# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/Myths of Creation, Heaven, and Hell

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MYTHS OF CREATION, HEAVEN, AND HELL
BELIEFS touching death, the spirit-world, and hereafter vary with the different tribes of Canada, and some of them have undergone change from contact with missionaries. Often the merging-point of the old and the new belief is impossible to descry, while in the case of the teacher who came across the Pacific in a copper canoe, preached morality to the shore tribes, was crucified, arose, resumed preaching, and was after-ward obeyed, we find a blending of the Christ his-tory and the Hiawatha legend.
The Nootkas in their version of this tale do not include either crucifixion or resurrection. On the contrary, they assume that the killing of the teacher was a good thing, because they secured his copper canoe and paddles, and the use of copper they learned at that time. Some of the great wooden images in their houses represent this teacher who promised a future life. Sheets of copper with eyes painted on them have been seen at Fort Rupert, and are thought to symbolize the sun. They are regarded with peculiar reverence.
​In a Chippewayan legend the first country was that through which the Copper-Mine River flows, and the ground was strewn with copper. A bird created this country,—a vast bird whose glance was lightning, and thunder the shaking of his wings. He created the earth by touching the primal ocean. The first men wore out their feet with walking and their throats with eating.
Some pretty traditions have grown from the im-planting of a new faith in imaginative soil. The loose quartz crystals found near Quebec are said to be Christ's tears, wept upon the earth for the sins of its people. The northern lights, which among ungospelled tribes are the spirits of dead friends dancing, the brighter the merrier, have turned to angels, throwing down snow to cool the parched in hell. An Indian who was discovered on all-fours in a wood near Wardsville, moving softly over the snow, was at first suspected of mischief; but he was only waiting to see the deer fall on their knees before the Great Spirit, as he had heard they did on Christmas night.
Biblical teaching and native myth are queerly mixed in the Ojibway tale of the beginning of the race, which they say occurred at Torch Lake, or Lac du Flambeau. The Great Spirit had made the vegetation about this water, and was surprised when he saw a creature wallowing through the reeds in the form since taken by men, but covered with shining scales like a fish. This object went ​mooning about in such a mournful fashion that the Manitou, taking pity on him, made a woman, also covered with scales, and breathed life into her. He told her to wander by the shore, and presently she would find something she would be sure to like. The man found her while she slept, and, rousing her, took her to walk, showing where roots and herbs grew that were good for food. Her name, she told him, was Mani (Mary?). He took her to his spacious lodge and went with her through his garden, warning her not to eat fruit from a certain tree that grew there. When she was alone, a handsome young Indian emerged mysteriously from the tree and urged her to pick and eat the fruit, adding that it made fine preserves. She ate, and persuaded her husband to do the same. The scales fell from their bodies, and they drew back among the bushes in shame. Then Gitche Manitou drove them away, so that they could no longer eat fruits, but had to live on meat. In his wandering the first man found a great book that began speaking to him. It told him to do so many things that he could not remember half of them, and he threw it away, whereupon he found on the earth a book in sign language that covered only two squares of bark. This sign-book gave no laws, but told much about foods and remedies, so that in a few years his children became not only hunters but medicine-men. Manitou repented his anger and restored the people to his ​love again, ordering his own son, or agent, Manibozho, to make a paradise for them in the west, where the world ended. It is a beautiful country, and there, when they die, they battle and hunt no more, but live on sweet, shining mushrooms, play on the flute and drum, and dance all day. To reach this land they travel the Milky Way, the path of souls. They need bows or guns on the journey, but none after they reach paradise. If on the way they stop to eat a strawberry that a tempter offers to them, they fall from the bright bridge and become frogs as they touch the earth.
Among the Blackfeet the sand-hills of the plains, near the United States boundary, were the shadowland, the ghost-place, the limbo of recently departed souls. Our shadows are held to be actual souls. Dead persons sometimes live again as animals, and owls are the ghosts of medicine-men. In the Red River country the dead hover about in the form of eagles, but some of the Siwash believe they take the forms of birds more foul of habit, that lurk over the place of their demise for four days. In order to keep them at a distance the survivors burn old moccasins that make a fetid smoke. Some of the far northwestern Indians believed that hell was in the ice, for it is natural that the cold of the Arctic winter should, to them, stand for the extremest suffering, but some of the Eskimos put the place of future punishment beneath the sea, and heaven above, with plenty of walrus. Their ​hell is like Dante's: of successive cellars, and the deeper go the damned the colder it grows. The wickedest go to the bottom. The Eskimos, by the way, are advanced beyond certain primitive beliefs, and the new woman is no stranger to them. The Sun was a youth to whom the Great Spirit gave wings that he might chase the Moon,{mdash}}a winged girl. Aoguta and her daughter Sedna are among their chief deities. The Hudson Bay Eskimos tell us that the first man sprang to being in a beautiful valley, and married the only girl on earth, after he had picked her as a flower. They were the parents of all mankind. The Assiniboins believed that hell was in the Great Selkirk glacier. The unspeakable majesty of this ice mass and its mountain setting to them was merely dreadful. The Chippewas held that the wicked were immersed to their chins in water, and that they could not leave it, although, to add to their discomfiture, the happy hunting-grounds were in their view.
