Creation Myths & Fables

“WHAT IS THE MYTH? A HISTORY OF THE TIME WHEN MEN AND ANIMALS WERE NOT YET DIFFERENT.

SOMETHING THAT TELLS US A LOT ABOUT HOW DIVERSE PEOPLE THINK OF HUMANITY AND ITS RELATION TO ANIMALITY.”

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

Creation stories, fables and myths we are taught shape our identity and how we approach the world. They tell us how we should relate to the environment around us and who we are in the universe. In this section, you can find a collection of stories from around the world.

About the H’mong: The H’mong are an indigenous group from the mountaineous regions of southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. It is true that their original home is the Huange He (Yellow River) basic of central China. They were slowly driven southward and marginalized by the expanding population of the Han Chinese.

A very long time ago, the whole universe turned upside down. The earth tipped up, and the sky rolled over, and the whole world was flooded with water. All living things were killed, except one brother and his sister, who had run and taken refuge in an unusually large wooden funeral drum. The brother and sister married each other and lived together as husband and wife. Later, they gave birth to a child. This child was like a round smooth stone. They cut the round egg-like child into little pieces. Then they threw the pieces in all directions. Two pieces fell on the goat house and these became the clan Lee. Two pieces fell in the pig pan and became the clan Moua. Two pieces that landed in the garden turned into the clans Vang and Yang. This is how they founded all the Hmong clans. Each clan is intrinsically linked with another living being.

Source: Johnson, C. and S. Vang. (1992). Myths, Legends and Folktales from the Hmong of Laos//Dab Neeg Moog. Saint Paul, MN: Linguistics Department, Macalester University.

Story: The creation of the 18 H’mong Clans
- H’mong People from Southeast Asia

Anishinaabe (other variants include Anishinabe, Anicinape, Nishnaabe, Neshnabé and Anishinabek) refers to a group of culturally and linguistically related First Nations that live in both Canada and the United States, concentrated around the Great Lakes. Anishinaabe translates as “Beings Made Out of Nothing” and “Spontaneous Beings.”

When the Earth was young, it had a family. The Moon is called Grandmother, and the Sun is called Grandfather. This family is basis of all creation in the universe. This family was created by Gitchi Manitou, the Creator. Earth is said to be a woman. She preceded man and her name is Mother Earth because all living things live from her gifts. Water is her life blood. It flows through her, nourishes her, and purifies her.

Mother Earth was given Four Sacred Directions – North, South, East, and West. Each direction contributes a vital part of her wholeness. Each direction and all things on Mother Earth have physical powers and spiritual powers.

When she was young, Mother Earth was filled with beauty. The Creator sent his singers in the form of birds to carry the seeds of life to all of the Four Sacred Directions. Life was spread across the land. The Creator placed the swimming creatures in the water. He placed the crawling things and the four-legged animals on the land. He gave life to all the plants and insects of the world. All parts of life lived in harmony with each other on Mother Earth.

Gitchi Manitou took the four parts of Mother Earth and blew them into a Sacred Megis Shell. From the union of the Four Sacred Elements and his breath, man was created. It is said that Gitchi Manitou then lowered man to the Earth. Thus man was the last form of life to be placed on Earth. From this Original Man came the Anishinaabe people. This man was created in the image of Gitchi Manitou. Man was part of Mother Earth. He lived in brotherhood with all life that surrounded him.

Story: An Anishinaabe Creation Story
- The Anishinaabe people from Canada

The Maasai tribe are an indigenous ethinic group in Africa of semi-nomadic people. The tribe originated north of Lake Turkana, north-west Kenya, in the lower Nile Valley and nowadays they are located in Tanzania and Northen Kenya. Their way of life is deeply interwined with their cattle heards.

Enkai, creator of the Earth, used to live on the planet together with human beings, until the day he chose to rise to the sky bringing all the cattle with him. This caused a problem in the long run, as animals needed to graze grass to get their nutrients. Enkai then decided to send the animals back to Earth, and he did so by making bovines and ovines slide along the branches of some trees ending up on Earth. The animals were entrusted to the care of the Maasai, who have taken care of the cattle for Enkai since then.

The tree used by Enkai to make the animals come down on Earth is the Ficus Natalensis locally known as Mutuba. This tree is sacred to the Maasai for this reason.

