Identify the recurring features of oral tradition (repetition, communal authorship, etiology) in a Native American creation narrative and explain how those features fit a literature meant to be spoken, not read.
Long before any of the texts this course will study were written down, they were spoken. Oral tradition is literature composed, performed, and passed forward by voice across generations, and it works by different rules than page-bound writing does. It has no single "original" text -- a story told a thousand times by a thousand tellers naturally produces variants, and that variation is a feature of the form, not damage to it. Oral literature also leans on repetition and patterned structure far more than written prose does, because repetition is what helps both teller and listener hold a long narrative in memory without a page to check.
A widely told Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) narrative, often called "The Earth on Turtle's Back," gives a clear case study. A sky-dwelling woman falls through a hole torn in the world above; the water animals below dive, one after another, to find solid ground beneath the endless sea to catch her, until one succeeds and the earth is built up on the back of a great turtle -- which is why some Native traditions still call this continent Turtle Island. Like the Genesis creation account or Greek accounts of the world's origin, this is an etiological story: one whose job is to explain why the world is shaped the way it is. Studied as literature, alongside those other traditions, it rewards exactly the same close attention to structure, image, and purpose.
Mastery looks like: They can define etiological narrative and repetition-as-structure, and identify both features at work in a specific oral tradition text.
Common stumbles: Treating oral tradition as a lesser or less "real" form of literature than written text; assuming variation between versions is an error rather than a normal feature of the form.