Like the Greeks, many of the Indians peopled the woods, hills, and waters with gods and spirits, who were amiable or devilish according to their environment and according to the nature of the imagination that evoked them. They personified many of the stars and mountains; a comet was a winged creature breathing fire; the morning star was the Early Riser; the Dipper was the Seven Persons; the moon was the Night Red Light; the Milky Way was the Wolf Road. Spirits of places ​sometimes spoke to those who asked advice of them, and while La Salle's boat, the Griffin, was in process of building at Cayuga Creek, he went to Niagara to consult the oracle at Devil's Hole. A voice spoke from it warning him to abandon his voyage on pain of death by treachery. He met that fate. The Nipissings were stigmatized by the Jesuits as "the sorcerers," and Lake Nipissing was beset by devils and magicians.
The mountain in British Columbia, or Washing-ton, on which life was preserved during the great flood is impossible of identification, but deluge legends pertain to several of the peaks. The Takullies say that the earth-builder was a muskrat, which, diving here and there in the universal ocean, brought up mud, and spat it out in one place until an island was formed, which grew to be the earth. After it had been peopled a fire swept over it, destroying all the surface save one mountain that held a deep cave, and in this hid one man and one woman until the earth was cool again, when they emerged and repeopled it. This myth is oddly repeated in Paraguay and Bolivia. Alaskan Kaiganees say that the big canoe in which a good man was saved in the time of a great flood rested on a mountain just back of Howkan, and one old fellow claimed, a dozen or two of years ago, that he had a piece of its bark anchor-rope. The crow that flew out of the ark still nests in the crater of Mount Edgecumbe, near Sitka, and catches whales. On Forester Island ​they say that towns were destroyed by pest and fire for their wickedness, and that a woman who looked back in the act of flight was turned to stone, her lodge and that of her brother being also changed to rock at the same moment, and you see them in the river to-day,—warnings to obey the Great Spirit when he speaks. A legend of a collision of the earth with a fiery dragon (a comet?) is found among many of the Algonquins.
Among the Dog-Rib Indians of the Barren Grounds there is a belief in one Chapawee, a mischief-maker who plunged the earth into a long period of darkness by catching the sun in a noose and tying it fast, so that it could not rise above the horizon. Does this typify the Arctic winter? After a time he sent animals to gnaw the snare asunder, and they were burned to ashes. Does this clothe in parable the outbreak of a volcano, or the dissipation of the ice in the Arctic summer? Belike it is neither, for many of the traditions are but old wives' tales, without a meaning. Men, measurably civilized, lived in North America twenty thousand years ago; and some of the myths like the foregoing are thought to preserve the memory of the last great glacier, that covered the continent down to the fortieth parallel, burying beneath it the cities of this ancient people.
One of the traditionary characters among the western tribes, from the Blackfeet to the Aleuts of Alaska, was Old Man. He varies in power and ​importance in different parts of the country, but among the Aleuts he has many of the attributes of the Great Spirit, and is a secondary god. He played a Cadmus part, dropping stones on the earth, that presently sprang up in human form. Some that he flung into the air became birds, those that he cast to a distance were quadrupeds and serpents, and those that he tossed into the sea turned to fish. Thus was the world peopled. The Blackfeet say that Old Man acquired a wife, a daughter, and a son-in-law. The latter was not worth much. There arrived in the lodge a young man who had sprung from the blood of some game they were preparing for the pot, and this young one and Old Man attempted to stop the thieving and abuse of the son-in-law. They could not, and as this objectionable person had an especially violent tantrum on a certain occasion, the good ones shot him dead, and there were peace and plenty afterward. All of which has been construed as a day and night myth, a summer and winter myth, a sunshine and storm myth, a famine and plenty myth. Maybe.
While some ethnologists claim that the Micmacs are the Skraelings of the Northmen, the first known explorers of our eastern coast, others relate the western tribes to the Asiatics. There are Greek words in Central American tongues, likenesses to Greek, Indian, Assyrian, and Egyptian architecture in Mexico, Central America, and Peru, pictures there of animals more common to Asia than to this ​continent, round towers in the West like those of Ireland, and faiths and myths among the aborigines resembling those of the Old World.
