Turtle Island

 

Turtle Island (the cosmos) as traditionally depicted in India. The Chinese use a similar turtle image.

Contrary to popular belief, Canada’s “First Nations” did not themselves traditionally claim to be aboriginal to the lands where they currently live. No doubt many do now, but probably only for political reasons.

Origins, a Canadian history textbook, justifies the claim with a Blackfoot creation myth, that has mankind created by the god Napi on Turtle Island.

The problem here is the common modern misinterpretation of “Turtle Island” to mean North America.

If the myth is ancient, those who composed it would not have such knowledge of geography. They would not understand “Turtle Island” to mean one of seven existing continents. To them, it meant “the cosmos,” the ordered universe. The story means only that man appeared in the physical world.  The waters surrounding it are, just as for the Chinese or the ancient Greeks, the waters of chaos.

Vine Deloria, the celebrated Sioux historian, mocks the idea that Indians had no recollection of coming from elsewhere: of some tribes, he claims, “they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River, and so forth.” Father LeClercq discovered such a legend among the Micmac. Alexander Mackenzie discovered a legend among the Chipewyan (Dene) that they had come from afar across a “vast lake.” And of course the Inuit/Eskimo retain ties across the Arctic.

In any case, virtually no aboriginal group, excluding those in the Pacific Northwest, has remained in the same general area even since the beginning of European settlement. They were, after all, nomadic cultures. The Blackfeet, who have the Napi creation legend cited above, are known to have arrived on the prairies in the 18th century, coming from an earlier home in the northeastern United States. They are less aboriginal to Canada than the French or English.

Almost certainly, all Indians are, like all European Canadians, originally immigrants from somewhere else. And in recent times.