The World on Turtle's Back

Like many myths, “The World on Turtle’s Back” lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Most straightforwardly, it is an attempt to explain the state of the world as humans know it. This entails providing origin stories not only for the world’s physical features—stars, oceans, plants, etc.—but also for its moral character, or rather the lack of it. By the time ordinary humans appear in the story, things have already gone awry due to the actions of Enigonhahetgea, who is the source not only of malice but also of various physical realities that humans experience as “evils”—e.g., landscapes and animals that can hurt or kill a person.

Through the brothers Enigorio and Enigonhahetgea, the myth dramatizes The Nature of Good and Evil and the associated dichotomies of order versus chaos and light versus darkness. Enigorio is the “good mind” and a symbol of light, order, creation, and strength through kindness. Everything he does is for the good of the Earth. He creates light itself by using his mother’s body and transforming it into a source of life-sustaining warmth and power. He creates greenery and game animals to sustain the humans he made from the earth. He feels that the natural state of the world should be a calm balance under the sun and moon. Enigonhahetgea (the “bad mind”) feels that darkness—a threatening state for humans—is the natural way of things. He is also fundamentally destructive: Whatever his brother has created, he attempts to throw into chaos. He does not want rolling hills but craggy steeps. He does not want horses but poisonous reptiles. At the same time, he envies his brother’s creative abilities. When Enigonhahetgea learns that his brother has created humans, he wants to make them too. He initially fails, but in a show of brotherly mercy, Enigorio steps in to help Enigonhahetgea by breathing life into his clay creations. As a result, they co-create a new entity: a human that possesses the most knowledge yet of both good and evil, perhaps explaining the existence of evil impulses among humans.

Cusick was Christian, and there are numerous points of similarity between his version of the Haudenosaunee creation story and the biblical account of Genesis. In particular, Enigorio’s creation of humans is virtually identical to the story of Adam and Eve: In both cases, the creator crafts a male and female from earth, “breathes” life into them, and gives them sovereignty over their environment. The order of creation is also roughly the same, with the advent of light, water, plants, and animals all preceding the arrival of humans. With that said, creation stories from around the world often feature similar plots. Sibling rivalry, for example, is a common mythological motif, with the fraught relationship between Enigorio and Enigonhahetgea recalling not only the biblical story of Cain and Abel but also the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, a god of chaos who usurped his brother Osiris’s throne.

The dense symbolism of myths like “The World on Turtle’s Back” also invites the application of different critical lenses—e.g., feminist theory—to search for less overt meanings. The text begins with a woman about to give birth. As she falls from above, the creatures below work to provide her a place to land: The humans, creatures, water, and land are all symbolically interdependent in order to begin the world. However, the woman herself displays no agency or decision-making during her time in the story. She becomes impregnated through immaculate conception, so has chosen no sexual partner. She does not decide to descend to the lower world for her birth; she either falls accidentally or is pushed. She cannot birth her two boys by normal means, as one of them decides to exit her body through the underside of her arm. The only other hints readers have about her personal experience are that she is pleased to land upon the turtle, that she is “overtaken by her travail” (19), and that the birth is painful. The woman dies soon after the twins are born, and the new babies do not even need her for milk to grow and survive. Yet despite having no agency or voice, the woman is the catalyst for the rest of the story: The twins could not be born without her, and the good twin uses parts of her corpse to create the rest of the universe. This connects the woman to a range of Earth Mother figures, whose life-giving and life-sustaining abilities reflect women’s childbearing capacity. Nevertheless, it is notable that Sky Woman’s act of creation coincides with her personal destruction, after which she is supplanted by a male creator; there is a clear distinction between Passive Versus Active Creation, and the split falls along gendered lines.

Lastly, it is impossible to divorce Cusick’s version of the myth from its historical and colonial context, particularly given its inclusion in a work that also depicts the Haudenosaunee in conflict with other peoples. The rising tension between the brothers leads to Enigonhahetgea challenging his brother to a winner-takes-all fight. Scaled up, this totalizing mindset suggests the expansion of the white settlers who found it necessary to remove Indigenous peoples from their lands. Cusick uses two brothers to represent the idea that humans are all kin. However, where one “brother” prefers peace and sharing, the other seeks control through violence. The final conflict occurs solely due to Enigonhahetgea’s insistence. In Cusick’s version of the creation story, the good mind wins the conflict by crushing the bad mind into the ground.