Nambweapa'w is the cosmic Cassowary-Mother of the Ilahita Arapesh, primordial ancestress of all human beings. In the myth she comes with other cassowaries to bathe, shedding her feathered skin to take the form of a woman; a man watching in hiding steals the skin and so keeps her as his wife. She bears him many children of alternating sex, from whom the various peoples and languages of the earth descend, the Arapesh among them holding a place of mythic seniority. In time her youngest son reveals to her where the skin has been hidden; recovering it she resumes her cassowary nature, kills the husband who had entrapped her, and departs, leading her children away. Tuzin reads the story as the counterweight to the men's tambaran cult, a charter of the female power that men appropriate and fear, and identifies Nambweapa'w with the great female figure carved on the facade of the spirit house. He argues that the tale is a Sepik reworking of the widely travelled Swan-Maiden story, the cassowary standing where other traditions place a swan.