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| Creation |
When I was a young girl my grandmother told me the story of the creation of the earth. This is what my grandmother told me. All the people of the world came from one small hole in the earth. As they emerged from this hole a mockingbird bird, who sat at it's edge, named the people and gave them their languages. It would say "you shall be this"and "you will speak the tongue of that". And so it was. The earth was still covered in darkness. One day the women joined together with the mocking bird to change this. They made a great ball of silver and called it the moon and a greater ball of fire and called it the sun. The mocking bird sang out "epelliarmus!" and they threw them both far into the darkness and the earth was transformed. The sun's great fire provided warmth and light. No longer did the people of the earth have to huddle together for warmth. The men decided to break up the people separating the diversity the mockingbird had made. The men decided that each group of similarly different people should compete in a race to find were the sun rises. When the sun's origin was discovered, by the quickest group, a meteor shower would rain in the sky signaling each group to stop and live in the spot they had traveled to. The vastly different peoples chose vastly different paths to find the sun. The women of the people of white skin however, where very impatient and had very poor endurance. Because of these things they pleaded to the mocking bird for her magic. The mocking bird rubbed flakes of skin from their bodies and sans out "expelliarmus!" and the flakes became horses. The horses were fast and carried the first to the sun. The meteors showered in the sky. Seeing this the groups of peoples stopped and live in the spots they had traveled to. This, my grandmother said, is why people live where they do. Bibliography www.lehigh.edu/~amy2/folklore Mythology, folktales and creation stories of native Americans. subtitle folktales. Author Kelly Green. Page was created for English 2-14 at Lehigh University. Last updated 3/17/00. For my web assignment I retold Kelly's version of a Hopi Native American creation story from the viewpoint of a young girl with a few embellishments of my own |
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