Turtles All the Way Down

A Hindu traditional image of the cosmos

I was upset, unreasonably, by a recent bit by the National Post on “Turtle Island.”  Because they were saying what I’d been saying for years. And no one has been listening. I want credit!

It was about “Turtle Island” supposedly being the traditional name for North America among the native peoples, the “First Nations.” There are problems with that idea.

First, the native people would have had no idea what a continent was, let alone having a name for the one they were supposedly on. Micmac living in Nova Scotia, say, would have had no idea there was a vast ocean five thousand kilometers to their West, nor one as distant to their North, or to their South. Nor would they have imagined this was of any significance. Continents are a fairly arbitrary Western idea, a cultural construct. Why, for example, are North and South America separate continents? More or less because Teddy Roosevelt dug the Panama Canal. In much of Europe, the Americas are still not considered two continents, but one. And what is the sense of seeing Europe and Asia as two continents instead of one? Why do the Urals split continents, but not the Himalayas or the Andes? 

When some ancient culture refers to living on a large island –as they all do -- they are conceiving of all creation, the ordered cosmos, as an island, not this or that body of land. And surrounded not by physical seawater but by the “sea” of chaos. Ancient Greece conceived it so, Ancient Mesopotamia conceived it so, and so did the Old Testament’s seven days of creation. “Turtle Island” is not North America, or even planet Earth, but the cosmos, the material world.

And according to the native people, there ain’t necessarily no turtle, either. There were thousands of different ethnicities wandering about Canada, each with their different creation myths. Perhaps one or two involved a turtle; perhaps none.

The “Turtle Island” concept as supposed native name for North America comes from Gary Snyder, West Coast Beat poet and environmental activist, who used it as the title of a poetry collection in 1974. He claimed without evidence that it was from Native American culture. He really got it from India, and from the Western philosophical tradition. It is an old Hindu idea that the world is supported on the backs of elephants who stand on a turtle. This image, misunderstood to be literal, has been preserved since the 19th century by European/American philosophers to be mocked as an example of primitive thinking and of infinite regression: “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Probably most people today claiming to be “First Nations” genuinely believe this was their own ancestral belief. How would they know? They got that idea from the TV, like the rest of us. They grew up in the same culture as the rest of us. “Native wisdom” is all a childish fantasy from the hippie movement of the 60s.