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Overview

In the later movement of Tirukala, Jewinna’s people visit Kedila’s house, exchange gifts and gamble. Kedila enlarges his house by blowing toward its four sides to accommodate the guests. His party eventually loses everything, disputes the fairness of play and attacks. The fighting destroys almost all the participants. Two final survivors briefly agree to go home; Wirula then tries to kill Chichepa, who evades the attack and kills him instead.

Chichepa returns in grief but goes back next morning with ten otter-skins. He takes a hair from the head of each dead person and carries the collection home. Four baskets of water are heated with stones, and the hairs are placed inside. He tells the women to remain indoors all night. At dawn the baskets overturn and the voices of returning people are heard outside. Jewinna, his son and their companions enter alive and healthy.

Kedila’s side receives a different restoration. His mocked youngest son, called Burnt Face, had predicted that he could live again through his own power and habitually spat in one place. After his death, a child rises from that spittle and reaches full growth by the next day. The youth follows the battlefield, turns the bodies over with his foot and restores Kedila’s people. He is retained as a successor emerging from Burnt Face’s remains rather than given an invented personal name.

The two methods are deliberately distinguished: Chichepa collects hair and uses heated water, while the newborn successor restores by contact. The full ending also returns Jewinpa to his wives and children, whose concealment in bearskins repeats his own earlier protected upbringing. Curtin associates Chichepa with spotted chicken-hawk in the personage list, but that correspondence does not explain away the narrative’s mourning and reciprocal family obligations.

Final survivor of a feudRestoration from collected hairSpittle-born grown successorTwo different revival methods
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Origins & earliest records

Jeremiah Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind (Boston: Little, Brown,1898). Collection notes486–487 distinguish the first nine narratives as Wintu and the later thirteen as Yana. Curtin describes California collecting in1895 and prior publication of these narratives in The Sun. The Yana section begins at281; these selected chapters do not name individual tellers.

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Records & interpretation

Complete Tirukala,339–349 read through the ending. Curtin’s personage list and the Yana section boundary distinguish community attribution from later comparative commentary.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Creation Myths of Primitive America

    Jeremiah Curtin, collector and English presenter; individual Yana teller unnamed here · 1898

    Tirukala,339–349; Yana section statement281 and collection provenance486–487.

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Primary textCurtin1898 digitised primary collectionResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

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