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.

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.