The Turtle and the Great Spirit

It goes something like this…

The Great Spirit wanted to create a world with animals and people, so he asked the Turtle to come up to the surface so he could build on the turtle’s back. But he wasn’t able to finish, so he just had the mountains and the valleys and the land created. So he went to sleep, and he dreamed of the animals and people crawling and walking and flying on and above the earth and he didn’t like what he saw in his dream… but when he woke up and discovered that his dream had populated the earth, it had turned out to be good…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “This is something I researched for a school project a while ago.”

Other information: “It’s a message to young children of the tribe—I don’t remember which tribe it is, maybe Abenaki? to pay attention to their dreams, because that is what created them.”

This is another example illustrating how the story within the constructed-truth of a myth doesn’t matter as much as the lessons embedded in, setting up some moral value for people, in this case, listening to dreams because a dream is how they originated.