Tokwaj

Tokwaj (also Tokhwáh, Tawkxwax, Tokjuaj) is the central figure of Wichí narrative, a trickster and culture-hero whose adventures form an extended cycle that Chaco ethnographers have grouped into the deceived-trickster, the liberation of the waters, and Tokwaj-the-shaper. He is at once creative and destructive: he frees the waters held in the great palo borracho tree, brings fire and honey to humankind, and fixes the rhythm of the seasons, yet his appetite and cunning constantly rebound on him in comic catastrophe. Though supernaturally powerful, he is conceived as profoundly human rather than as a remote high god, and his deeds are felt to have given the Chaco its present shape.

Domains

• trickster culture hero
• release of the waters
• fire and seasons

Powers

• to release the world's water from the tree that contained it
• to change his own shape and trick other beings

Epithets

• Tío Travieso

Relations

• companion: The Sun
• enemy: Lawo', the Rainbow Water-Serpent

Sources

• Alfred Métraux, Myths and Tales of the Matako Indians (The Gran Chaco, Argentina), Etnologiska Studier 9, Göteborg, 1939.
• Johannes Wilbert & Karin Simoneau (eds.), Folk Literature of the Mataco Indians, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, Los Angeles, 1982.
• Jan-Åke Alvarsson, The Mataco of the Gran Chaco, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 11, Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala, 1988.