Shuar, Arutam, and Tsunki
Mythology Monday #3 (Indigenous Latin American peoples edition!): Shuar peoples of Ecuador, and their Tsunki.
Tsunki: The tsunki is a water spirit. According to Pueblos Originarios this creature is responsible for teaching humanity about fishing. It can take on the forms of aquatic animals, such as the duck, crab, and apparently this motivates the Shaur people to consider bathing like a ritual where they could potentially meet the Tsunki daily.
Flood Myth Alert! The Shuar are one of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas to have a flood myth. Yep. One of the creation/foundation myths for the Shuar includes Tsunki quite closely.
So finding sources on this was tough. But the information I found says that the Shuar myth of the great flood involves a Tsunki.
There was a Tsunki (because there is more than one of them in the world, this isn't a singular entity, to the Shuar) who fell in love with a man. The two of them would get married (despite the man already having a wife, because the Shuar do accept polygamy) and the Tsunki would be in the shape of a snake while at home, and transform into a human woman whenever the two of them would go on hunts. The Tsunki would become pregnant with the man's child (she already had one son with him, in the land of the spirits where they initially went after getting married. He returned home to see his other wife and brought the Tsunki with him). The Tsunki would then be mistreated by the other wife by her dropping an ember on her (the first her being the other wife, second her being the snake wife), and return home to her father, in the land of the spirits. She would tell her father about this treatment, who would proceed to send out a great storm and an army of anacondas. The husband survived because he realized what was about to happen upon noticing the darkening skies. He took his child, a daughter, and fled to the highest possible point (a tree high in the mountains). They survived. No one else did.
The snake, the daughter, and the man would go to repopulate the world.
Part of the reason why the Tsunki are so important in this mythology is because of the fact that the supreme deity/spirit, the head of their pantheon, Arutam are deity/spirit/beings (I use multiple words because differing sources describe Arutam differently. Some make it seem like this is a single being, whereas others refer to multiple beings under one collective name, like a vampire) of water.
Have you heard of the Shuar? Or of the Tsunki and Arutam? If so, what have you heard?
The Sources I used for this:
http://pueblosoriginarios.com/sur/amazonia/shuar/tsunki.html (Spanish source)
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/meeting-arutam
http://pilgrimagethroughamericas.blogspot.com/2012/10/shuar-practices-beliefs-myths.html
http://arutamecotours.com/about/the-meaning-of-arutam/
https://vimeo.com/113070917 (I believe this is in Shuar, but subtitles are in Spanish)
