Sky Woman

Above this world there was another one, and in the middle of it stood a tree whose blossoms gave off light. No sun crossed that country and no moon rose over it. The fields, the lakes and the houses of the people who lived up there were lit by flowers.

A woman of that upper country was carrying a child, and she wanted something from the roots of the tree.

What happened next is told a dozen ways. Her husband dug at the roots to fetch her the medicine she asked for, and the ground caved in. The tree came up whole and left a hole where it had been standing. She leaned over the edge to look and lost her footing. She had already dreamed the fall and stepped in on purpose. She was pushed. The Wendat kept a telling in which she chased a bear into a pit after her dog and went down with the pair of them. Nobody agrees on why she fell. Every version agrees that she fell, that she was pregnant when it happened, and that on the way through the hole she closed her hand on seeds from the roots of the shining tree.

Below there was water and nothing else, cold and dark and busy with animals. Beaver, otter, loon, the ducks and the geese and the muskrat had the place to themselves. One of the birds looked up and saw a light in the dark, coming down and getting bigger. Several of them dove in fright. Then they came back up, because whatever it was would reach the water shortly, and it did not look like something that could swim.

The waterfowl went up together and locked their wings into a floor of feathers. They took her weight and brought her down the way a leaf comes down. A turtle rose under them and offered his shell, and they set her on it.

One after another the animals went down for mud. Beaver went and found no bottom. Loon went. Otter went. In the Oneida telling the ones who failed came back up dead with their claws open, and the last to surface was the muskrat, dead as well, his small fists shut tight around a few grains of earth. Someone pried them open.

She took the mud, patted it onto the shell, and began to walk, singing, turning always to her left. The shell widened under her feet. The grains multiplied into wet soil, the soil into a shore, the shore into a country with a horizon on it. Then she opened her hand and let the seeds fall, and they rooted where they landed.

The child she was carrying was a girl. The girl grew up on the new land with her mother’s knowledge of both worlds and one instruction, which was not to walk west. She walked west. A wind came, and a cloud with the shape of a man in it, and she fainted; when she woke there were two crossed arrows lying across her stomach and she was carrying twins.

The boys argued before they were born. One came out the ordinary way. The other refused, forced his way through his mother’s side, and killed her doing it, which left Sky Woman holding two grandsons and digging a grave. Corn, beans and squash grew from the head of that grave. Tobacco grew over the heart. Wild strawberries came up at the feet. Haudenosaunee gardeners still plant the first three together in a single mound and call them the Three Sisters.

The oldest written account of any of this is not Haudenosaunee at all. It is Wendat, taken down in 1636 by a French missionary living among them who kept measuring what he heard against Genesis and finding it wanting. In his report the woman is Ataentsic, the twins are Iouskeha and Tawiscaron, and their quarrel is settled with a stag’s antler against a handful of wild rose hips. Tawiscaron lost. He ran, bleeding, and where his blood struck the ground it hardened into the flint the Wendat struck for fire and went on calling by his name. The same account has Ataentsic become the moon and Iouskeha the sun, both of them turning up uninvited at village feasts, and Iouskeha insulting his own mother from behind a disguise and then blaming a horned spirit for it.

Later English versions carry mission-era paint. The luminous tree becomes an apple tree, the chief of the sky world becomes a Great Spirit, one twin becomes Good and the other Evil, and the story picks up a moral it never needed. The older and in-culture tellings are less tidy about it. Flint is not wicked. He is winter, night, stone and death, and the world does not work without him.

Her power is not the sort that usually gets called power. She fights nothing and rules nothing. She arrives with her fist shut, and what is inside it is the difference between a world of water and a world a person can stand on. The dancing is the working part: the land does not appear all at once, it spreads at the speed of a woman walking a slow circle and singing, wet grit under her feet, the smell of new mud coming up off a shell that keeps getting wider.

What she cannot do is make earth out of nothing. She needs the animals, she needs a turtle willing to hold still, and she needs a muskrat willing to drown for a handful of silt. She cannot go back up, either. There is a hole in the sky above her and no road to it. Some Iroquois versions give her almost no time on the new land at all, killing her at the birth of the twins the way the Wendat kill her daughter, and others let her live long enough to quarrel with her grandsons and back the losing one. The stories are close to silent about how she looked. What the animals saw coming down was brightness with a woman somewhere inside it, bright enough to send a loon under. Painters put her in deerskin with her hair loose down her back, and the old tellings neither confirm it nor argue.

When she does die, one of the twins throws her head up into the night. She is there now. People across the Confederacy call her Grandmother Moon, and she keeps the count of the months and pulls the water up and down the shore of the land she made.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sky Woman?

Sky Woman is the first mother of Haudenosaunee and Wendat tradition, a being from a world above this one who fell through a hole in its floor and landed on the back of a turtle. The earth grew from a few grains of mud spread on that shell. Her Wendat name is Ataentsic; Mohawk, Cayuga and Seneca speakers know her as Atsi’tsiaka:ion, Awenhai and Iagentci, among other names.

How did Sky Woman create the earth?

She did not create it alone. Water animals dove to find soil and the muskrat drowned bringing up a handful of it, which she patted onto a turtle’s shell, and then she walked in a slow counter-clockwise circle, singing, until the shell and the soil spread out into a country. She had fallen holding seeds taken from the roots of a luminous tree in the sky world, and she scattered those on the new ground.

Why is North America called Turtle Island?

Because in this story the first dry land is a layer of mud spread on the back of a great turtle who offered his shell to hold Sky Woman. The land grew outward from that shell. The Wendat name for themselves, Wendat, carries the sense of people of the island, from the same account.

What happened to Sky Woman’s daughter?

The daughter was born on the new land, walked west against her mother’s instruction, and was made pregnant by the Spirit of the West Wind, waking with two crossed arrows on her stomach. She bore twin boys, one of whom forced his way out through her side and killed her. Corn, beans and squash grew from the head of her grave, tobacco over her heart, and wild strawberries at her feet.

Is Sky Woman the same as Ataentsic?

Yes. Ataentsic, also spelled Aataentsic, is the Wendat name for her, and it is the name under which the story was first written down in 1636. The Haudenosaunee tellings use different names and differ in the details, most importantly over whether Sky Woman herself or her daughter is the mother of the twins.

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