I purchased a book when I was in Las Vegas a few months ago titled, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, and quite immediately opened the book to chapter 4, The Myths, Cosmogonic Myths. After perusing the creation myth, I was immediately taken by the section 3, Kana'ti and Selu: The Origin of Game and Corn. I had already determined to my own satisfaction that Goddess Selu, the Cherokee Corn Goddess got her name from the Sanskrit word selu, which means "abundance." Anthropologically speaking, corn is synonymous with abundance. Kana'ti, the "Lucky Hunter God," seems likely to correspond to the Sanskrit word kSAnta, which means "of a hunter," among other things. Upon a second reading, I determined that the Cherokee myth about Kana'ti and Selu and their sons is in fact a retelling of certain Hindu myths about Shiva and Parvati and their sons.
I had previously read of the murder of Selu by her own sons, who saw her manifesting corn by rubbing her belly else by similar means, and thus killed her for being a "witch." I didn't know of the story of the advent of one of the two sons from the waters of the river, however, until I started to peruse the aforementioned book.
At first the Kana'ti and Selu had only one son. According to the account given, "The little boy used to play down by the river every day, and one morning the old people thought they heard laughing and talking in the bushes as though there were two children there. When the boy came home at night his parents asked him who had been playing with him all day. "He comes out of the water,"said the boy, "and he calls himself my elder brother. He says his mother was cruel to him and threw him into the river." Then they knew that the strange boy had sprung from the blood of the game which Selu had washed off at the river's edge."
One of Great Goddess Parvati's Avatars is as Annapurna, who is Goddess of Food and Nourishment. Great God Shiva is depicted in Hindu myth as a skillful hunter who often disappears into the forest on hunting forays. According to Hindu myth, Shiva and Parvati's son Kartikeya, also known as Skanda, was born in a bed of reeds on the edge of the Ganges when Great God Shiva on one occasion spilled His seedinto the Ganges, where said wad floated into a bed of reeds, in one version of the myth of the birth of Kartikeya. In other versions, the Devas and Devis (Gods and Goddesses) conspire to bring Kartikeya into the world by delivering Shiva's seed into the flow of the Ganges. Kartikeya is the elder brother of Ganesha, the popular elephant-headed God of Hindu myth.
Clearly, there seems to be more than coincidence involved in these two myths conveying such similar mythemes, telling such parallel stories. I have already drawn parallels between the as yet undecifered script of the Indus Valley Civilization of 1500-5000+ BCE and the petroglyphs and pictographs and architecture of pre-Columbian America, as well as noting many nigh if not precise cognates between Sanskrit and various Native American languages in previously published posts (see previous posts, "A Few Examples of Indus Valley Script and Hindu Gods Found in Native American Indian Rock Art" and "Maybe Columbus Found India After All: Traces of India Amongst American 'Indians'").
The clear parallels between the myth of Kana'ti and Selu and there two sons and Shiva and Parvati and their sons Ganesha and Kartikeya further reifies my contention that Native American Indians are indeed, to some degree, the progeny of colonists from India and Southeast Asia, however many thousands of years ago. Native American Indians are indeed not entirely misnamed, as such.
Namaste