Week 11 Story: A Cautionary Tale for Women

(Eskimo woman with knowing glint in her eyes; source: Wikipedia)

Listen here, women of the South and women of the North. Listen to the tale of your ancestor, the first woman:

I knew being the only woman in the land made me quite popular, but I hadn’t expected word of my existence to travel to the North. Nevertheless, a man from the North had traveled all this way to offer me a proposal for marriage. Having grown bored of the Southern men all around me, I agreed, albeit cautiously. After all, I didn’t know exactly what kind of man he was.

The Northman treated me surprisingly well and seemed proud to have me as a wife. In fact, he often bragged to me and other townspeople that he had a wife when the son of the chief in the North did not. I should’ve known that his boasting (although it made me feel valued at the time) wouldn’t end well. Sure enough, word of my husband’s braggadocio spread across the land.

One night, as I slept peacefully in the hut, I felt cold hands clasp my shoulders and drag me across the floor. My eyes shot open, disoriented, before I realized a dark figure—a man—was trying to abduct me. I screamed and thrashed about, attracting the attention of my husband. I heard more than saw him rush over to me. Instead of trying to fight the stranger and wrestle me out of his grip, my foolish husband gripped my ankles and yanked.

The ensuing few minutes were the absolute worst of my life. The pain I endured as the men tugged me this way and that was all-consuming and horrendous. To this day, I’m shocked that my screams of agony never woke any neighbors. At the very end, I felt myself give in to the pain and let the darkness envelop me.

When I opened my eyes, I discovered that my soul was no longer trapped inside my body. I was floating, hovering somewhere in the spectrum between life and death—a spirit, if you will. I found that in the process of fighting over me, my husband and the stranger, the Northern chief’s son, had ripped me in two. My upper half traveled with the chief’s son to the North and my lower half stayed in the South with my husband.

It is for this reason that the women of the North are skilled in needlework and the women of the South are talented at dancing. If you take anything out of my tale, let it be this: never allow yourself to be treated as an acquisition, a piece of property, an object. For if you do so, you may face a similar fate as mine.



Author’s note: The original tale was an Eskimo story about the first woman. Much like this version, a Northern man travels to the South to meet and wed this woman. However, the Northern man never outwardly brags of having a wife, though he is internally satisfied that he beat the chief’s son to it. The chief’s son was traveling southward himself and as in this story, attempts to abduct the woman. The ripping apart of the woman and the subsequent inherited characteristics of Northern and Southern women were described in the original story. My purpose with writing this tale was to give the first woman a narrative of her own. So many things seemed to happen to her and yet, she was depicted as a flat, passive character. I hoped to change that here and give her some purpose.

Bibliography. Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson (1911).