Plot/Theme

Question 0

Cause and Effect Relationships (one effect that brings about the other)

Answer 0

Cause: falling, the woman clutches at roots
Effect: seeds in her fingernails

Cause: arrows- one sharp and one blunt placed across the daughter’s body
Effect: birth of twins- right hand and left handed twin, truth and lies

Cause: unnatural birth (Mother)
Effect: mother is dead

Cause: animals molded out of clay
Effect: competition- prey and predators

Cause: duels
Effect: day and night. Right= (God) the ruler of the day “master of life” & “great creator” “he holds up the skies”; Left= ruler of nighttime (devil)

What Exists
What Caused It to Be

The Earth
The muskrat, the Earth-Diver, brought soil from the bottom of the ocean up the woman who fell from the Sky-World. She put it on the turtle’s back and circled it like the sun until the earth began to grow.

Useful Plants
The woman planted the roots she had clutch between her fingers when she fell from the Sky-World; roots and plants grew out of the Sky-World root. The woman lived off of the roots and plants. The woman walked as the sun goes to keep earth growing.

From the daughter’s grave all plants grew. Her head grew the corn, the beans, and squash and her heart grew tobacco.

Soil
From the bottom of the ocean

Rotation of the Earth
The woman and her daughter walked as the sun goes, moving in the direction that the people still move in the dance rituals.

Right and Wrong
The two brothers: the righted-handed twin was good and made good choices and the left-handed twin was devious and made the wrong choices

Straight-mind and the Crooked-mind; upright and devious; right and the left

Animals
The twins had creative powers. They took clay and modeled it into animals and then gave these animals life.

Humans
Right-handed twin made man out of clay and baked him in a fire

A Balanced Ecosystem
The right-handed twin and the left-handed twin contended (competed) with one another. Thus, making a balanced world.

Day and Night
The right-handed brother is the day and the left-handed brother is the night.

The Moon
The grandmother’s head watching over her favorite grandson, the night.

Question 1

Characters in

“World on a Turtle’s Back”

Answer 1

• A man/husband in Sky-World (minor/static character)
• His wife (main/dynamic character)
• Birds of the sea
• Fish and creatures of the deep
• Daughter
• Man with arrows
• Twins

Question 2

Themes

Answer 2

–an Iroquois myth which explains how the WORLD was created
–expresses a Native American ideal of people living in HARMONY with nature
–the world is made up of forces that seem to be in OPPOSITION to one another
–these opposites are needed for BALANCE and harmony

Question 3

Balance: what creates it?

Answer 3

• meat eaters and plant eaters (vegetarians)
• medicine and disease
• population control (humans and animals)
• world needs “good” and “evil” to function properly

Question 4

Why did the “evil” twin create the medicine? Why did the “good” twin kill his brother and grandmother?

Answer 4

Nothing is ALL “good” or ALL “evil”, people are a mix of good and bad.

Question 5

What is the role that “all creatures” play in this myth? What does this suggest about the Iroquois’ attitude toward nature?

Answer 5

• nature helps and supports the woman
• animals are wise and resourceful
• nature is revered and respected
• woman takes care of nature and ensures that plants grow

Question 6

What did you learn form the Iroquois’ beliefs and culture?

Answer 6

• the world needs balance
• respect for nature
• see themselves as part of nature, do not have a dominion over it, they are part of it and must act to maintain a right relationship with the world around them, not superior to it,(circle of life)
• nature is sacred
• the human and non-human are seen as a sacred whole
• the ocean always existed; eternal and god-like; unknown

Question 7

Three details to explain how

the gods are like humans in this myth?

Answer 7

a. The woman at the beginning of the story
acts like a pregnant human when she craves
strange foods (lines 8–9).
b. The woman’s husband, who is a god, acts
like a human when he knows that getting roots
from the tree is wrong but does it anyway
(line 20).
c. Like a human, the man shows fear of the
unknown when he breaks a hole in the floor of
the Sky-World (lines 22–23).
d. The woman acts like a human when she is
curious at what lies beneath the hole in the
floor of the Sky-World (lines 24–26).

Question 8

What does the tale reveal about the culture from which it came?

Answer 8

• It’s all about harmony – always two sides to every story.