Native American Mythology

There is no such thing as a single Native American mythology. More than five hundred tribes are federally recognized in the United States and more than six hundred First Nations communities exist in Canada, speaking languages that belong to more than a dozen unrelated families, and their accounts of how things began differ accordingly: earth brought up from under water, people climbing out of the ground, Raven letting the daylight out of the box that held it — and, in some nations, a beginning that is simply not told to outsiders on request. Three reasonably well documented accounts are set out here: the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy, chiefly the Seneca and Onondaga records), the Lakota, and the Diné (Navajo). They are three separate traditions, not three parts of one story; the order below is a matter of layout only and implies no sequence and no claim that these three stand for the rest. Where a nation has its own name for itself, that name is used: Iroquois, Sioux and Navajo are all names given from outside. All three are living traditions. Only published material is drawn on here, and nothing that belongs to ceremony or to initiated knowledge.

On the versions, one by one. Sky Woman: Cusick's Sketches (1827) is the earliest account written in English by a Haudenosaunee man, but he wrote it inside a world of missionaries and English history books. The Mohawk, Onondaga and Seneca texts Hewitt published in 1903 and 1928 do not agree with one another — whether Sky Woman fell, was pushed, or climbed down; whether it was the muskrat or the toad that came up with the mud; what the twins are called and what weapon settles their contest. The Lakota emergence: the connected version people read today comes mainly from James R. Walker, a physician at Pine Ridge from 1896 to 1914, who collected fragments from George Sword and other holy men and assembled them into a single cycle. When Elaine Jahner edited that material for publication in 1983 she said plainly that Walker's own literary arrangement is part of what we have, and that it cannot be treated as a fixed canonical text. A separate body of Lakota knowledge sets the terrain of the Black Hills against the constellations, site answering to star, with the ceremonial year following the sun between the two (Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge, 1992). Identifying Wind Cave as the place of emergence carries great weight in Lakota oral tradition today and in the Black Hills land claim, but not every record says so.

Diné bahané does not settle even the number of worlds: most tellings bring the people up into a fourth world, the Glittering World, while some records count five. Nor do the records agree on where First Man and First Woman came into being — Matthews (1897) has the ears of corn become them in the world reached after the ascent, while O'Bryan (1956) and Zolbrod (1984) place it in the lowest, Black World. Diné tradition holds that these stories are told in winter. None of the three accounts contains a separation of sky and earth: for the Haudenosaunee, sky and water are two realms from the outset, and the Lakota and Diné worlds are stacked one above another, so nothing has to be split apart or propped up. The Hopi and other Pueblo peoples of the Southwest have emergence accounts of their own, which are not the same as the Diné one and are not folded in here.