Nanaboozhoo

About Nanaboozhoo

Who Nanaboozhoo is. Nanaboozhoo, also spelled Nanabush, Nanabozho, Waynaboozhoo, and Nanaboojoo, is the central cultural hero of Anishinaabe oral tradition — the shared inheritance of the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Algonquin peoples of the Great Lakes region. He is trickster, transformer, teacher, healer, and flood survivor in a single figure. In the episode that names him 'Nanoo,' he appears as the protagonist of an Earth-Diver creation story in which the world as it was ends beneath water, and the world as it now is must be rebuilt from a single grain of mud carried up in the paw of a small, dying animal.

Parentage and siblings. In the narrative cycle recorded by Edward Benton-Banai in The Mishomis Book (1988) and by Basil Johnston in Ojibway Heritage (1976), Nanaboozhoo is one of four sons born to Winonah, a human woman, and Epingishmook, the West Wind — a manidoo, or spirit-being. His brothers are Mudjikiwis, Pukawiss, and Chibiabos, each with a distinct cultural role. His grandmother is Nokomis, who in many tellings is the earth herself, sometimes the moon, always the elder who raises him after his mother's death. This genealogy matters: Nanaboozhoo is half-human, half-spirit, positioned structurally between the Creator — Kitchi-Manitou, the Great Mystery — and the Anishinaabe people he teaches. He is not a god to be worshipped. He is an elder brother, a mediator, a teacher who learns by failing and then teaches what he learned.

The flood story. In the flood cycle, the Great Lakes region is overwhelmed by rising water. The details vary between tellings — in some versions the flood follows a conflict between Nanaboozhoo and underwater beings called the Mishebeshu or the water manidoog, in others it simply comes — but the structural outcome is the same. The land is gone. Only Nanaboozhoo survives, clinging to a floating log or a raft of sticks. Gathered around him on the log are the surviving animals: loon, beaver, otter, muskrat, and others depending on the version. The animals and Nanaboozhoo drift for a long time across the endless water.

The dive. Nanaboozhoo addresses the animals. The old world is gone beneath the water, he tells them, but somewhere below lies the earth. If even a grain of that earth can be brought up, he can make a new world from it. He asks for a volunteer to dive. Loon, the powerful diver, goes first — plunges deep, does not return for a long time, and finally floats up dead on the surface. Beaver, strong swimmer and builder, tries next. Beaver dives longer than loon and returns dead, with nothing in his paws. Otter tries and also dies. The large, capable, strong animals have all failed. Only little muskrat is left. Muskrat is small, not regarded as a great diver, and the other animals laugh when he volunteers. Nanaboozhoo does not laugh. Muskrat dives.

Muskrat's return. Muskrat is gone longer than any of the others. When he finally surfaces he is already dead — but clutched in his paw is a tiny grain of mud from the old earth. Nanaboozhoo lifts the mud from muskrat's paw. He breathes on it, or sings over it, or speaks to it depending on the telling. He places the mud on the back of the turtle who has offered her shell as the foundation of the new world. The mud grows. It spreads. The turtle's back becomes Mishiikenh-minis — turtle island — and from that island the continent now called North America is formed. The world that stands is the muskrat's gift, set on the turtle's back, made possible by the smallest and humblest of the animals rather than the strongest.

Why this shape of flood matters. The Anishinaabe flood is not Noah's flood. There is no righteous man chosen by a deity to survive a punishing deluge. There are no animals preserved two by two inside an engineered vessel. The flood is not sent as judgment, and it is not survived by rescuing a cross-section of the old world intact. The old world is simply gone. What is saved is one spirit-being, a handful of animals who volunteer, and — in the end — a grain of mud. The new world is built fresh on the back of a turtle who volunteered her body as ground. Reading Nanaboozhoo's flood through Noah's template flattens its distinct theological shape: world-renewal through humility and re-creation rather than world-preservation through righteousness and obedience.

The trickster dimension. Nanaboozhoo is not only a solemn creator figure. Large stretches of the cycle are comic. Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinaabe literary scholar, has argued across decades of work that Nanaboozhoo belongs to a trickster lineage that also includes Coyote in the American West, Raven on the Northwest Coast, Hermes in Greek myth, Loki in Norse myth, and Anansi in West Africa and the Caribbean. He boasts and is humbled. He lusts and is deceived. He tries to outwit animals and is outwitted. He gets stuck in hollow trees. He negotiates with his own body parts and loses. The pedagogical function of the trickster stories is not incidental — they teach by showing what goes wrong when the teacher forgets his place. In Anishinaabe epistemology, learning happens through watching the elder brother fail in a recognizable human way, then recover.

