Found my way today to two fascinating articles about the Skywoman story. The most commonly recounted version, like that which frames Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, starts in mid-air.
She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. ...
Wondering how she came to be falling is less urgent than finding out what happens to her next, and the ensuing collaboration of animals and their mutual founding of Turtle Island as good as never refers back the the Skyworld, beyond the bundle of leaves and branches she grasped on her way down.
I've made a point in teaching Braiding Sweetgrass of stressing the irrelevance of the Skyworld: we don't live there, nor should we. The miracle is the world we inherit, co-created by all its peoples, a world we also inherit a role in sustaining, down here below.
But it seems there are stories about how this woman came to be falling, and they may contain valuable teachings, too. I'd had the impression (from Kimmerer) that the hole in the sky was opened when a storm toppled the Tree of Life (what? tell me more!), and that the woman who would become Skywoman fell into it by accident. In her new introduction to Braiding Sweetgrass, on its tenth anniversary, Kimmerer has suggested that our current moment might be better served by a new telling.
The detail that varies from one telling to another is just how Skywoman finds herself falling from one world to the next. The common version is that she slips, the earth giving way at the edge of the hole in the sky where the great Tree of Life had fallen. It is an accident, with mythic consequences—and so it begins.
But in other tellings, this was no accident. In one version, she was pushed. In another she was thrown—not from malice but because she was needed for the sacred task and needed “help” in leaving her beloved home for the next. In every version I’ve ever heard, Skywoman was an accidental and possibly an unwilling traveler to the next world, like a seed on the wind.
As I look around at the strong women I know, Indigenous and newcomer, survivors and thrivers, teachers, artists, farmers, singers, healers, mothers, nokos, aunties, daughters, sisters holding together families and communities and leading the way to a new world, I have a hard time seeing our Skywoman as an unknowing and passive emissary. No. I see her standing at the edge of the hole in the sky, her belly planted with new life, looking down into the darkness. Guided by the shaft of dazzling light shining through, she catches a glimpse of the world that waits for the seeds she carries, plucked from the Tree of Life. With all humility and respect for the teachings of this sacred story, I cannot help my imagining forward to this moment on the circle of time. What if, with full agency, she spreads her arms, looks over her shoulder, feels her child stir within and then—what if she jumps?
In the earliest recorded versions of the story, the woman - the wife (or perhaps daughter) of the Guardian of the tree - was pushed. By whom? By the Guardian, who had had a strange dream and was angered by her curiosity, which tipped over the tree, or, more commonly, sickened by jealousy, perhaps of their child, which she carried. In some versions he gives her gifts for the journey, so she knows what is going to happen. Here's an Onondaga version, recorded in 1903.
Surely it had come to pass; the people had uprooted the standing tree called It-Tooth, and lay the chief He-holds-the-earth down beside the hole left in the earth. Each person came along and looked into the abyss at which time the chief said to his wife “Now, let us too look into the abyss. You must carry It-winds-go-plurally (Gusts of Wind) on your back. You must wrap yourself with care.” At this time the chief gave her three ears of corn, dried meat of the spotted fawn and said to her “This shall be the provisions for you both.” At this time [he] broke three pieces of wood which he also gave to her. She placed all these gifts under her garment near her bosom. Then they went to the hole left in the earth, and she sat down on the edge of it. She hung both legs out into the abyss. Now as far as he was concerned, he was looking into the abyss, at this time he raised himself up and said “You look here into the abyss.” Then she did as he requested, but first she held in her teeth her robe which contained her gifts from him, and she also seized the edge of the abyss when she bent over to look where he told her to look. He said “Do bend over and look here.” Which she did as she was asked. As she did this, bent forward, the chief seized her by the neck and pushed her into the abyss and she fell into the abyss.
Kevin J. White, "Rousing a Curiosity in Hewitt's Iroquois Cosmologies," Wicazo Sa Review 28/2 (Fall 2013): 87-111, 104
This is only one of several accounts which Mohawk scholar Kevin J. White analyzes, emphasizing their subtle differences. There may be as many as three dozen recorded versions, but a single streamlined account by (white) ethnographer William Fenton from 1962 has been accepted as authoritative. Other versions, if they're even noticed, are dismissed as distorted by the fancies of their tellers or interpreters. White analyzes versions collected by Tuscarora scholar J. N. B. Hewitt (1859-1937) from Holders of Tradition from different Haudenosaunee nations. These versions are ignored by later scholars as tediously repetitive, any divergences dismissed as insignificant idiosyncracies of their tellers.
But oral traditions never come in definitive form. To appreciate them as oral, one needs to do what White argues Hewitt tried to do: to acknowledge them as narrations for a particular place and time: we need to know who was speaking, from what nation, in what language, to whom, when and in what context - and who was the "gatherer." It should be clear, White says, that all these recorded (= written down) versions were intended for non-Haudenosaunee readers, making the differences from telling to telling that much more significant. And a reminder that a living tradition is a changing one.
Each narrative can be considered a fragmentary piece of a larger philosophical worldview articulated from the ancient humans that illuminates how and why cultures may change over time. (108)
The Holders of Tradition are those who know how narratives need to be told and retold in changing times, and to different audiences. White likens it to the Haudenosaunee metaphor of "extending the rafters" - the way a longhouse is expanded.
