Haudenosaunee TraditionWorld-Bearer
Great Turtle
Also known as Turtle Island (the land itself)
- the earth
- endurance
- the created world
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.
About Great Turtle
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Indigenous nations across North America use for the continent today, a living use of the story's image, not only a historical reference.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.
Worship and cult
Temples, festivals, and practices recorded for Great Turtle
No specific ceremony is described in the public sources this site draws on.
Family
Family tree
Great Turtle's parents, consorts, children and rivals, as recorded in the atlas.
In the atlas
Where Great Turtle appears
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Arthur C. Parker, Seneca Myths and Folk Tales
- J.N.B. Hewitt, Iroquoian Cosmology, Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports 21 and 43
Cite this page
No publication date is recorded for this page, so each citation uses n.d. and today's date as the access date.
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Parallels are editorial comparisons across traditions: a shared role does not, by itself, establish a shared origin.
Family relationships come from the atlas's kinship records. Ancient sources often disagree on divine genealogy.
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