Tabaldak

Also Known As: also Dabaldak, Tabal-dak, Tobaldak; “the Owner” or “the Lord”, a title of Gici Niwaskw, the Great Spirit
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Abenaki Mythology, Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The Owner made the world and everything living in it, then withdrew from it, remaining benevolent, abstract and almost entirely absent from the stories told about the land afterwards.
Role in Mythos: Creator of the world and of every living thing, who delegated the shaping and taming of that world to the culture hero Gluskabe.
Relation to Humans: The Owner is benevolent but does not deal with people directly, is rarely personified, and has no cult, no idol and no myth cycle of his own. Early missionaries used the same name to translate the Christian God, and most Wabanaki people today regard the two as one and the same.

Somewhere in the soil of Vermont and New Hampshire lie the broken pieces of the first people. They had been cut out of stone, and their hearts ran cold, so the maker took them apart and scattered them across the country and started again with wood. That is the version of the story that reached English, and it has been repeated so often that it is worth saying up front how thin the paper trail behind it actually is.

Start with the name, because the name is the whole problem and the whole interest. Tabaldak is not really a name. It is a title, and a workaday one: the Owner. Abenaki and Penobscot speakers built the word on a verb about owning and ruling, the same root that surfaces in the Catholic prayer books printed for the mission at Odanak in the 1830s, where “thy kingdom come” arrives in Abenaki as something closer to “may your owning arrive”. The being who carries the title is Gici Niwaskw, the Great Spirit, and the Wabanaki languages have several other ways of saying the same thing: Niwaskowogan, the Great Spirit; Weli-Niwesqit, the Good Spirit; Keluwosit, the one who is good. Every one of them is a description rather than a personal name. That is not sloppiness. It is the point. You do not hand a private name to the Owner of everything.

What the Owner did is easier to state than what the Owner is. In one Abenaki telling there was no sound and no colour anywhere until he filled the empty earth with light and living things. He called Tolba, the Great Turtle, up out of the water to make the land, and raised the mountains and the valleys along the ridge of the turtle’s back, and set the clouds above his head. Then he slept. While he slept he dreamed people and animals, every kind of them, and when he woke the dream was standing there in front of him, breathing.

No source describes what he looks like. Not one. There is no carved figure, no mask, no painted hide, no borrowed animal shape, and the oral record does not even settle on a gender, since the older tellings assign him none at all and the masculine pronoun crept in later with English. He is a presence with no outline, which is precisely why the accounts of him are so short and why the interesting material clusters around everyone else.

Because the real work of making the country habitable was subcontracted. That job belongs to Gluskabe, who is not a god but a culture hero and a trickster, and who tempers the winds, cuts wild animals down to a manageable size, releases the water that a greedy monster has dammed, and generally cleans up after a creation that arrived unfinished. In the version that still lives in Wabanaki hands rather than in encyclopedias, Gluskabe is also the one who makes the people. He shoots an arrow into a brown ash, the trunk splits along its straight grain, and men and women step out of the wood singing and dancing. Ash is not a decorative detail here. Pounded ash is the material of Wabanaki basketry, still worked by a couple of hundred artisans in Maine alone, and the story says in the plainest possible way that the people and the tree came out of the same wood.

Then there is the exception. The one thing the Owner is said not to have made is Odzihozo, whose name means “he makes himself from something”, and who according to the popular account assembled himself out of the dust left over from creation. Odzihozo came up incomplete: body and arms, but legs too short to stand on. So he dragged himself. He grabbed handfuls of sand and heaped them into mountains and slopes, and the furrow his backside left behind him filled with water and became the rivers. He turned where he sat and worked the ground down as deep as he could reach, and that hollow became Bitawbagw, the lake in between, which the maps now call Lake Champlain. Pleased with it, he changed himself into stone and stayed, a grey hump in the water off Shelburne Point that Americans named Rock Dunder and that is visible from the Burlington waterfront on a clear day. For hundreds of years Abenaki people crossing to Grand Isle left tobacco and a pipe on him so he could have a smoke and the wind would stay down.

Here is the part that ought to be said out loud. That Odzihozo narrative was recorded properly, in Abenaki, from Ambroise Obomsawin at Odanak in February 1968, who had it from Theophile Panadis, and it does not mention the Owner anywhere. It opens by saying only that very long ago there lived a being who made the mountains and the riverbanks, the rivers and the lakes. No creator hands him his dust. No creator watches him work. The tidy arrangement in which Tabaldak makes everything except Odzihozo comes from a much shorter and much later chain of English-language summaries, and the stone people with the cold hearts come from the same place.

His powers are total and almost entirely unexercised. He owns and made the world, the light in it, the animals in it and the people in it, and having made them he leaves them alone. There is no story in which he walks into a village. He gives no weapons, sets no tests, fathers no heroes, and takes no offerings, which is why the tobacco goes to a rock in a lake instead. His limitation is the flip side of his scale: a being who is everywhere and belongs to no particular place cannot easily be told about, and a tradition that will not personify him has very little to say. When Jesuit and later Protestant translators needed a word for God, Gici Niwaskw was already sitting there, doing exactly that job, and it slid into the Bible without friction. Most Wabanaki people today consider the Great Spirit and the Christian God to be the same being, and the word for Owner has never had to change its meaning to keep up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tabaldak in Abenaki mythology?

Tabaldak is a title for the Abenaki creator, and it means “the Owner” or “the Lord”. The being it refers to is Gici Niwaskw, the Great Spirit, who made the world and all living things. Tabaldak is one of several descriptive titles used instead of a personal name.

Is Tabaldak male or female?

Neither, originally. Older Abenaki tellings do not assign the Creator a gender at all, and the masculine pronoun attached later through translation into English, which forces a choice the Abenaki language did not require. This is why Tabaldak is often described in modern sources as androgynous.

What did Tabaldak create?

Tabaldak created the world and everything living in it. In one Abenaki account he filled an earth that had no sound or colour with light and life, called Tolba the Great Turtle out of the water to form the land, raised mountains and valleys along the turtle’s back, and then dreamed people and animals into being while he slept.

What is the difference between Tabaldak and Gluskabe?

Tabaldak is the Creator; Gluskabe is the culture hero who finished the job. Gluskabe is not a god. He tempers the winds, tames animals, frees dammed water and makes the world habitable, and in the tradition still carried by Wabanaki basketmakers he is the one who releases the first people from a brown ash tree by shooting an arrow into it.

Did Tabaldak create Odzihozo?

The popular English account says Odzihozo was the one being Tabaldak did not create, assembling himself instead from leftover dust. The Abenaki text recorded at Odanak in 1968 tells a different story, or rather leaves one out: it says simply that a being lived long ago who made the mountains and the rivers, and it never mentions the Creator at all.