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Overview

Hitchinna dreams that his limbs fall while he gathers pine cones. He tells his wife only part of the dream, then takes her and their baby to a pine tree. The dream unfolds as he works: his body separates piece by piece until only the head remains. His terrified wife runs to warn the village and forgets the child. The head becomes a Putokya, one of the skull or head people, with a changed mind and desires; it devours the baby and acknowledges the further dream it had concealed.

Unable to walk, the head rolls and bounds with tremendous force. It breaks trees and houses and produces a roaring wind. The people have hidden inside Wamarawi Mountain. Putokya attacks its four sides, but the holes close again before he reaches them. He then bounds from higher neighbouring mountains onto its summit. Two blows leave the roof dangerously thin, yet he abandons the assault before breaking through. The story associates the remaining summit hollow with a lake; no modern location verification is claimed.

Metsi, associated with coyote, meets the head after assuming the appearance of an elderly woman. Feigning kinship and pity, he promises to restore its lost body. Putokya believes a fabricated account of a previous successful treatment and enters a heated pit lined with pitch. Metsi covers it with stones; the trapped head burns and dies. Metsi resumes his fine clothing and continues his journey.

The narration explicitly calls Metsi a habitual deceiver while judging this particular destruction beneficial. It does not equate deception with harmlessness, nor present his promised treatment as a real restorative practice. Putokya is the transformed state of Hitchinna here, not a second duplicate individual or an imported identity from another tradition’s flying-head accounts.

Body separates after foretelling dreamRolling and bounding movementDestructive windMountain refuge resists attackFalse cure ends the threat
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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 Hitchinna,325–335 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

    Hitchinna,325–335; 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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