Great Turtle
Also known as: Turtle Island (the land itself)
Mythological Narrative
The turtle on whose back Sky Woman is set as she falls from the Sky World, and whose back, built up with earth by other animals, becomes Turtle Island, the Haudenosaunee name for the continent.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## Attestation
The Great Turtle appears in Haudenosaunee cosmological tradition as recorded by Hewitt and Parker: after Sky Woman falls and is slowed by waterfowl, the animals of the primordial waters debate who can bear her weight, and the turtle volunteers his back; another animal (muskrat, in many Seneca and Onondaga tellings, though other tellers name other divers) succeeds in bringing up mud from the depths to spread across the turtle's back, which grows into the earth. "Turtle Island" remains a name Haudenosaunee people and other Indigenous nations across North America use for the continent today, a living use of the story's image, not only a historical reference.
## Variation across tellers
Which animal dives for the mud, how many attempts fail before one succeeds, and exactly how large the resulting land becomes vary between the Seneca tellers Parker recorded and the Onondaga and Mohawk tellers Hewitt recorded. This site does not resolve those differences into a single version.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Great Turtle.
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