Abotani, 'Father Tani,' is the primeval ancestor of the Tani-speaking peoples of central Arunachal Pradesh, whose very name as an ethnic group means 'the children of Abotani.' In the Padam-Minyong cosmogony he is the youngest and weakest child of the mother-goddess Pedong Nane, yet he becomes the first true human and the founder of settled life, above all of rice agriculture. The vast Apatani and Adi oral corpus casts him as a trickster who survives and prospers among predatory spirits through cleverness rather than strength, most famously in his lifelong feud with his brother the Epom. He is venerated as forefather rather than as a god, and his exploits are recited by ritual specialists (miri / nyibu) and dramatized in the agricultural festival cycle.