{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim04_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim04_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim04_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/nam/iro/sim/sim04.htm","summary":"This is a Native American oral narrative, almost certainly from the Seneca (Haudenosaunee/Iroquois) tradition, featuring two supernatural figures: SKAG\u00c9DI, a Half Man who travels by jumping while singing, and ONGWEIAS, a cannibal giant who conjures food by striking a magic kettle. The two form a wary alliance \u2014 SKAG\u00c9DI advises the man-eater on how to defeat a deadly gambler in the North who wagers heads in a hide-and-seek contest, and the man-eater wins by following SKAG\u00c9DI's instructions to hide under the old man's breech-clout and guess that the old man hides \"behind the sun.\" The man-eater then burns down the gambler's house and frees the victims whose bones were stacked at the edge of the woods, framing him as a force that can be redirected toward destroying evil. A second episode introduces a dangerous woman in the North who transforms living things into men and then kills them, prompting the man-eater to seek SKAG\u00c9DI's help again, but this time SKAG\u00c9DI bargains: he will help only if the man-eater stops eating humans. The story's central and distinctive movement is the gradual reformation of a cannibal monster through food substitution \u2014 SKAG\u00c9DI feeds him deer and bear meat until human flesh makes him physically ill \u2014 suggesting a mythological account of how a category of being dangerous to humanity was domesticated or converted. The text is notable for treating cannibalism as a matter of upbringing and appetite rather than pure evil, and for using mundane social rituals (shared meals, hospitality rules) as the mechanism of moral transformation.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Seneca Indian Myths: Skag\u00e9di And The Man-Eater","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":2845}