viewed each other as something entirely different. To overly generalize their internal warrior description, according to Gwynne, the Comanche male was “noisy, jolly, rollicking, mischief-loving braggadocio, brimful of practical jokes and rough fun of any kind….rousing the midnight echoes with song and dance, whoops and yells.”[5]
The Comanche male members loved to wager and bet on anything and everything. He especially liked to gamble for horses, games of chance, and even his last deer skin. He loved to sing, especially the songs written expressly for him by their Band’s medicine man. He often woke up singing, sang during the day and went to bed singing. He adored games of any kind, but, more than anything else in the world, he liked to race horses.
The male Comanche was vain about his hair — often weaving his wife’s shorn tresses in with his own to create extensions, as modern women and men do today. He would roll those extensions in beaver or otter skin. He was an incurable gossip and had a positive craving for knowing what was going on around him. He would dance for hours, or days. He doted on his family, especially his sons, and spent winters snug and indolent, wrapped in thick buffalo robes by the fire in his tipi. He loved to talk. He would talk with wild excitement about his exploits in love, war, on “the chase,” and he willingly commits all sorts of exaggerations, while spinning the tales around the campfire.[6]
To other Native American tribes, the Comanche were the personifications of Death. To themselves, they were simply “the People.”
Who Exactly was Quanah Parker?
Quanah Parker was the last free Comanche chief and one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the American West. Born around 1845–1850 (accounts vary), he was the son of a white woman, Cynthis Ann Parker, and Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Parker had been captured by the Comanches as a child in 1836 and fully assimilated into the tribe, eventually marrying Peta Nocona. Quanah had a brother named Pecos and a sister named Topsannah (known as Prairie Flower). Quanah grew up as a Comanche warrior and rose to become a leader of the Quahadi band, one of the most militarily formidable and resistant Comanche groups on the southern Plains. He gained a fearsome reputation fighting to defend Comanche land and way of life against encroaching settlers, buffalo hunters, and the U.S. Army during the Red River War of the 1870s, one of the last major conflicts between Plains Indians and the United States.
After the Quahadi Comanches were finally forced to surrender in 1875, their tribe was facing the destruction of the buffalo herds upon which the Comanche survived. To the astonishment of his captors, Quanah made a striking transition from war leader to statesman. He settled his people on a reservation in present-day Oklahoma and became a skilled diplomat and business-minded advocate. He carefully negotiated grazing leases with Texas cattlemen, he promoted White man education, and even served as a judge in the Court of Indian Offenses. Parker was also instrumental in the spread of the Native American Church and its use of peyote in religious ceremonies.
Quanah Parker cultivated relationships with prominent white Americans, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and worked to help the Comanche people adapt to reservation life while preserving elements of their culture and identity. He took the surname “Parker” in honor of his mother and died in 1911, remembered as a bridge between two worlds — a warrior who became a peacemaker and one of the last great Comanche leaders.
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Footnotes:
[1] Wallace, Ernest and Hoebel, E. Adamson, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, page 194.
[2] Gwynne, Samuel C., Empire of the Summer Moon, Scribner, New York, 2010, page 45.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Dodge, Richard, Our Wild Indians, Chatto & Windus, London, 1878, page 59.
[6] Gwynne, op cit., pages 46-47.
Henry E. Hooper 