Sacred Texts: Native American

Seneca Indian Myths: Uncle and Nephew

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This is a Native American oral folk tale from the northeastern woodland tradition, following a young hunter raised by his uncle who violates a cardinal prohibition — traveling north — and is captured by a supernatural woman who drops him into a bottomless ravine populated by the bones of her previous victims. A dream-vision grandmother guides him to escape by sprouting a hemlock tree from a vomited leaf and singing it skyward, and he resurrects the skeletons around him into living men before climbing out. Back in the world, he enters the household of the woman who trapped him and is presented with a series of lethal tasks by her wizard mother — killing two white otters and a black eagle — which he accomplishes through resourcefulness and magical power, only to learn afterward that the otters and eagle were the old woman's brothers. He retaliates by sealing the mother and remaining daughters inside their house and willing it to stone, then burns the trapping woman alive before returning home to an uncle who has been mourning him for dead. The tale is distinctive for its layered test structure (the forbidden direction, the seduction, the ravine, the supernatural tasks) and for the uncle's flute, which bleeds as a sympathetic index of the nephew's suffering — a detail that gives the story unusual emotional texture across its episodic plot.

Seneca Indian Myths: Uncle and Nephew

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