Scomalt
Salish · deity · primordial / myth age · Recorded classification
Scomalt appears in the Okanagan (Okanogan) origin narrative first recorded in the fur-trade era and later anthologized by Ella Clark and by Erdoes and Ortiz. She is described as a woman of great height and power who ruled an island of white giants in the primordial sea and 'could create whatever she wished.' When the giants fell to fighting among themselves, she broke off the portion of the island where they lived and pushed it adrift; it slowly sank, and a surviving man and woman who escaped in a canoe reached the mainland and became the ancestors of the Okanagan people. She is one of the few individually named female sovereign figures in Interior Salish oral literature.
Domains
- sovereignty
- flood and sea
Powers
- to break off part of the island and set it adrift on the sea with the rebellious giants aboard
Sources
- Scomalt is the powerful giant woman who chiefs the white giants of a primordial island in Okanagan tradition and whose punishment of the quarrelling giants by setting their land adrift produces the flood-borne ancestors of the Okanagan people.: Ella E. Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, University of California Press, 1953. (secondary); Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz (eds.), American Indian Myths and Legends, Pantheon Books, 1984. (secondary)