{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim58_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim58_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim58_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/sim58.htm","summary":"This is a Native American oral narrative, likely from the Seneca or a related Iroquois-speaking nation, belonging to the tradition of northeastern woodland mythic tales that combine domestic drama with supernatural adventure and hero-quest elements. The story begins with a hunter's family in the forest: the wife is secretly meeting a shape-shifting bird-man lover, and when the husband discovers and disrupts the tryst, she beats him senseless, burns their cabin, abandons the children in a conjured snowstorm, and disappears. The elder child, a boy, then fails his one charge \u2014 to never set his baby sister down \u2014 and she is carried off by a bear, leaving him alone and suicidal; he leaps into a lake, is swallowed by a giant fish, and is effectively reborn when seven sisters cut him free from its belly and raise him as their own. As a young man he defies the sisters' warnings and travels west, where he encounters a series of dangerous \"uncles\" who compel him to wager his head in lethal games \u2014 stone-turning, ball-racing, and an ice race \u2014 and he defeats and beheads each one in turn. The tale's distinctive qualities are its unsentimental depiction of maternal cruelty and sexual betrayal as the engine of a hero's origin, and its episodic game-contest structure, in which cunning and composure matter more than strength \u2014 the boy repeatedly wins by insisting on his opponent's own rules.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Seneca Indian Myths: A Little Boy and his Dog, Beautiful Ears","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":3236}