Water monsters

[BARudes at aol.com]

In reply to Jess's comment,

I cannot resist going speculative here.  Is the water monster perhaps a
legendary hold-over from an earlier abode of the people in question, or
perhaps a legend that has been borrowed from people who have a link to the
Amazon.  There is SLOWLY growing evidence of migrations of peoples in
pre-historic times out of the Amazon, across the Caribbean islands and onto
the mainland of North America. (The evidence is archaeological, ethnographic
and linguistic, but VERY speculative.)

I am not saying here that the Proto-Siouan-speaking peoples and the related
Proto-Catawban-speaking  (and potentially related Yuchean-speaking [and
perhaps related Iroquoian-speaking]) peoples personally arrived in North
America from the Amazon, but there are some suspicious similarities with the
Arawakan languages that I will hold for another day.  In any event, if one
reads through the texts that Douglas Taylor (1977) reported for Arawak and
Island Carib, one finds remarkable parallels with Iroquois and Catawba
legends.

Blair