I've been spending some more time with Skywoman. Robin Wall Kimmerer's exquisite telling of the story in Braiding Sweetgrass has introduced millions around the world to this wonderful cosmogonic story from the Haudenosaunee, including me: I'm pairing it with the first three chapters of Genesis in my second chapter.
I'd planned to include the way she updated it a few years later, but have been finding more surprises: a different updating a few months before, and quite different tellings in various sources, including Joanne Shenandoah and Doug George's Skywoman: Legends of the Iroquois, the one to which she directs her readers (from whence the image by John Kabionhes Fadden above). This fits what I'm saying about it - that living stories are told and retold in different ways, the difference a testimony to their vitality. But I hadn't realized how artfully outlierish the Braiding Sweetgrass telling is, abstracting from who Skywoman was or how she came to be falling, while still telling us she was holding some sprigs from the "Tree of Life." In this book, for instance, which gives Skywoman a full backstory and a name, the tree is called the Great Tree of Light - and she doesn't take seeds from it down to what will become Turtle Island.
How do I honor the particularity of her tellings without implicitly calling them into question?
