Sky Woman Falls

Before this world, there was another one.

It existed above, somewhere past where the sky ends. Not clouds. Not space as we understand it. A different place entirely, a sky world with its own ground and its own trees and its own rules about what was possible. The Haudenosaunee people, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, have been telling this story for a very long time. Their territory spans present-day New York and into Canada, across the lands around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. This is one of their central creation accounts, and it begins not with nothingness but with a different kind of existence.

In the sky world, there was a Great Tree. A massive tree at the center of everything, with roots so deep they held the world together and light that glowed from its roots. This tree was not just a tree. It was the source of light for the whole sky world. It was important in the way that things become important when everything depends on them.

And then someone decided to uproot it.

Who, exactly, and why, depends on the telling. In some versions, a man has a dream that the tree must fall, and in the sky world, dreams have weight. A dream is not just a dream. Dreams tell you what must happen. So the man digs around the roots of the Great Tree, and when the roots come loose, there is a hole in the sky world floor where the tree had been. A hole with darkness below it. A way through to something else.

In some tellings, Sky Woman leans over to look through the hole. In some she is pushed by her husband. In some she simply falls. What all versions agree on: she goes through.

Sky Woman fell out of the sky world.

Below, there was only water.

Below the sky world, the world was water. An ocean without edges, without a shore. Animals lived on it and in it. Birds flew above it. And they all saw the same thing at the same moment: a woman falling out of the sky, and nothing beneath her to land on.

The birds acted first. Geese, or swans, depending on the telling, flew up and caught her on their wings. They slowed her fall. They carried her. But they couldn't carry her forever. A woman from the sky world is heavier than she looks, and the question was where to put her. You cannot put a land being down on open water.

Turtle said: put her on my back.

Think about what that means. Turtle offered its body as an island. Offered its shell as the foundation of a world. This is not a small thing, and the Haudenosaunee do not treat it as one. The name many Indigenous nations use for North America is Turtle Island. Not a metaphor. The name reflects this: the land that exists now exists because of what Turtle did then. Every piece of ground you have ever stood on rests, in this understanding, on the back of the one who said yes when there was nothing.

But a turtle's back, even a great turtle's back, is not a continent. Sky Woman needed soil. She needed earth.

The animals dove. One after another, they tried to reach the bottom of the water and bring up mud. Otter dove and came back empty. Beaver dove and came back empty. The water was too deep, the bottom too far. Duck tried. Others tried. In some versions many animals fail before the one who succeeds.

Muskrat is usually the one who makes it. Muskrat dove, and dove, and stayed down far longer than should have been possible. When Muskrat finally surfaced, barely alive, barely moving, the animal was clutching a tiny bit of mud in its paw. Or its mouth. Or its claws. Just a small handful.

That was enough. Sky Woman took it. She placed it on Turtle's back.

And it grew.

The mud spread. Slowly at first, then faster, then in all directions across Turtle's back. It became soil. It became rock. It became the shape of a continent. This is how the land came to be. The Haudenosaunee are not speaking loosely or metaphorically when they call it Turtle Island. This is the story of where the island came from, and Turtle is carrying it still.

Sky Woman landed on the new earth. She walked on it. She was pregnant.

This is the part of the story that moves faster than you might expect. Sky Woman had come through the sky world hole carrying a child, and the child was not long in coming. She had a daughter. The daughter grew up on the new world, the world that was still forming around them.

But the daughter's story is brief and terrible. She became pregnant herself, and in the Haudenosaunee accounts this pregnancy was unusual. She was carrying twins. And the twins were not at peace with each other even before they were born.

One twin chose a normal way into the world. The other did not. The left-handed twin, the one who would become the source of difficulty and danger in the world, decided that he would not wait, would not follow the normal path, would be born through his mother's armpit.

This killed her.

The Haudenosaunee accounts name her. Her name is translated as Mature Flowers or Flowers. She died bringing her sons into the world. Sky Woman buried her daughter in the earth she herself had helped create, and from that grave grew the three great plants. Corn. Beans. Squash. The Three Sisters, the foundation of Haudenosaunee agriculture and sustenance. Flowers died, and what grew from her sustained the world.

The twins grew. Their grandmother, Sky Woman, raised them.

The right-handed twin and the left-handed twin set about making the world. Together, in opposition to each other, sometimes in direct competition, they shaped everything in it.

The right-handed twin made rivers that flowed in both directions, which meant you could paddle a canoe upstream as easily as down. Useful. The left-handed twin put bends and rapids in the rivers and made the current run one way. Less convenient, but the rivers got interesting. The right-handed twin made plants grow straight and easy to harvest. The left-handed twin made thorns and tangles. The right-handed twin made gentle winds. The left-handed twin made storms.

You see what's happening here. The world is not a place that was designed to be comfortable. It is a place that was built by two forces working in opposite directions, and what resulted is the actual world: beautiful and dangerous and difficult and full of things that will hurt you alongside things that will sustain you.

This is a fundamentally different account of suffering than the one most Western readers are used to. There is no fall from grace here, no original sin, no paradise that was ruined. The difficulty was designed in from the beginning. Not as punishment. As structure. The left-handed twin is not evil in the Christian sense. He is the other half of a balance. Without him the world would be smooth and calm and probably lifeless.

Sky Woman had her own reactions to the twins. Different versions handle this differently. In some she favored the left-handed twin, which caused its own complications. In some she remained neutral. What all the accounts agree on is that the twins eventually came to a final confrontation. The right-handed twin won. The left-handed twin went below the earth.

But he didn't disappear. He's still there. Which is why things are still difficult.

Sky Woman is in the story long after the twins have done their work. In some Haudenosaunee accounts she becomes a figure associated with the forces of the sky world she fell from. Her grandsons, for all their conflict, completed what she started: a world that could be lived in.

Here is the thing about creation stories. They're not really about the past. A creation story is an explanation for why the world is the way it is right now, in this moment, as you're living in it. The Haudenosaunee creation account doesn't describe a lost golden age or a perfect world that went wrong. It describes exactly the world we have. A world that rests on something that chose to carry it. A world that grew from a handful of mud brought up by the smallest animal that tried. A world that contains both corn and thorns, both useful rivers and rapids, because it was made by two forces in opposition and neither one of them won completely.

Turtle is still under the land. Still carrying it. If you live on the North American continent, you are on Turtle Island, and that is not a metaphor for the Haudenosaunee people, the Anishinaabe, the Lenape, and many other nations who hold versions of this understanding. The name carries the story with it every time someone says it.

Muskrat dove deeper than anything else and barely made it back. That tiny handful of mud became everything.

The world was not given. It was held up, and carried, and grown from almost nothing, by the ones willing to try.