Spider Woman”

Spider Woman”

From Pawnee Tribe

Long ago Spider Woman and her daughters lived off by themselves and tended a garden. People would travel there to get corn, bean, and squash seeds from the woman, but she would tell them that first they had to play a dice game with her. In this game the people would jump up and down just as dice do when tossed in a basket. While people were jumping up, spider woman would send storms and the people would freeze to death. Then she hung the skulls of her victims from the walls of her lodge.

Finally the people decided that something had to be done about the spider woman. There were two young boys in their village who seemed to possess great powers. The people asked these boys to visit the spider woman. The boys traveled   several days until they came into a cornfield with a grass lodge nearby. Skulls were hanging from the walls of the lodge.  They spoke with a girl outside the lodge who warned them to go away quickly. If her mother saw them, she would make them eat poisoned human flesh. The boys told her that they would leave for a short time and then return.

When they were far side of cornfield, the boys ate a piece of root from their medicine bag and then returned to Spider Woman’s lodge. This time she saw them draw near and called to them to come into her lodge. She suspected that they had come for her daughters and decided to kill them like all the others who had approached her lodge. “You must be hungry,” she said to them. The boys replied that they were, indeed, very hungry from their long journey.

Spider Woman set bowls of food in front of them containing human brains cooked into a mush. Behind her they could see the daughter shake her head, warning them not to eat, but they did anyway. When they were finished the boys excused themselves to go outdoors for a while. Spider Woman feared they would go away, but the boys promised her they would be right back. When they had walked far enough away and were out of sight from the lodge, the boys vomited the poisoned brains and then returned to the lodge. Spider Woman thought it was strange that they appeared normal, so she gave them bowls of what appeared to be black corn, but were really human eyes. Before they began eating what she had prepared, they each took a bit of medicine root from their bag. Again, when they had emptied the bowls, they went outside and vomited all they had eaten.

Spider Woman decided that she couldn’t kill them with poison, so she asked them to stay until the next morning and play a dice game with her. In the morning she gave them what looked like squash but was actually human ears. The boys used their medicine again, and when they came back to the lodge, Spider Woman told them that it was time to play the dice game. The boys once again walked out of sight of the lodge, but when they came back they were covered with white clay and had black streaks painted below their eyes. They sat down and Spider Woman began to sing and call for a windstorm to come. That didn’t kill the boys, so she sang for a snowstorm to come. But, the boys turned into snowbirds, and when the sun returned, they turned into larks.

Finally the woman decided she could not harm the boys so she told them to go back to her lodge with her and they could have her daughters. But the oldest boy said, “No, let me sing and you can dance”. First he called the blizzard, but Spider Woman had power over snow storm, so it didn’t harm her. Then he called for boiling heat. She begged for him to stop, but he kept singing. Then she felt herself being raised off the ground as the boy sang for a swarm of grasshoppers to come. The grasshopper flew all around her and lifted her up into the sky. The boy kept singing the grasshopper song as the woman was taken up to the moon where the grasshoppers left her. Then grasshoppers flew on to the sun, and that is why on hot summer days we see grasshoppers swarming around in the sky. Today we can still see something on the moon. It is Spider Woman’s dress.