Earth-maker myth

An elaborate Earth-Maker Story of Creation is a myth that comes from the Native Americans of California, also called the "Story of Creation." This myth describes Earth-maker creating day and night, land, water, and all living things. Men and women were created out of soft clay into which Earth-Maker "breathed life".He also created the seas with his tears. The creation begins:

“In the beginning there was no land, no light, only darkness and the vast waters of Outer Ocean where Earth-Maker and Great-Grandfather were afloat in their canoe... Earth-Maker took soft clay and formed the figure of a man and of a woman, then many men and women, which he dried in the sun and into which he breathed life: they were the First People." (Kroeber 1968:62).

The entire narrative is printed in the book Almost Ancestors: The First Californians by Theodora Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer. The (hardback edition) of the book does not identify the ethnic group who believed in this myth, or an exact narrator.

Sources

    Kroeber, Theodora, and Robert F. Heizer. Story of creation, printed in Almost Ancestors: The First Californians. New York: Sierra Club-Ballantine Books, 1968, page 62.


    gollark: I failed to come up with a non-politically-charged example so I'll just use a horribly politically charged one: people arguing over statements like "abortion is murder" is pointless, as you're basically just arguing over whether you get to associate it with bad things or not, instead of getting to the actual underlying questions about, say, rights of unborn babies.
    gollark: It doesn't help your argument, or help people more accurately think about the actions, or whatever.
    gollark: I am talking meta-level here; I'm not saying "culling is unhelpful" but "it doesn't actually help anything to try and shove things into the culling box".
    gollark: It might not be *technically wrong* by a strict definition to say that trying to improve health standards and whatever to reduce population growth is culling, but it's not... helpful? As in, it doesn't really matter whether the relevant actions fit into [bad and emotionally charged category], but whether they're actually bad.
    gollark: "Culling" is generally meant to mean something more like actively going out and killing people.
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