Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
PRE- AND EARLY COLONIAL LITERATURE
omissions and mediations. Many Native American tales are performative as well
as oral—the meanings of the words supplemented by expressions, movements,
and shared cultural assumptions—and so the words alone do not represent their
full signicance. That being said, the examples of Native American accounts that
follow give us some starting points to consider the dierent ways in which cultures
explain themselves to themselves.
First among a culture’s stories are the tales of how the earth was created and
how its geographical features and peoples came to be. The Native American creation
stories collected here demonstrate two signicant tropes within Native American
creation stories: the Earth Diver story and the Emergence story. Earth Diver stories
often begin with a pregnant female falling from a sky world into a watery world,
such as the ones here from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people of the eastern
United States and from the Cherokee people from the southern United States.
Various animals then work together to create dry land so that the woman may give
birth there, starting the process of creating the familiar world and its population.
With Emergence stories, here represented by the uni creation story, animals and
people emerge from within the earth, a distinction from the Earth Diver story that
is likely connected to the topography familiar to this tribe from the southwestern
United States. Creation stories feature a “culture hero,” an extraordinary being
who is instrumental in shaping the world in its current form. Other examples in
addition to the works here are the Wampanoag culture hero Moshup or Maushop,
a giant who shared his meals of whale with the tribe and created the island of
Nantucket out of tobacco ash, and Masaw, the Hopi skeleton man and Lord of the
Dead who helped the tribe by teaching them agriculture in life and caring for them
in death. Some creation tales show similarities to Judeo-Christian theology and
suggest parallel development or European inuence, quite possible since many of
these stories were not put into writing until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Some Native American creation tales show motifs of movement from chaos to
duality to order and beings of creation and destruction paired together, themes also
found in European accounts of creation. However, these tales feature signicant
dierences to the European way of understanding the world. These tales often
show the birth of the land and of the people as either contemporaneous events,
as with the Earth Diver stories, or as the former guratively birthing the latter, as
with the Emergence stories. This suggests the context for some tribes’ beliefs in the
essentialness of land to tribal and personal identity. As Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna
Pueblo) asserts in The Sacred Hoop (1986), “The land is not really the place
(separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies . . . It
is rather a part of our being, dynamic, signicant, real.” In addition, Native
American creation tales often depict the relationship between man and animals
in ways sharply dierent from European assumptions. In the Haudenosaunee tale
and many other Earth Diver tales like it, animals and cultural heroes create the
earth and its distinctive features collaboratively.
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