After a day of muskrat trapping in the frozen and snow covered marshes with Dene elders and youth, an elder then told us the story of how the world was made, which I summarize here: the world was covered in water and all the animals grew tired of swimming so they elected different animals to dive down to look for land, the final diver was muskrat who emerged with a bit of soil in his paw which hare ran around on until it flattened into the land we were camping on that day. The elder emphasized that this little animal we were currently eating was in fact the boss of the land. I have relayed this story at the AAR before when talking about personhood: muskrat as a sentient, communicable, personable being with whom Dene people have a relationship, experienced through being on the land. For this presentation, I delve deeper into the story and examine human relationships with muskrat as a story of ecological political organization with implications for sovereignty, which speaks to the AAR presidential theme of freedom. This paper demonstrates that in removing the embedded abstractions that serve colonial possessiveness in terms religion, myth, and creation story, a material reality shared between humans and animals emerges that is necessarily decolonial.
The earth-diver story—whether the hero is muskrat, crawfish, an insect, or different species of duck or fish—has been told by elders to young people across a great stretch of time and location. Martin, discussing ancient Hopewellian earth mound structures, says the earth-diver is “probably among the most widespread of all Native American creation stories, and one of the oldest” (26). Napolskikh maps instances of earth-diver stories across North America and northern Eurasia, positing it began in the upper palaeolithical era in Northern Asia, traveling both west to northern Europe and east to North America.
Some versions of the story link to more stories and recurring characters, creating more space for misguided interpretation. Ridington applies an Eliadian analysis suggesting a shamanic dive to a lower world by muskrat is coupled with a shamanic flight to an upper world by swan, creating an axis-mundi at the center of up and down, mythic time and the now, sacred space and the trap-line. Lincoln, weighing in on the debate between Eliade and Smith on which came first between chaos or order, says that creation stories did not originate to make abstract theological statements. Rather, Lincoln argues creation stories establish an ideological consensus that the old political order was chaos, while the new political order of the creation story brings order to the world. The Haudenosaunee Skywoman versions also connect upper and lower worlds, as Skywoman falls from the sky and helps muskrat in spreading the soil on the turtle's back. Rather than an abstracted Eliadian sacrality, Skywoman introduces many important elements that are experienced in Haudenosaunee lives, including agriculture relations and a matriarchal political organization.
Weatherdon discusses the earth-diver when applying criticism developed in Native American Studies that problematizes normative “settler colonial modes of relation” (11) to animals. She tells an Anishinaabeg version wherein the doodem (totem) system is developed from the council of beings who participated in muskrat and hare’s re-creation of the world. Unlike scholarship which interprets the system “in metaphoric terms” as a projection of “social concepts onto animal archetypes,” Weatherdon says the doodem is politically activated as a “means of political and cultural resurgence.” Doodem, the earth-diver muskrat, and other animal stories are invoked by various Native American Studies scholars in “forging pathways for decolonization and rebuilding worlds anew.” These pathways, this decolonization, this new world is most importantly a material world centered on a material politics of earth and actual living beings.
The council of beings exhibit a level of what Graeber terms “baseline communism” wherein beings form community by each giving according to their abilities and receiving according to their need. Viewed through a traditional Dene lens, where this labor is necessary for survival, muskrat’s heroism is respected but he is not owed anything, including in the versions where muskrat does not survive, sacrificing himself to save the others. Sacrifice does not lead to debt, however, as Graeber shows us that “It’s only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt.” As the Earth-diver story predates the introduction of empire, cash, and credit, the “myth of primordial debt”—with its abstractions that obscure ecological relations and reinforce colonial hierarchy—does not apply. Deloria cautions against interpretation that leads one to “the abstract structure of physical reality”, but rather, interpretation was to “find the proper road” (46). The earth-diver story presents an opposing ecological, political, and economic theory to that of empire and capitalism, and is thus a fitting story for decolonization.
After listening to the elder relay the earth-diver story in our tent, we returned to the marsh and our traps. Marshes are in-between states: not lake, not land, but an environment always in transition. Just as the earth-diver story describes an environment in transition, so is the role of beings in this new land. Deloria says “The world is constantly creating itself because everything is alive and making choices that determine the future” (46). Looking at the muskrat “push ups” of dirt in the otherwise flat frozen marsh, it dawned on me that muskrat is creating earth. Muskrat took this task upon itself and continues to work before our eyes, if we pay attention.
Citations
Deloria, Vine Jr. 2006. The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: the First 5,000 Years.
Lincoln, Bruce. 1999. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship.
Martin, Joel W. 1999. Native American Religion.
Napolskikh, V. V. 2012. “Earth-Diver Myth (А812) in northern Eurasia and North America: twenty years later.”
Ridington, Robin. 1990. Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology.
Weatherdon, Meaghan S. 2022. “Religion, Animals, and Indigenous Traditions.”
This paper examines the story of the animal earth-diver. Commonly called a creation story, or myth, the earth-diver motif appears among Indigenous peoples in North America, Siberia, and Northern Europe, nearly everywhere the landscape contains marshes. I examine an example of the earth-diver story among subarctic Dene people, of muskrat creating land in a water world by diving to find mud. It is tempting to call this motif religion and to abstract the story from its material reality and ecological, political, and economic implications for real people and real animals. When contextualized within a traditional Dene framework other elements of the story emerge; such as a rational examination of the natural world, and a political structuring of human relationships and ecology with animals and other other-than-humans, all of which inform a trans-species ethos and is a powerful articulation of sovereignty.