The proud Abenskis, of eastern Canada, say that they are the original people; they acknowledge no ancestry; they built villages, and believe that "after making them and their land the Great Spirit made the rest carelessly." They were related in marriage to Pamola, the terrible One who lived in Ktaadn, and whose son killed game and men by pointing at them. On midsummer day," the day of sparkling fire," they built a large fire and danced about it—a Phœnician custom, the fire representing the sun. This custom the Acadians modify in their "fire talk" on St. John's Eve, when the priest heaps fragrant boughs before his church and recites prayers as the flames crackle among them. So soon as this is seen the country glitters and the news goes round; for if a death has occurred the farmer dashes out his fire; if sickness, he lets it flicker and die; if all is well, it blazes jubilantly.
A theory that the northern Indians descended from Tyrians and Israelites who came over in 332 B.C. is based on the existence among those tribes of the deluge legend, that of the dove of discovery, and that of the ark of the covenant. The ark, which contains a shell that speaks oracles, understood only by the medicine-men, is never allowed to touch the earth, but is carried by the faithful into battle. When it is advanced among the enemy all ​rush to its safety, as the Scots pressed about the heart of Bruce when it was thrown among the foe, and as some tribes rallied about the heads of their chiefs when, after death, they were carried into the fight on poles, as standards. The exact whereabouts of this ark remains a mystery not to be revealed to the profane.
But most wide-spread of all beliefs among the red men of the north is that in Nanabush, Manahozho, Glooskap, or Hiawatha, who is buried beneath Thunder Cape, or "the sleeping giant," a basaltic uplift, thirteen hundred and fifty feet high, at the northwest corner of Lake Superior, and whose deeds of valor and charity are told in many tongues. Some say he was the statesman who federated the Six Nations and preached arbitration. He took on human form to benefit mankind, but often went away and dwelt with birds in a great space and great light. He came from the cast in a granite boat, with a woman who was not his wife, for he never took one. When on a later voyage he gave room in his boat to a woman of evil character—as was proved by the storm that arose about him—he sprang ashore, leaving her to drift about until she became a shark. Hiawatha figures sometimes as creator, sometimes as Messiah, sometimes as a Noah who was saved from the deluge, and who sent forth the bird called the diver from his boat, to learn if the earth was emerging from the waters. On their subsidence he became the father of a new race, and ​walked over all America. In some legends he is the Hare, and the Hare was the sun. His foe, the snake prince, the god of evil, whom he destroyed, has been thought to be a comet. Another foe, the giant frog, vast and cold, squatting over miles of plain, was the great glacier of the ice age. Believing that his father had killed his mother, he chased him to the shores of the Arctic sea. His brother, the Flint, he killed in fight, and the boulders on the plains of Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan were the missiles they hurled at each other. In the mission-yard at Victoria, on the North Saskatchewan, was a meteorite that Manitou—possibly Manabozho—had cast down, and the Indians believed that to move it would be to incur his hate, and bring upon them battle, disease, and scarcity of game. White men moved it, and, unhappily for those who had been inveighing against the superstition of the Indians, war, small-pox, politics, and famine quickly followed. In the east he was called Glooskap. Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, was his beaver-pond, dammed at Cape Blomidon, his throne; but when he saw that the pent waters were rising among the villages, to the alarm and distress of the people, he burst the rocks asunder, and swift tides now eddy through "the Gut." Here he fought and killed the Great Beaver, whose bones are the Five Islands, near Parrsboro', though this legend appears also at Sault Sainte Marie. Spencer's Island is his upset kettle. ​On Partridge Island he held a great feast with Kitpooseeagoono, and the pair of them ate a whale. Fragments of a great causeway of his building are seen in islands off the shore of the old maritime provinces. He was much in company with his uncle, Great Turtle, and shared many of his adventures. At one time, when he was not at hand, some hostiles caught the Turtle and condemned him to the stake. He rushed into the flames so eagerly that they pulled him out. Then they resolved to cut his throat, whereupon he seized a knife and hacked himself so fiercely that they disarmed him. Finally they agreed that he must be drowned, and this fate seemed to put him in terror, so that he caught at trees as they urged him on; but once at the water's edge the cunning fellow chuckled, dived out of sight, and so escaped. When the English came, Glooskap waded from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, and either freed his hunting-dogs or turned them to stone, that their cries might not betray the lodges of his people to the strangers. But the red men became evil after they had known the English, and Glooskap, with Great Turtle, entered his white stone canoe and sailed away to the west, singing—some say up the St. Lawrence; others say across the Great Lakes. All nature mourns his return, and the owl, the loon, and other birds and beasts found new voices on the night when he went away.