Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Tailypo/reply

It might well be native in origin, there would be little way to ever know. It doesn't appear in any collections of Native mythology and folk lore, and first appears in the context of Black slaves. That said, there was a lot of cultural mixing between the two, so I suppose anything is possible.

Slotkin, the expert who is trying to tell us this is originally about human cannibalism is full of it. you can claim anything that eats humans is originally about cannibals, but no one has ever been able to prove any of that. The most famous examples are the Gitchi Manitu stories from the North East and Canada. "Scary monsters up in the mountains eat you" have often been claimed by "academics" as pointing to cannibalistic tribes, but a far more likely reason for the tales is "hunting parties have died and not come back" and we need explanations, or "dont' go there".