Flint vs Sky Woman's Daughter

The hard-minded twin grandson of Sky Woman, born in a way that costs their mother's life, who in Haudenosaunee tradition shapes the earth's difficult features in contest with his brother Sapling.

In most recorded tellings, Flint is born after his brother Sapling in a way described as unusually violent, some tellers say he forces his way out rather than being born in the ordinary manner, and this birth costs their mother's life, which is why Sky Woman raises the Twins herself. From there, Flint shapes the parts of the world that make life harder: difficult terrain, dangerous animals, or winter, depending on the teller. Hewitt's and Parker's recorded tellers do not agree on how the brothers' rivalry ends, and this site does not present one outcome as final.

The daughter born to Sky Woman on the new earth, mother of the twins Sapling and Flint, who dies giving birth to them; in many tellings the food plants grow from her grave.

Sky Woman is already pregnant when she falls, or gives birth soon after, and her child is a daughter who grows quickly on the new earth. Most recorded tellings do not give the daughter a personal name, and this site does not supply one. How she conceives the twins is one of the points on which tellers most disagree: in the Seneca retelling Parker summarises she marries Ga'ha', the gentle wind, while other versions recorded by Hewitt name a different visitor, or leave the father mysterious.