25 pages • 50 minutes read
The World on Turtle's Back
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Background
Literary Context: Creation Stories
Cosmogonies are a subcategory of myth that attempt to explain how the world began. Before scientific theories about the origins of the universe, such stories usually ascribed the creation of the universe to one or more divine powers. Although quite varied in their details, cosmogonies also tend to fall into a few categories: Some depict the world as emerging from a primordial state of chaos, others feature an act of creation from nothing (ex nihilo), still others speculate that the world was birthed like a child, etc. “The World on Turtle’s Back” most closely corresponds to a “genre” of cosmogony sometimes referred to as “earth-diver” stories, as it involves a figure fetching soil that will become North America from deep within the ocean. However, it also features a second act of creation (by Enigorio) that is responsible for most other elements of life on Earth, from the existence of the sun to the arrival of humans.
The latter is another central concern of many cosmogonies, which explore not only the creation of humanity (or even a particular ethnocultural group) but also its place in the world. Hierarchies appear in many cosmogonies: Divine gods rule the action at the top, evil spirits lurk in the depths below, and humans must navigate their way between them. Although “The World on Turtle’s Back” does not feature many humans (at least in the usual sense), it is deeply concerned with how people relate to their creators and to the opposing moralities the twins represent. This is evident not only in the co-creation that results in humans who have “the most knowledge of good and evil” but also in Enigonhahetgea’s dying words (20), which imply that humans who are wicked will fall under his rule when they die.
Authorial Context: David Cusick
Peoples collectively known as the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee in Seneca and Kanosoni in Mohawk) are an ethnolinguistic group originally from the Erie and Ontario Lakes area of the northeast US. The Haudenosaunee are made up of many subgroups—Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga—which partly accounts for variation among different versions of the Haudenosaunee creation story. Later, they were joined by the Tuscarora, at which point the Five Nations became Six.
The author of this piece, David Cusick, was born a member of the Tuscarora on the Oneida Reservation, perhaps around 1780. Cusick’s father was a Christian, and Cusick was educated by a missionary named Samuel Kirkland and would adopt the religion himself. This may explain some of the connections between Cusick’s version of the creation story and that of Genesis, although certain motifs (e.g., fratricide) are common to a variety of mythologies. Cusick became an important leader in his tribe and was considered a doctor and artist. He created the woodcuts that decorated the cover of his book Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827), an important source of shared knowledge about the Haudenosaunee culture.
Cusick considered the events of the Haudenosaunee creation myth historical. In fact, his account is believed to have led to the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy, illustrating the links between historical knowledge and political power. Likewise, Cusick’s use of the colonialist word “Iroquois” in his title might have helped persuade non-Indigenous people to read the text and learn about the Haudenosaunee’s past success in fighting off expansionist armies. The publication of the work was particularly urgent given Andrew Jackson’s promise to push eastern Indigenous tribes west of the Mississippi.
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