The transformer. Alongside the trickster stories are the transformer stories — the cycle in which Nanaboozhoo does the shaping work that makes the world recognizably Anishinaabe. He names the animals. He names the plants. He teaches humans which plants are food and which are medicine. He institutes the pipe ceremony and the sacred songs. He establishes the protocols of the hunt and the protocols of giving thanks for what is hunted. He sets the ethical frame within which the Anishinaabe understand themselves to live. Christopher Vecsey, in Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (1983), reads these stories as the charter literature of Anishinaabe culture: not metaphors for abstract lessons but the actual account of how ceremonies and relationships came to be.

Grandmother Nokomis. Nokomis, Nanaboozhoo's grandmother, is the figure who raises him. In some tellings she is the earth herself, having received her grandson from the sky or from the death of his mother in childbirth. She is the one who teaches him which plants are medicine. She is the one who warns him before his misadventures and consoles him afterward. Theresa Smith's The Island of the Anishinaabeg (1995) reads Nokomis as a structural counterweight to Nanaboozhoo: where the grandson moves, acts, errs, and transforms, the grandmother stays, observes, instructs, and endures. The flood story is often told in the mode of Nokomis recalling to Nanaboozhoo what happened and what it meant — an elder's account to a young descendant about the remaking of the world.

Kitchi-Manitou. Above Nanaboozhoo stands Kitchi-Manitou — the Great Spirit or Great Mystery — who is the source of creation but not a figure with whom humans negotiate directly. Nanaboozhoo mediates. He is sent or he volunteers. He is the figure through whom Kitchi-Manitou's intent becomes real at the scale of lived experience. Basil Johnston, in Honour Earth Mother (2003), emphasizes that this structure is theologically specific: the Great Mystery is not anthropomorphic, not to be petitioned as a person. Communication with the sacred moves through Nanaboozhoo, through the manidoog (spirit-beings), through plants and animals and ceremonies.

Oral tradition and Schoolcraft. The Nanaboozhoo stories were carried orally across centuries before they were recorded. The first substantial written recording was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (1839), compiled from stories told to him by his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft — herself Anishinaabe, daughter of an Ojibwe mother — and by her relatives at Sault Ste. Marie. Schoolcraft's rendering is partial and filtered through his literary tastes; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855) drew on Schoolcraft and famously conflated Nanaboozhoo with the unrelated Haudenosaunee statesman Hiawatha, a conflation still causing confusion. Even so, Schoolcraft preserved material that might otherwise have been lost entirely during the assimilation era that followed.

Suppression and survival. The US and Canadian governments spent roughly a century after Schoolcraft actively suppressing Anishinaabe oral transmission. Indian Residential Schools in Canada (1870s to 1996) and Indian Boarding Schools in the US (1870s to 1970s) explicitly targeted the intergenerational teaching of stories like Nanaboozhoo's. Children were removed from families, punished for speaking Anishinaabemowin, and taught to regard their own traditions as shameful. Michael Angel's Preserving the Sacred (2002) documents how Anishinaabe communities kept ceremony and story alive under these pressures — often by going underground, often at real risk. The survival of the Nanaboozhoo cycle into the present is not incidental; it is the result of deliberate effort by elders who kept telling the stories.

Modern transmission. Edward Benton-Banai, a spiritual leader of the Three Fires Midewiwin Society, published The Mishomis Book in 1988 as a framework for teaching Anishinaabe history and spirituality to younger generations. The Nanaboozhoo cycle sits at its core. Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe scholar from the Wasauksing First Nation, produced Ojibway Heritage (1976) and multiple subsequent works in the same project. Anton Treuer's Ojibwe Tradition and Culture and the ongoing work of the Mille Lacs and Leech Lake bands in language revitalization have kept Anishinaabemowin alive as the language in which the stories were first told. Michael Pomedli's Living with Animals (2014) reads the Nanaboozhoo cycle specifically through its treatment of animal persons — loon, beaver, otter, muskrat, turtle — as moral agents rather than narrative props.

