World On The Turtle's Back Short Story

Have you ever wondered how Native Americans believe the world came to be? Both stories include the elements that make the world balanced. The stories “World on the Turtle's Back” and “The Menominee” both include the importance of nature and animals. Also, their beliefs on what makes things good and evil. Finally, they include how the gods created man, woman, and earth. While some differences between “World on the Turtle’s Back” and “The Menominee” are obvious, the similarities are salient. To begin with, there are multiple shared features between the two stories, the first noticeable similarity is that they both include nature and animals. In other words, they both have a setting in nature and both include animals as the main characters in the stories. For instance, “the creatures of the sea came to her and said that they would try to help her,” (Iroquois 9) is an example of animals trying to help the fallen woman. For the rest of this story, the animals were always there for the woman as she created her own world on the shell of the turtle. Likewise, “Bear and

“These two brothers, as they grew up, represented two ways of the world which are in all people.” “They called them the straight mind and the crooked mind.” (Iroquois 18) These quotes simply explain that the brothers were both good and bad and this balanced the world. For example, one brother made the deer, and the other made the mountain lion which killed the deer. But in this case there was always more deer to maintain everything balanced. Similarly, “some of these spirits were benevolent, but many were malevolent.” (Hoffman 2) “Good Spirit realized that the Menominee were afflicted by hardship and disease from the malevolent spirits.” (Hoffman 5) This explains that there was good spirits that brought good things to the tribe, and there were bad that did harm to them which in the end maintained the Menominee