The Maasai believe the bovines are a direct link between them and Enkai.

story via talkafrica.com

Story: The Creation Story of the Maasai People
- The Maasai Tribe, East Africa

The Potawatomi are an Algonquian Native American people of the Great Plains, upper Mississippi River, and western Great Lakes region. Their name is a translation of the Ojibwe word “potawatomink,” meaning “people of the place of fire".

The Patowatomi creation story starts with a Skywoman falling down from Skyworld through a hole in the sky.

The animals see the shaft of light from the hole, and they see that Skywoman is falling towards the water. Her fall is broken by a flock of geese that see that she is in danger. The geese hold her up on their wings until they can decide what to do next. Far below, a giant turtle offers to let her rest on his back. The animals can see that the woman needs land to live on. With the help of several animals, mud is retrieved from the bottom of the waters so that land can be built on Turtle’s back. Skywoman is so grateful for the help of the animals that she begins dancing her thanks. As she dances, the land spreads all across the turtle’s back. As Skywoman fell, she grasped a bundle of seeds and roots in her hands from the Tree of Life. She plants these seeds in her new home. Soon plants, trees, and all manner of living things grow. This collective effort of geese, Skywoman, the turtle, the animals, and the riverbed brought about life on Turtle Island.

Story via Kaitlin Curtice

Story: The Creation Story
- The Patowatomi People

The Hawaiian language had no written form. Instead, histories were passed down orally through songs, chants and dance. An important chant, called the Kumulipo, records the Hawaiian view of the creation story.

According to Kumulipo, in the beginning there was utter darkness inseparably connected to an invisible intelligence. This darkness is Papahānaumoku, the mother of Gods, the Earth and the underworld. And then there was the creative light from Wakea or sky father. Together, Papahānaumoku and Wakea created a universe of opposites, light and darkness, land and sky, different yet equal to each other. They had a daughter, Hoʻohokukalani, which literally means the creator of the stars. Wakea had wandering eyes, and desired his daughter Ho’ohokukalani. Together, they gave birth to Kalo - who sadly was an unformed fetus born prematurely. They buried Kalo into the earth, and from this grew a Taro plant.

This odd couple had another child, Haloa, who was healthy and strong. Haloa became the first man on the newly formed earth, and was the first Ali'i Nui - or high-ranking chief - and the ancestor to all Hawaiian people.

But what could men eat? As the story goes, the Taro plant that grew from his deceased brother was a bulb-like root that was starchy, similar to potatoes and yam. Taro became the main sustenance to feed the first man Haloa and the rest of the human race and it's what the Hawaiians ate as a main part of their diet. Consequently, the Taro plant is highly respected in Hawaii, as a living symbol of the origins of humankind.

Story: The Kumulipo: Ancient Hawaiian Creation Legend
- Hawai

The Tibetan Plateau spans about 2.5 million km2 and over a quarter of China's territory. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpa, Tamang, Qiang, Sherpa, and Lhoba peoples and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han Chinese and Hui people. Tibet is the highest region on Earth, with an average elevation of 5,000 meters. The highest elevation in Tibet is Mount Everest, Earth's highest mountain, rising 8,848 m above sea level.

For a foolish official to speak skillful words is as difficult as for lightning to split a lump of bronze.
Tibetan Proverb.

Once upon a time there was a very poor man, with nothing much to eat and very little to wear, who made his living by hunting. One day he went out to hunt and traveled and traveled up hill and down. At last he came to the top of a mountain, hungry, tired and thirsty, as he had had nothing to eat all day. He stood still a few minutes thinking and wondering what he would do.

Looking around he saw a valley far below with a cold stream of water flowing through it. Starting down, he made him a cup of a leaf as he went, came to the stream, dipped his leaf full and started to drink it. Just as he was ready to swallow it a big raven flew by and with his wing struck the cup from his hands. The hunter thought it was an accident, so dipped another drink, when the old raven knocked it from his hand again.

Then he began to be angry at the bird, when he dipped the third time and the raven knocked this out of his hand. He said angrily, "All right, I'll fix you," drew his bow and shot the raven dead.

When the bird was dead the man began to wonder why he didn't want him to drink the water. "Perhaps I had better not drink now, but I'll go to the head of the stream and see where the water comes from." He went a short distance and found that the stream issued from the mouth of a great snake, and looking along the banks he saw many skeletons of birds and animals that had been drinking the water. Then he grieved greatly because he had killed the raven that had tried to save his life.

