Reading Diary B: The Wife Who Lied

The second unit of the Eskimo Folk Tales was not as strange as the first unit. But that is okay because the stories were still interesting and entertaining! My favorite story from the unit was The Wife Who Lied, which is one of the weirder stories in the second unit. The story is about a woman who is wed to a man in a different village, one that did not eat men. When she went to visit her people in her old village, she wore mittens on her feet and boots on her hands to show the villagers that she was being ill-treated. To me, this act was really strange to get the villagers attention. She could have easily lied a different way, telling the people of her village that she was not being treated well. If someone came up to me with reversed clothing, ill treatment is not the first thing I think about. Perhaps I my first thought would be insanity or lack of sleep but not ill treatment. Anyway, once her villagers saw this they went to attack her husband’s village while the men were away. They murdered all the women, excluded the three women who hid well, and stuck spears threw them. When the men came home, they were enraged because they knew the wife had run away and what village she was apart of. While they prepared for war against the enemies, the wife’s village summoned spirits and saw when the villagers would swarm them and take revenge. So they beat them to the punch, killing all the men and leaving the rest of the women to be chosen by the village. When it came down to chose the wife, two men took her to the forest and cut off her arms and let her bleed out because she lied about her ill treatment.  

A Luzon Negrito with Spear by Dr. A. B. Meyer's (2009)