Awkhe, more widely written Auke, is the transforming boy-hero of the Eastern Timbira and the central figure of the Canela's messianic imagination. Born to a young woman without an acknowledged father, he alarms his kin by turning at will into a jaguar, a deer, and other fearsome creatures. Terrified, his relatives kill and burn him, but he revives each time, until at last he leaves his people and becomes the ancestor and creator of the whites, the source of their cattle, firearms, cloth, and manufactured wealth. The myth carries an implicit promise of reversal, that the goods and power now held by outsiders properly belong to the Canela, and it furnished the ideological charge of the Canela messianic movement of the 1960s analysed by Crocker, when a prophet-figure invoked Auke's return.