{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim14_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim14_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim14_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/sim14.htm","summary":"This is a Seneca (Haudenosaunee) oral legend recorded in the tradition of Native American mythological origin stories, explaining how storytelling itself came to exist. A young orphan boy named Poyeshaon, while hunting and repairing his arrow, encounters a talking stone that offers to exchange stories for birds \u2014 narratives of a world that existed before the present one. The boy returns day after day, eventually drawing first another child, then two adult men, and finally the entire village to gather and listen, each bringing food as payment. The stone then delivers its stories over three days to the assembled community, charging them to preserve and transmit these accounts across generations, always bringing something of value to whoever holds the stories. What makes the piece distinctive is its embedded theory of oral tradition: memory will be uneven, some will retain everything and others nothing, so communal repetition is essential \u2014 and crucially, storytelling is framed as an economic and reciprocal exchange, not a free gift. The stone explicitly identifies itself as the source of all Seneca knowledge about the world before this one, making the legend a charter myth for the culture's entire narrative inheritance.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Seneca Indian Myths: The Origin of Stories","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":2020}