Turtle Island

Image from India of the world turtle

A pet peeve of mine is hearing people refer to Canada, or North America, as “Turtle Island.” This is supposed to be the traditional Indian name for it, and a nod to native people as the original owners of the land.

But this is absurd. The Indians would have had no concept of what a continent is. This is an arbitrary Greek geographical classification. They would not have known they were surrounded by seas. Nor, of course, would they have had any concept of Canada with its present boundaries.

Nor, as is often pointed out, did they have any concept of land ownership. Different bands roamed through the same territories, with no fixed address.

It is common around the world to imagine the ordered universe is borne on the back of a turtle—you see this in steles in China. The turtle with his hard shell, rising from the water, represents order, solidity, and life emerging from formless chaos. Not a geographical concept, a cosmological one.

Some native cultures may well have used this concept to explain the universe. But native cultures were diverse. There are other creation myths. For those who did, Europe and Europeans would have been just as much residents and owners of Turtle Island as the next tribe—or their own.