Tunica

(map)

A variant of this myth (Swanton in the references) was related by the uncle of the woman who was the informant for this version. In it, one man from the flooded village survived by running far away to another village.

A chief lived in his house with his two daughters, who would pound corn. One morning, they found moisture in the hole where they would set the mortar. Water dripped into the hole from ice on the roof, and minnows jumped around in the hole. The daughters were puzzled when they saw this, and the chief, when they showed him, was also puzzled. "What is going to happen to us?" he said. He assembled his people, who came and looked. Water continued to rise in the hole. One of the people said, "Much water will come."

Wanting to be sure, the chief sent for a blind woman who lived at the edge of town. She came and put her hand in the hole. The minnows jumped about. She rose and said, "You must make a large boat to be saved."

The chief organized half his people to build a large boat, and when they were finished, they boarded it and waited. The rest of the people danced. While they danced, the ground got mushy. The water rose up almost to the sky. The people on the boat looked out and saw that the people who had been dancing had transformed into half fish and half people and were jumping about in the water.

The redheaded woodpeck caught hold of the sky and hung there. The water washed his tail and wings.

Once the water receded, the people got off the boat and raised more offspring.

Mary R. Haas, Tunica Texts, University of California Publications in Linguistics, vol. 6 no. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950), 60-65.

Variant: John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 43 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1911), 323-324.