Native American Creation Stories

           In the video we watched in class ("American Passages – A Literary Survey:  Native Voices"), one of the Native American speakers made the point that “storytelling always begins with the land…the land told us the stories.”  This seems to me to be different from the way I viewed wilderness in my original definition.  While I viewed wilderness as a place set apart, free from human technology and restrictions, Native American authors don’t seem to view humanity and wilderness as being separate from one another.  As another quote I have written in my notes from the video puts it, “human beings emerged from the Earth and are part of the Earth."

            In the Iroquois creation story, Sky Woman’s twin sons  – in whose image humans beings are made – create the world.  Using parts of his mother’s body, Enigorio (good mind) creates the sun, moon, and stars, then goes on to form “numerous creeks and rivers on the Great Island…and numerous species of animals of the smallest and the greatest…and fishes of all kinds to inhabit the waters” (20).  He then goes on to create human beings, “two images of the dust of the ground in his own likeness, male and female” (20).  So humanity is literally made from the land, the Earth (which is also the way it happens in our own Judeo-Christian culture’s creation story).  Enigonhahetgea’s (bad mind’s) contribution to creation was “numerous high mountains and falls of water, and great steeps, and also…various reptiles which would be injurious to mankind” (20).  The inclusion of both beautiful and dangerous elements in this view of wilderness is similar to the view I expressed in my first blog.

            In the Pima creation story, the earth is created by a supernatural shaman, Juh-wert-a-Mah-kai, using “perspiration, or greasy earth” (22) from his breast.  From this he creates the greasewood bush, a very important local plant, and ants who build the earth.  After creating Nooee, the buzzard person, and the sun, moon, stars, mountains, and plants, the shaman creates people:  “And now Juhwertamahkai rubbed again on his breast, and from the substance he obtained there made two little dolls, and these he laid on the earth.  And they were human beings, man and woman” (23).  Again, human beings are formed from the same substance as the Earth they live upon. 

            This view of humanity as being an element of the natural world, formed from it and an integral part of it, feels oddly reassuring to me.  It contrasts with the Euro-American cultural view which seems to suggest that humanity is somehow separate from nature – either that we’re supposed to subdue it and have dominion over it or, conversely, that our very existence is an insupportable strain on the earth and we ruin everything we touch.  The Native American perspective as articulated in the video is that humans and all of nature are part of a living whole that is evolving together.  Another memorable quote from the video:  “That which does not grow and change is dead.”  To me, this statement offers hope.  Growth and change often feel slow, difficult, and painful to us, but it is the nature of evolution – and life.  To be alive is to evolve.