Seneca Indian Myths: Skagédi And The Man-Eater

This is a Native American oral narrative, almost certainly from the Seneca (Haudenosaunee/Iroquois) tradition, featuring two supernatural figures: SKAGÉDI, 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 — SKAGÉDI 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 SKAGÉDI'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 SKAGÉDI's help again, but this time SKAGÉDI 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 — SKAGÉDI feeds him deer and bear meat until human flesh makes him physically ill — 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.

Seneca Indian Myths: Skagédi And The Man-Eater

Related pages View as graph →