The Story Archive

Selu and Kanati

Cherokee myth · c. 1800 CE · Myth / Legend · Cherokee · Romantic

Kanati the hunter takes game from a cave in the mountainside, and Selu his wife fills the basket with corn and beans by rubbing her belly and her sides, and their son and the wild boy who came out of the river spy on both of them. The boys let every animal loose from the cave, and when they learn where the corn comes from they decide their mother is a witch and kill her, but she tells them first to drag her body over cleared ground, and corn grows wherever her blood soaks in. Cherokee oral tradition, recorded from Eastern Band speakers by James Mooney in the 1880s and published in his Myths of the Cherokee in 1900.

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