{"collection":"Sacred Texts: Native American","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim62_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim62_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_nam_iro_sim_sim62_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/sim62.htm","summary":"This is a transcribed Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral narrative, likely recorded by an ethnographer, belonging to the tradition of northeastern Native American mythological storytelling. It follows an interconnected chain of episodes centered on a family of six brothers and a sister who live by strict spatial rules in a longhouse: a new wife's defiance of those rules blinds all six brothers by giving a vengeful woman the opening to steal their eyes using a magical skin blanket. The sister, now sole caretaker of her blinded brothers, is then kidnapped by cannibal man-eaters who fatten humans for consumption on an island; she is rescued by the son of Whirlwind, whom she marries, and together they kill the cannibalistic old woman by slitting her belly to release a lake's worth of swallowed water. The couple lives with Whirlwind's mother\u2014a supernatural being who exists only as a living Head\u2014and their twin sons grow up to be trickster-heroes who outwit and kill their dangerous uncle through cunning misdirection. The story ends mid-scene with the twins devising a plan to recover their uncles' stolen eyes, linking the opening catastrophe back to the closing quest. Distinctive features include the matter-of-fact treatment of supernatural beings (a head-mother, magical hooks, eye-theft via blanket) as ordinary participants in family life, and a structural logic in which domestic rule-breaking ripples outward into ever-larger supernatural confrontations.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Seneca Indian Myths: The Rabbit Brothers","tradition":"Sacred Texts: Native American","translated_text":null,"word_count":2453}