Deer Woman

Deer Woman, sometimes also known as Deer Lady, is a shape-shifting woman in Native American mythology, in and around Oklahoma, The Western United States and The Pacific Northwest.

She allegedly appears at various times as an old woman, or a young maiden, or a deer. Some descriptions assign her a human female upper body and the lower body of a white-tailed deer.

The Deer Woman is said to sometimes be seen as a beautiful woman just off the trail or behind a bush, calling to men to come over. Deer Woman is often said to have all the features of a normal young woman, except her feet which are shaped like deer hooves and her brown deer's eyes. Men who are lured into her presence often notice too late that she is not a natural woman and are then stomped to death. Other stories and traditions describe the sighting of Deer Woman to be a sign of personal transformation or a warning. Deer Woman is also said to be fond of dancing and will sometimes join a communal dance unnoticed leaving only when the drum beating ceases.^[1][2]

The Deer Woman is similar in nature to several other female figures of folklore from other regions such as La Llorona from Mexico and the Southwestern United States, the Fiura of Chile, the Colombian creatures the Patasola and "the Tunda and the Iara of Brazil, the Xana from Asturias (Spain), and Naag Kanyas (serpent women) from India. All are females who at times, function as sirens leading men to their death.

This physical deformity marking an otherwise perfect women is a common theme among legendary siren figures. Deer Woman has hooves for feet, La Patasola and the Tunda have deformed feet and La llorona is often said to have no feet by those who see her. The Iara on the other hand is a fish woman with a blow hole in her neck.

According to Ojibwe tradition, she can be banished through the use of tobacco and chant^[3] others say that you can break her spell by looking at her feet, which are in fact hooves. Once she is recognized for what she is, she runs away.^[4] This is, in fact, how one of the main characters in the horror movie mentioned below stopped it from killing him.

Deer Woman was featured as a character in an eponymous episode of the Showtime horror series Masters of Horror. It originally aired in North America on December 9, 2005 and was directed by John Landis, who is best known for his direction of the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London.^[5]

Elsewhere

In parts of Northern India, there have been reports of people shocked (generally at night) by suddenly discovering to their utter surprise that women travelling along them have cow-hooves instead of normal feet. In other versions of this urban legend, women have normal feet, but fixed the other way around or in local language ਪੁੱਠੇ ਪੈਰ - a sure sign, according to a folk-belief,^[6] that the lady is not a human being.

References

1. ^ LaDuke, Winona Last Standing Woman Page 243 Published by Voyageur Press, 1997 ISBN 0896584526 Accessed via google Book October 12, 2008
2. ^ Where the White Stag Runs: Boundary and Transformation in Deer Myths, Legends, and Songs by Ari Berk Realms of Fantasy magazine, 2003
3. ^ LaDuke, Winona Last Standing Woman Page 245 Published by Voyageur Press, 1997 ISBN 0896584526 Accessed via google Book October 12, 2008
4. ^ Deer Woman And the Living Myth of the Dreamtime by Carolyn Dunn the Journal of Mythic Arts 2003
5. ^ W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Waco, Texas: Baylor, 2011), p. 33, ISBN 978-1-60258-314-6 .
6. ^ Punjabi Folklore http://www.punjabilekhak.com/?p=2465

External links

• Oklahoma’s Deer woman by Tonya Hacker
• Deer Woman And the Living Myth of the Dreamtime, article by Carolyn Dunn from the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts 2003