Native American Origin Stories I::

Native American Accounts of Origins

The Sioux scholar, Vine Deloria JR, has called the Bering Strait migration theory "scholarly folklore" on the part of scientists. He has stated that many Native American people are opposed to the theory because it contradicts traditional sacred and historical knowledge - that is, it does not reflect any of the memories or traditions passed down by the ancestors over many generations. Native American oral traditions tend to give quite different accountings of human origins on the American continent, ones that link particular groups with particular regions, in evolving and often multilateral creative processes. Oral traditions do not seem to be confused as to where and when particular Indian nations emerged. In fact, stories abound across the Americas of humans being birthed in the very bowels of the American continent, emerging as particular tribes at particular sites and then radiating outwards. Indeed, some Native Americans observe that migratory routes between Asia and America could easily have moved from east to west.

Caves feature widely in Mesoamerican origin belief. The first Nahua people, for example, were believed to have emerged from beneath the ground at a place called Chicomoztoc, or "the place of the seven caves". Some scholars have linked Chicomoztoc to an area in Arizona and the Nahua to the prehistoric Anasazi people of the southwestern United States. An Inca origin myth has the ancestors of the Inca emerging from a group of three caves near the old capital of Cuzco, or 'Navel'.

According to a creation myth of the Hopi, humans entered the present or fourth world after having ascended through three lower worlds. They emerged through an opening called the sipapu, believed to be at the bottom of the Canyon of the Little Colorado in southwest United States. When they emerged, the ancestors of the four clans were told to walk to the four ends of the earth before they could return to the centre and settle in their homeland. They walked all over the Americas. When members of the Snake Clan stopped in the Plains of North America, they left their mark by building a large earth mound in the shape of a snake. There are some Hopi today who say that the great Serpent Mound in Ohio is this very same legendary mound of the Snake Clan. Today, such ancestral emergences and journeys are celebrated, often in secret, and often in kiva that represent the bowels of the earth and the sipapu opening to new life.

The Lakota Sioux also have a creation story that has humanity emerging from a magical underworld. In the bowels of the earth, they lived as prototypes of the buffalo and they had magical powers and spiritual natures. Then Iktomi, the Lakota trickster figure, coaxed a few of them out through a cave in the Wind Cave area, which is at the heart of South Dakota's Black Hills. They lost their sacred abilities and were forced to survive and then thrive in relatively harsh conditions.