Earth-Diver as a pattern. The Anishinaabe flood story belongs to a family of creation narratives called Earth-Diver myths, which anthropologists have documented across a wide band of northern North America and into Siberia. The Huron/Wendat and Iroquois tell of Sky Woman falling from the sky, with muskrat (or toad in some versions) diving to bring up the earth she will stand on. Algonquin peoples across the Great Lakes share closely related versions. The pattern is stable: an older world is lost beneath water, a humble animal dives and dies, and a small quantity of earth becomes the foundation of the new world on the back of a turtle. The Anishinaabe telling centers the cultural hero, Nanaboozhoo, where the Haudenosaunee telling centers Sky Woman, but the structural bones are shared.

Not the Abrahamic flood. Placed next to the Noah narrative or the Mesopotamian Utnapishtim and Ziusudra flood-survivor stories, the Anishinaabe Earth-Diver is a different theological shape. There is no divine decision to wipe the earth clean of human corruption. There is no chosen righteous family preserved to repopulate the world. There are no pairs of animals sheltered inside a vessel. There is no dove, no olive branch, no dry land emerging as the floodwaters recede. The flood is a pre-existing condition, not a punishment. The survivors are the ones who happened to be there. The new world is built, not restored. Theresa Smith argues that collapsing these differences in comparative survey work does real violence to the Anishinaabe theological claim — which is not that the world was almost destroyed and then saved, but that the world was destroyed and then remade.

The wider flood-myth web. The global flood myth corpus is large — scholars have catalogued somewhere between 200 and 500 distinct flood traditions depending on how strictly they define the category. Most are preserved in agricultural societies near river systems prone to catastrophic flooding; some, like the Anishinaabe cycle, come from regions without obvious candidate events. The Great Flood as a motif spans Manu in the Vedic tradition, Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek myth, numerous Chinese and Polynesian traditions, and multiple Indigenous American cycles of which Nanaboozhoo's is one instance among many.

Hypotheses about real-world triggers. Researchers have proposed geological candidates for a real event that might underlie the global flood pattern. The Black Sea Deluge hypothesis of William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposes a Mediterranean breach into the Black Sea basin around 5600 BCE. The Younger Dryas catastrophic flood hypothesis proposes that the abrupt end of the Younger Dryas cooling period around 10,900 BCE produced massive glacial-lake outbursts and sea-level rise events across the northern hemisphere, including regions where Anishinaabe ancestors would have lived. Graham Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods and America Before argues that Indigenous flood memories across the Americas may preserve genuine recollection of the Younger Dryas catastrophe. The claim is contested in mainstream archaeology but is taken seriously by a growing number of researchers. Within this frame, Nanaboozhoo's flood gets read as possibly referring to a specific dated event rather than as a purely structural archetype.

The ancient-astronaut lineage and Nanaboozhoo. Ancient astronaut theory — the interpretive tradition built by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods? (1968) and extended by Zecharia Sitchin in The 12th Planet (1976) — has engaged Indigenous American flood memory unevenly. Von Däniken concentrated on Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican material; he did not give Anishinaabe tradition sustained attention. Sitchin's reconstruction was almost entirely Sumerian and Akkadian, built around his Anunnaki reading of the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis Epic. Mauro Biglino, the Italian Hebrew translator and former Edizioni San Paolo staff translator (he worked on translation projects for that Catholic publisher and has been careful to note that this is not equivalent to being a Vatican official, a claim sometimes asserted loosely in secondary discussion), focused on re-reading the Hebrew Bible and similarly did not extend his argument into Indigenous American tradition. L.A. Marzulli has gestured at Native American flood memory as corroborating evidence in his broader cross-cultural sweeps. Timothy Alberino has discussed Indigenous traditions more sympathetically in Birthright. Paul Wallis has treated the comparative flood question as central to his reading of the Eden and flood material. Billy Carson invokes Indigenous cosmology more frequently than the earlier European members of the lineage. Graham Hancock, from a different tradition — closer to catastrophist archaeology than to the ancient-astronaut reading proper — has engaged Indigenous flood memory more substantively in this adjacent space than any of the others named, particularly via the Younger Dryas hypothesis. The April 2026 Anna Paulina Luna congressional moment drawing attention to the Watchers of 1 Enoch, and her August 2025 Rogan appearance — both distinct, both real — have increased general public interest in cross-cultural flood and non-human-intelligence material, which in turn has led more readers to seek out traditions like the Anishinaabe Earth-Diver as part of a broader non-human-intelligences literature. Nanaboozhoo is not easily assimilated into that reading. He is a manidoo — a spirit-being of the local tradition — not an extraterrestrial. But the current interest climate has pulled his story into wider conversation than it has held for decades.

