Wohpekumeu

Wohpekumeu is the foremost culture-hero and trickster of Yurok narrative, one of the woge, the immortal spirit-people who inhabited the lower Klamath before human beings. His name is understood as 'the widower from across the ocean.' He is credited with shaping the conditions of human life: he loosed the salmon and the acorns, established many of the arrangements by which people live, and figures in the coming of death. He is at once a benefactor and an insatiable seducer whose appetites drive much of his cycle, and in the end, thwarted, he withdraws westward across the ocean. Sources differ on how far he is a creator as against a transformer of a world already in being.

Children

• Kapuloyo

Domains

• culture origins
• subsistence
• trickery lust

Powers

• transform the first-age world
• release the salmon and acorns

Epithets

• Wohpekumew — the widower from across the oceanKroeber, A. L. 1976. Yurok Myths, name gloss. (secondary)

Relations

• child: KapuloyoKroeber, A. L. 1976. Yurok Myths, Wohpekumeu cycle. (secondary)
• ally: PulekukwerekThe two great woge culture-heroes act as complementary orderers of the world.Kroeber, A. L. 1976. Yurok Myths, narratives pairing the two culture-heroes. (secondary)

Sources

• Wohpekumeu is the foremost Yurok culture-hero and trickster among the woge, credited with arranging human life, loosing salmon and acorns, and figuring in the origin of death before withdrawing across the ocean.: Kroeber, A. L. 1976. Yurok Myths. Univ. of California Press, Berkeley. (secondary); Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. BAE Bulletin 78, Yurok religion. (secondary)