Sapling vs Sky Woman's Daughter

The good-minded twin grandson of Sky Woman, who in Haudenosaunee tradition shapes the world's fertile land, food plants, and easy rivers, opposite his hard-minded brother Flint.

What English retellings often call Sapling or Skyholder is given different names by different Haudenosaunee nations and tellers: the Mohawk name Teharonhiawagon ("He Holds Up the Sky") is recorded by several 19th- and 20th-century sources, while Arthur C. Parker's Seneca tellers use Djuskaha and other terms. This site uses Sapling and Skyholder as the most common English forms while naming the Mohawk term as one nation's own name for him, not the only correct one.

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.