Sky Woman
Also known as: Awenhai
Mythological Narrative
The woman who falls from the Sky World through a hole torn open when a great tree is uprooted, and is caught and set on the back of the Great Turtle, whose back becomes Turtle Island.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## Attestation and variation
Sky Woman's fall is the opening event of Haudenosaunee cosmological tradition, recorded in detail by J.N.B. Hewitt (Tuscarora) in *Iroquoian Cosmology* from Onondaga, Seneca, and Mohawk tellers, and by Arthur C. Parker (Seneca) in *Seneca Myths and Folk Tales* (1923). Tellings agree on the core shape, a woman falls from a torn-open sky, is slowed by waterfowl, and is set on a turtle whose back grows into the earth, but differ on why she fell (an uprooted tree, a jealous husband, curiosity about the hole of light), which animal succeeds at diving for the mud that becomes land, and other particulars. This site follows Hewitt and Parker in treating these as genuine regional and individual variants rather than errors to be corrected into one master version.
## Grandmother of the Twins
Sky Woman's daughter is born on the new earth, and that daughter, in most tellings, dies giving birth to twin sons, Sapling and Flint, whom Sky Woman then raises. This detail, that the Twins are her grandsons rather than sons, is consistent across the Parker and Hewitt recordings, though different tellers give the daughter different fates and different explanations for how she conceived.
## Not a dated story
Haudenosaunee tradition presents this account in the present tense, as an ongoing description of how the world came to be, not as a chronicle with a year attached; this site follows that framing rather than assigning it a calendar date.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Sky Woman.
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Sapling
The good-minded twin grandson of Sky Woman, who in Haudenosaunee tradition shapes the world's fertile land, food plants, and easy rivers, opposite his hard-minded brother Flint.
Great Turtle
The turtle on whose back Sky Woman is set as she falls from the Sky World, and whose back, built up with earth by other animals, becomes Turtle Island, the Haudenosaunee name for the continent.
Dew Eagle
The great eagle of the upper air in Seneca tradition, who lives above the clouds, gathers dew in its feathers, and watches over the people, coming down when calamity threatens.
Earth Holder
The chief of the Sky World and husband of Sky Woman, who in many tellings uproots the great celestial tree, opening the hole through which she falls.