Sacred Texts: Native American

Seneca Indian Myths: Turkey's Brother goes in Search of a...

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is an Indigenous oral narrative, almost certainly Seneca (Haudenosaunee/Iroquois), presenting a hero tale structured around a young man's quest westward to obtain a wife from a distant chief. The elder of two orphaned nephews sets out with his younger brother Turkey — a toddler who wears an actual turkey skin and can fly — equipped by their uncle with a suite of enchanted objects: a roaring meteor-skin coat, singing feathers, and a biting fisher-skin pouch. Despite warnings, the hero is deceived by a shape-shifting thief (Woodchuck Leggings, "the Deceiver") who tricks him into stripping his magical outfit, then pushes him into a hollow tree full of bones — from which he escapes only through two childhood dream-helpers, a great spider and a black snake. The thief arrives at the chief's village disguised in the stolen regalia and marries the eldest daughter, while the hero arrives looking like a feeble old man in the thief's rags; the chief's perceptive youngest daughter nevertheless recognizes the true hero and chooses him. The two men's natures are then exposed through a recurring wampum test: the genuine hero produces first black, then white wampum, while the impostor produces only lizards and filth. The story is distinctive for its emphasis on perception over appearance, dream-granted spiritual allies, and vividly inventive enchanted objects — and it includes a comic etiological aside explaining why wildcats have singed, yellowish coats.

Seneca Indian Myths: Turkey's Brother goes in Search of a...

Related pages View as graph →