Sacred Texts: Native American

Seneca Indian Myths: A Little Boy and his Dog, Beautiful Ears

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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 — to never set his baby sister down — 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 — stone-turning, ball-racing, and an ice race — 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 — the boy repeatedly wins by insisting on his opponent's own rules.

Seneca Indian Myths: A Little Boy and his Dog, Beautiful Ears

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