This story is part of the Tibetan Folktales unit. Story source: Tibetan Folk Tales by A.L. Shelton with illustrations by Mildred Bryant (1925).

Story: How the Raven Saved the Hunter
- Tibetean People

i grew giant

by Selina N. Leem

LAKWE
MEANING: “HELLO,” “I LOVE YOU,” AND “YOU ARE A RAINBOW.”

Into the horizons we marched
Children with skinny, gangly limbs
Each tiny step on the reef
That comes out of hiding
During low tide
A warrior determination our ancestors
Would have sang their praises for
For our home
For our country
Us little warriors will save
Each of us with corals in our hands
Spread out into a long horizontal line
Our front to the roaring waves
Our back to our lamooran
Our land
We put the corals into the shallow water
And we went to get more
Grow little ones
Grow corals
We tell them
We read that corals grew towards the sun
Grow little ones
Be the giant we need you to be
In the wildly adventurous minds of a child
They would grow to be giants
Giant barriers for our home
Day after day
We would go to the ocean side Our horizon
Check all the corals
Have they grown?
Little hands picking them up
“Hmmm this seems bigger. Yes we are saved.”
Each year, we saw the corals less
The waves grew bigger
My uncle's house got torn down
They ran out with their screeching baby
Their belongings swallowed by the ocean
The day our smiles cracked
Our seawalls cracked
Savaged down to broken pieces of hope and fear
Our hope crumbled down with our fortress
Our fear rose with each rising wave
Night after night
With each high tide
But people forget,
the media turns a blind eye too
That in a state of anger, fear, and panic People act
We do not flee
We act
We will not flee We will act
Because
with each rising wave
Is our rising resilience
And sense of urgency For justice
For home
For us
Marshall Islands
The weeping home to
67 nuclear bombs
Marshall Islands
So damn strong
Absorbing each blow by blow by blow by blow by blow by blow
Marshallese, us,
Learned to live,
To live with the dire impacts
Our DNA riddled with poison
To be passed onto our children and their children
Lands were lost
People never to return
Displaced
Marshall Islands
Home to a dome suffocating with nuclear waste
That leaks day by day into the land
To the rising water
But we lived, we are surviving Most importantly, we stayed
We stayed
Let history repeat itself
Pillaged by nature angered by
Humanity’s lack of morals
Misplaced sense of responsibility
Greed to take more than they deserve
You, higher ups, blinded by your wants
Jimma told me,
“Selina your needs will last you a lifetime.
Your wants.... Will not.”
So tread carefully
No, it is not in 2040, 2050 No
Yesterdays and
Today
Now is what I need you to respond to
I’ve seen bones of loved ones Spilling out of broken graves
Torned by the angry waves
Nightmares haunt me at night
And follows me throughout the day The terror I feel
Act now
I stand here
Naij jutak ijin
For my people, my home
Nan armej ro ao, nan ijo jiku
Our corals never grew to be the giant we needed them to be
To protect us from the rising water
But I did
To 5’3
The giant to protect my home from the waves of deniers
And work hand in hand with those fighting for our planet
Together, each of us
Like the tiny corals my friends and I put out in a horizontal line
Near the outer reef
Grow tall
To stay
To be giants for our planet

From 1946 to 1958, the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls (Marshall Islands), forcing these communities to evacuate their lands. Now, 60 years later, the Marshall Islands is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, by 2035 the Marshall Islands would be partially submersed due to sea level rises. You can read more about this topic here.

Indigenous Listening

“Humanity is at the edge of an abyss.” António Guterres, UN secretary general 

Can we halt what many scientists call the beginning of the Sixth Mass Extinction? To answer this question, we must now look to the communities that colonisers sought to “civilise”. 

Indigenous Communities represent 5% of the global population but their land contains 80% of biodiversity. The language we use to describe our world informs our relation to it. Over and over again, indigenous words reveal a cosmology that marks nature as sacred and our relationship with it as reciprocal, as seen here in these Indigenous Listening Sessions, which were organised for COP26: the Real Climate Leaders, and with HRH (now King) Charles. Here we present the recordings of both sessions.

INDIGENOUS LISTENING SESSION

with Chief Ninawa Huni Kuin, Agnes Leina, Mindahi Bastida, Cristiane Julião Pankararu, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, Tom BK Goldtooth, Selina Leem

WORLD INDIGENOUS LEADERS IN DIALOGUE

with King Charles, Sonia Guajajara, Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, Tom BK Goldtooth, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz