Sky Woman

Attestation and variation

Sky Woman's fall is the opening event of Haudenosaunee cosmological tradition, recorded in detail by J.N.B. Hewitt (Tuscarora) in Iroquoian Cosmology from Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk tellers, and by Arthur C. Parker (Seneca) in Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923). Tellings agree on the core shape, a woman falls from a torn-open sky, is slowed by waterfowl, and is set on a turtle whose back grows into the earth, but differ on why she fell (an uprooted tree, a jealous husband, curiosity about the hole of light), which animal succeeds at diving for the mud that becomes land, and other particulars. This site follows Hewitt and Parker in treating these as genuine regional and individual variants rather than errors to be corrected into one master version.

Grandmother of the Twins

Sky Woman's daughter is born on the new earth, and that daughter, in most tellings, dies giving birth to twin sons, Sapling and Flint, whom Sky Woman then raises. This detail, that the Twins are her grandsons rather than sons, is consistent across the Parker and Hewitt recordings, though different tellers give the daughter different fates and different explanations for how she conceived.

Not a dated story

Haudenosaunee tradition presents this account in the present tense, as an ongoing description of how the world came to be, not as a chronicle with a year attached; this site follows that framing rather than assigning it a calendar date.