Before this world, the story begins, there was a world in the sky. Beneath it lay only water, crowded with the animals who swim and dive. In the tellings of the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations confederacy of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, the earth we stand on begins with a fall. A woman of the Sky World tumbles through a hole opened where a great tree was uprooted, and falls toward the endless sea.
She does not fall alone. The waterfowl see her and rise together, catching her on their joined wings. But there is nowhere to set her down, until the great turtle offers his back. Then the diving animals attempt what the story remembers as the costliest errand in the world: swimming to the bottom of the sea for a little soil. One after another fails and floats up drowned or breathless. In various tellings it is the beaver, the otter, the loon. At last the smallest, the muskrat, comes up barely alive with a few grains of mud in his paw. Spread on the turtle’s shell, the mud begins to grow. It grows into the world. In many tellings Sky Woman, or her daughter, then walks the new earth in widening circles, and from her come the plants and the peoples. North America keeps, in many Indigenous communities to this day, the name the story gave it: Turtle Island.
The record, honestly
This entry rests on two unusual sources. The first is early and Indigenous. David Cusick, a Tuscarora writer, published his Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations in 1827, one of the first accounts of the tradition set down by one of its own people. The second is deep and careful. J. N. B. Hewitt, himself of Tuscarora descent, working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, recorded Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk tellings in the original languages with interlinear translation (1903). As with all living traditions in this wing: the versions differ among nations and tellers by design, the tradition remains the property of the Haudenosaunee, and this entry gives only the published outline.
The library’s hand
Two things distinguish this beginning among the doors of the wing. First, creation here is cooperative and costly. The world exists because many small animals tried, one drowned diver at a time, and the least of them succeeded. There is no solitary omnipotence in the story at all. Second, it belongs to the earth-diver family, the most widespread creation-motif on the planet, told from Siberia to the Balkans to these woodlands (the Slavic door opens on another branch of it). Two continents, one image: the world begins with someone willing to dive.