Thoughts on the Importance of Creation Myths

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, from the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer begins her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, by comparing the Potowatomi and Christian creation myths. Kimmerer positively contrasts Skywoman, who builds the Earth from music and faith and communion with animals, with Eve, whose only described accomplishment is failure and exile. Not only does Skywoman promote harmony with nature, Kimmerer believes, but Eve encourages attitudes of fatalism and misogyny.

I won’t say Kimmerer is wrong, because she isn’t. But the more versed I become in comparative religion, the more I believe her correctness is conditional. The Skywoman narrative describes the creation of a people defined by their relationship with one place and the land. Adam and Eve describes a people defined by exile and return. The Hebrew Masoretic Text is bookended by Israel’s exiles in Egypt and Babylon, and their respective returns.

Religious absolutists generally take their creation myths seriously, and one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest controversies has been how to teach, for instance, science in light of seven-day creationism. But I contend that religious creation myths are only literally true for those who have forgotten why those myths were written. Creation myths don’t pretend to accurately describe how the world came into being; rather, they describe their authors’ identity.

Adam and Eve are doomed to wander, not because their creation myth is fatalistic, but because Israelite history is one of resident aliens amid occupying nations. Arguably, Adam and Eve, who are vaguely defined characters, are less important as creation archetypes than Cain. Christian interpretations of Cain and Abel characterize Cain as the antagonist. But perhaps Cain, both exiled and protected by God, is the actual Israelite ancestor.

The Native American creation myths I’ve read generally spotlight either an Animal, such as Coyote in many Southwestern myths, or a woman, such as Kimmerer’s Skywoman, or the Corn Woman common in many narratives. Either an animal spirit, a maternal spirit, or both, brings forth reality. Humans, in these stories, are afterthoughts. Our world isn’t a habitation, as in Abrahamic religions, but a responsibility, one which White invaders habitually shirk.

While American schools cope with how, and whether, to teach Abrahamic creationism, the real mythological battle takes place in history classes. Politicians and educators feud mightily over how to teach American history, because the narrative we learn in public (state) schools—the only narrative some students ever learn—defines how we receive ourselves as a nation. The official history has become a creation myth.

The frontier as depicted by Currier and Ives (click to enlarge)

This isn’t metaphorical, either. We literally learn a sanitized version of history because, like Eve and Cain, the narrative is about us, the living. Where I live, in Nebraska, we learn just-so stories about plucky settlers who walked overland, Conestoga wagons in tow, to claim and domesticate an unsettled prairie, pulling crops from uncooperative soil. Agrarian industriousness is Nebraska’s state religion, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books our scripture.

Except.

This holy writ is compromised from the beginning. As LSU historian Nancy Isenberg writes, the original sodbusters who “domesticated” this soil were despised, and were chased off the land once it became lucrative for Back-East speculators. Conestoga settlers and their immediate heirs, the cowboys, were valorized in American mythology only once they were safely dead and couldn’t challenge our beliefs about our ancestral greatness.

Besides which, as Yale historian Greg Grandin writes, White settlers didn’t “domesticate” the prairie. My ancestors only crossed the frontier line years after the U.S. Cavalry cleared Native Americans off the soil. As I've noted elsewhere, Wilder’s Little House books weren’t really history, they were Libertarian myth-making, heavily rewritten by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. As myth-makers have always known, true virtue always exists in a distant, morally scrubbed past.

Though the White sodbuster narrative contains nuggets of truth, it’s as much mythology as Zeus on Olympus. That’s why American history classrooms have become as hard-fought as Martin Luther pleading his case before Cardinal Cajetan, because the “history” we’re fighting over is American state religion. We aren’t fighting over how to teach facts, because facts are ancillary. We’re fighting over which story we use to define our shared national identity.

Perhaps that’s why progressives struggle in this debate. They believe they’re laying out “facts,” when what the debate needs is a counternarrative, an alternate myth. Historian James Loewen notes that American classroom history is presented as an unbroken arc from triumph to triumph, which precludes both backsliding and penitence. What Americans need isn’t facts, it’s a more nuanced story, a creation myth that includes room to admit mistakes and learn.