Yakamin father and the star-marked children

Overview

Rodrigues’s third narrative under Yurupari is set by the Uanauá in the Rio Branco region. A maiden leaves a settlement where women guard talismans and ritual attributes, seeking a husband. She and a man of the Yakamin people choose each other and marry. Washing with a plant of that name transforms both into yakamin birds. She expects eggs but instead bears a daughter and a son. When their mother first sees them sleeping, the girl bears seven stars on her forehead and the boy a starry serpent around his body.

The father seeks an explanation from ritual specialists: they affirm his paternity and attribute the star markings to his wife looking at the stars when the children were conceived. Meanwhile, despite a maternal prohibition, the strong boy shoots yakamins. His mother discovers that he has killed his father and the specialists. He promises to provide what she has lost, and they travel to her parents’ country.

Fearing that her father will confine her because she left a virgin and returns with children, she appeals to her son. He throws a great stone onto the women’s house, flattening it as the women escape. The stone sinks into the ground, terrifying the chief and his people. When the chief asks him to repair the damage, he lifts the stone and puts it back; the family then lives among these relatives.

The daughter becomes ill without a husband. Her brother offers to find a remedy but takes her to the sky instead of curing her; she becomes the Seven Stars, explicitly identified as the Pleiades. Their mother follows and is swallowed by a great snake. The son searches widely, fathering children along his route, finds his mother and brings her to the sky. The closing passage associates Pinon or Great Snake with a star, but the Portuguese rendering’s feminine pronoun and the preceding interlinear gloss’s masculine pronoun differ. This profile leaves that final referent uncertain rather than assigning the name unconditionally to mother or son.

Origins & earliest records

Poranduba amazonense,1890, taleIII Cunhan etá maloca, Rio Branco,pp.119–127. The heading and full Portuguese rendering locate the narrative at Uanauá; no named individual teller is supplied.

Records & interpretation

Complete Portuguese rendering125–127, heading/footnote119 and closing interlinear page125 inspected visually. Final Pinon pronoun discrepancy retained. The complete Nheengatu text has not been independently analyzed.

Selected bibliography

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

1. 01

   Poranduba amazonense, ou Kochiyma-uara porandub

   João Barbosa Rodrigues · 1890

   TaleIII Cunhan etá maloca: complete Portuguese125–127, heading119 and closing interlinear125; following128blank. No personal teller named.

Family, evolution & connections

Yakamin parents and the star-marked siblings — Rodrigues III

Named textual witness, Portuguese rendering pp. 125–127, with Rio Branco heading on p. 119.

Only expressly stated parentage and the daughter/son relationship are represented. All relatives are unnamed in this graph. Bird transformation belongs to the narrative, not natural classification. Pinon is excluded because the interlinear and Portuguese ending use conflicting gendered pronouns. The complete Nheengatu wording has not been independently translated.

References

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

1. Primary textUFPE: Barbosa Rodrigues1890 original scanResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.