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The World On The Turtle's Back: The Story Of Corn And Medicine

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Comparison and Contrast of Native American Creation Stories
The purpose of this paper is to highlight the key similarities, and difference between two Native American stories of how the world and its inhabitants came to be. These two stories are “The World on the Turtle’s Back,” and “The Story of Corn and Medicine.” These stories come from the Iroquois and the Cherokee people respectively, and are their creation stories. “The World on the Turtles Back” tells of a pregnant woman who was pushed from the heavens by her husband. When she fell she was helped by the animals of the world below, a world of water. She asked the animals to bring her mud from the bottom of the water and when one did, she placed the mud on a turtles back and began to walk around. In turn, it grew into the Earth. After the Earth had grown, she sowed plants she had clutched when she fell. She lived in this world and later on she gave birth to a daughter. Even later the daughter matured and she meets and unknown man, shocked by the sight of another person after being isolated for so long she faints. The man then pulls two arrows from his quiver and places them on the …show more content…

A small beetle goes to the bottom to retrieve a piece of mud. That mud, then grows into the Earth, which is suspended by ropes which are foretold to break one day. When the mud had dried the animals came down and put the sun into the sky, and were told to stay awake for seven days. Only the owl and panther and a few others stayed awake, so they were able to see in the night while the others slept. The same thing happened to the trees and that’s where evergreens come from. Later humans came and they reproduced so quickly it seemed they might not survive but they did. Later there seemed to be less and less room for the animals, so they decided to create the diseases people suffer from

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The differences between light and dark, good and bad, are blurred in the Iroquois Creation Story. The narrator captured two different views in this story, blurring the line between what is considered right and wrong. The Iroquois Creation Story does not have just the black and white, but also the gray areas as well. It makes readers question what is really good and what is bad. The overall use of light elements gives the story a light feel, but also has a dark undertone when looked at closely.

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How the World Uniquely Begins Native American myths and the Christian Bible both offer stories about how the world began.. In “The Earth on Turtle’s Back” and Genesis 1, both tales have similar values and ideas. These two stories compare in that both tell the importance of water, the fact that Earth came out of the water, and the existence of supreme beings; in contrast, each story has a unique idea of how the world came into being. “The Earth on Turtle’s Back,” a story from the Onondaga tribe, an original Native American group, is a myth which relates a story about the beginning of the world. Water is below the Skyland and it becomes an issue when the Great Tree is uprooted.

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In the World on the Turtle´s Back the Iroquois wanted to emphasize how there was a Sky World, with people that had extravagant beliefs that explained how good and evil balanced everything in their life. This peculiar place had different gods, like Iroquois. They believed in weird thing for example they believed that a Great tree was the center of their universe. The Great Tree wasn’t a habitual tree, it was huge and had been in that place forever. In this Sky World, there was this woman that seemed to break the rules and desire things that are off limit.

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