In the metaphorical construct of extending the rafters between the generations as it pertains to the cosmologies, there is an implied meaning that each generation must hold the narrative and then imprint on the obligations or instructions contained in these meta-narratives. As each generation answers the questions that evolve during its life-time, stories may have been modified or tweaked, in preparation to be “passed down” to the coming generations. ... The original intent of narrative remains the same: to use our best thinking for those generations yet unborn in our present decision-making process reached through consensus. (109)
In his article, White cites just three of Hewitt's accounts of Skywoman's fall (the one above is the first), but these are enough to suggest that important information was being conveyed in each Holder of Tradition's rendering in that time and place. In a more recent, collaboratively written article, White shares an even older version. There is no tree in this one, translated a little awkwardly from 18th century French, but there is a push.
It started that the sky that was populated by people and under the sky it was a large estendue [body] of water inhabited by many fish. —the master of life, named Tarum-ia-Ouagon [Tharonhiawakon, “Holder of the sky/heavens,” a word for the Creator in the Mohawk language] malcontent of his wife resolved to punish her and she was sleeping near the door-of-the-sky, that was near the place which is presently filled by the sphere of the sun, given to his wife by him to take and eat. He put her between himself and this door as she was there, he arranged his foot and pushed her in a manner that she fell as rain by this hole. —the water creatures [literally translated as “fish”], that saw her fall, came together to deliberate if they should burn her or if they should give her life, and did resolve to give her grace, they gave to a turtle [tortoise] the commission to receive her. During these deliberations, the woman finished falling was rescued on this turtle, upon which many others had joined her, and, left her at no point supported that this floating plank [platform], wishing [hoping] that the earth was made, and she made it.
Il n’y avoit au commencement que le ciel qui fust peuplé d’hommes, et sous le ciel il n’y avoit qu’une grande estendue d’eau habitée de plusieurs poissons. —Le maistre de la vie, nommé Tarum-ia-Ouagon, mescontent de sa femme, résolut de la punir, et s’estant couché près de la porte du ciel, qui estoit à l’endroit qui est présentement remply par le globe du soleil, ordonna à sa femme de luy apporter à manger. Il la fit mettre entre luy et cette porte, et comme elle estoit là, il allongea son pied et la poussa de manière qu’elle tomba et fut précipitée par ce trou. —Les poissons, qui la virent tomber, s’assemblèrent pour délibérer s’ils la brusleroient ou s’ils luy donneroient la vie, et ayant résolu de luy faire grâce, ils donnèrent à la tortue la commission de la recevoir. Durant ces délibérations la femme acheva de tomber, fut receue sur cette tortue, à laquelle plusieurs autres se joignirent, et, se lassant de n’avoir point d’autre appuy que ce plancher flottant, souhaita que la Terre se fist, et elle fut faite.
Kevin J. White, Michael Galban and Eugene R. T. Tesdahl, "LaSalle on Seneca Creation, 1678," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 40/4 (2016): 49-69, 65-67
In all of these subtly different narrations, White hears differently inflected warnings about threats to the consensual decision-making central to Haudenosaunee tradition - even as different accounts of what pushed the pusher are offered.
What if we begin to look at entire narratives of creation, in all their variations among the nations, as models of social protocol demonstrating consequences for acting outside of normal acceptable human behavior in responsibility to the group, rather than the desires of the individual? ("Rousing a Curiosity," 108)
If there are teachings about how to share the world to be gained from knowing it created by the animals who decided together to stay Skywoman's fall, there were others, surely, in the various accounts of how she came to be falling - at least in those moments of telling Hewitt and others recorded. For instance, White thinks the tellings of Skywoman's push underscored the importance of the ritual practice of "dream guessing" in the civilization the Holders of Tradition shared with Hewitt and others - for the Guardian of the Tree had had a dream before all this happens (107).
White's larger point is that the Skywoman narration communicated sophisticated Haudenosaunee cosmogonies, shared if varied among the nations of the confederacy, in a manner always plural. Open to new contexts but also, if only we could know more about the tellings, used by different specialists within each society.
[A]s is often the case when studying indigenous cultures, those distinctive peoples and traits are viewed as inherently interchangeable within the culture, especially by Western scholars. If one were to bracket a literary scholar, historian, anthropologist, ethnographer, and psychologist in the academic world as an inherently interchangeable professor, one has to wonder what might happen. While certainly they are all educators, each branch of knowledge jealousy guards its disciplinary ranks and boundaries. Why would indigenous cultures be any different in terms of selecting individuals to be Holders of Traditions, orators, diplomats, or storytellers? (109)
All this doesn't tell how the narrative demands to be told today, but does suggest that one size cannot fit all. (Here's another contemporary retelling.) While I can't judge Kimmerer's right to suggest that our time needs a Skywoman who jumps, one moral of the story of the Tree Keeper's jealousy of his child might have been the warning that Holders of Tradition (not to mention the rest of us) not become jealous of new narratives.
Image by Shelley Niro
