White Crow
Oneida Sound Recording
Description: Food, honor, and telling the truth told by Eddie Metoxen to Andrew Beechtree and read by Amos Christjohn
Written text: Internlinear Translation (PDF)
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English Translation
White Crow
A crow used to be white. A reporter said, "I saw the other day in the paper where someone had seen a white crow."
A crow used to be white when he was created and he used to be surpassingly smart and they say he used to speak back in the beginning, but when the Creator washed clean the earth, that crow committed a crime. When the water level was receding as the ark was floating around, it got a little dangerous with the small amount of food they had. So the leader sought out someone to volunteer to go investigate where land might be peeking out. They say there were these two crows competing and they said, "Give us the job!"
So they set out and a short way away they found some bodies lying around on the ground of people who died from drowning. Usually when one drowns, the body becomes black. They had a certain amount to do just looking around and there were some more bodies lying around where they landed and they were hungry. They even found this body above them. So they pecked at it and they ate that body. So for a while they were pecking and rubbing their beaks in the carcass. Here and there their feathers that had been a nice white turned black. Then they returned and when they arrived, they told about the direction of the land that was peeking out.
Then the leaders of the ark asked them why they had a meal there. They lied and said they were innocent. He said, "But it's written all over your bodies. You two sinned three times. This is how you will be punished because you ate the flesh of the dead – you will be eating corpses from this time forward. And you dirtied the original white you had been dressed in so now you will be black. And you lied so there will be an end to your speaking."
More Texts
This traditional Oneida story is one of several. For more, see our listing of Oneida Sample Texts.
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