{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim52_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim52_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim52_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/sim52.htm","summary":"This is a Native American oral narrative, likely from an Iroquoian tradition (the character names suggest Seneca or a closely related language), belonging to the genre of mythic animal-person tales in which supernatural beings take human-like social form. The story follows Bright Body, the tiny, sheltered youngest son of Thousand-legs (a worm), whose father is revealed as a deceiver keeping a second household, and whose mother is subsequently captured and tortured by a village of malevolent spirit-beings \u2014 Blue Jay as chief, the Raven family as his people \u2014 who burn her feet to harvest her tears as wampum beads. While his six older brothers one by one disappear searching for their parents, Bright Body alone perceives his mother's distant crying, rises into the air with his pet flea-dog, and rescues her by transforming the long house into red-hot stone, incinerating the entire village. The tale is distinctive for centering the most marginal figure \u2014 small, unnamed until the story needs him, kept literally under the furniture \u2014 as its sole effective hero, while the conventionally capable characters (the hunter-father, the older brothers) all fail or vanish without explanation. The narrative's closing admission that \"the story doesn't say how the brothers got home or what happened to them\" is an unusually candid acknowledgment of a gap, suggesting a story transmitted in fragmentary form or deliberately indifferent to tidy resolution.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Seneca Indian Myths: Thousand-Legs and Bright Body his Son","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":1427}