Where the framing goes wrong. A recurring error in comparative treatments of Nanaboozhoo is the move to read him as a local variant of an originally foreign figure — as a garbled Noah, as a Sumerian survivor-hero translated across continents, as a memory of a literal global flood preserved imperfectly by peoples who did not have writing. These moves are almost always made by outsiders to Anishinaabe tradition and they almost always import assumptions that the tradition itself does not share. The Anishinaabe account is not an imperfect copy of something older and elsewhere. It is a complete theological statement in its own right. Recent work by Indigenous scholars — Vizenor, Johnston, Benton-Banai, Treuer, Vine Deloria Jr.'s earlier Red Earth, White Lies — has insisted on the sufficiency and distinctness of the tradition's own terms.

What the story teaches. In the internal frame of the tradition, Nanaboozhoo's flood story teaches several things at once. It teaches that the world is fragile and has ended before. It teaches that when the world ends, the work of beginning again falls to whoever is present, and the weight of that work is often borne by the smallest and most overlooked. It teaches that the turtle offers her back and the muskrat gives her life, and the new world stands on those gifts. It teaches that the Anishinaabe do not live on a world that was theirs by default — they live on a world that was rebuilt through sacrifice, and they are held to protocols of thanks and responsibility that correspond to that origin. The ethical weight of the story is not optional background — it is the point. To read Nanaboozhoo as simply a flood survivor is to miss the grammar of the narrative. He is the figure through whom a community's entire relationship to the land is held in story.

The animals as persons. A feature of the Nanaboozhoo cycle that tends to drop out of summary retellings is the status of the animals as full persons rather than props. Loon, beaver, otter, muskrat, and turtle are not emblems. They are moral agents who volunteer, who die, and whose gifts are remembered. Michael Pomedli's Living with Animals (2014) argues that this is consistent with the wider Anishinaabe treatment of animal persons throughout the cycle — each species has its own tradition, its own knowledge, its own clan relationships with humans. In the Anishinaabe clan system, the dodemag are named for animals and the relationships within each clan carry obligations that correspond to the animal person's gifts. When muskrat dies for the mud, he is not a plot device. He is a relative who gave his life, and the Anishinaabe stand in a continuing relationship with his descendants that the story names.

The turtle's back as ground. Turtle Island — Mishiikenh-minis — is the name the Anishinaabe give to the continent now called North America, and the name is not symbolic. It is the literal account of where the land is standing. In the flood cycle, after muskrat brings the mud up, turtle offers her back as the place to put it. Nanaboozhoo places the mud on turtle's back, and the mud grows. The turtle whose back becomes the continent is still there, beneath the land, supporting it. When Anishinaabe teachers speak of Turtle Island today — a phrase that has spread well beyond Anishinaabe contexts into broader Indigenous and allied usage — they are invoking this specific origin. The continent is a gift received and held on a volunteer's back. The protocols of living rightly on it correspond to that gift. Reading 'Turtle Island' as a picturesque regional name for North America misses what is being said by the name.

Chibiabos and the underworld. Nanaboozhoo's brother Chibiabos is, in many tellings, drowned by the underwater manidoog — the water-spirit beings, sometimes called the Mishebeshu — and his death is part of what precipitates the conflict between Nanaboozhoo and the underwater powers that leads to, or coincides with, the flood. After the flood, Chibiabos is remembered as the first being to die and pass to the other side, and he becomes the figure who guides the dead on the path after death. This parallel — Nanaboozhoo in the middle world, Chibiabos in the spirit world after death — is part of the wider theological architecture the cycle holds in place. The flood is not a discrete episode. It is connected to death and to what happens after death, and the grief of Nanaboozhoo for his brother is part of the motive that turns him toward the work of remaking.

Why oral tradition matters here. The fact that the Nanaboozhoo cycle was transmitted orally for centuries before being written down is not a deficiency of the tradition. It is a feature of how the tradition works. Stories in Anishinaabe context are not frozen texts to be memorized verbatim. They are living narratives that the teller holds in relationship with the listener, with the season, with the occasion, and with the version the teller's own teacher told. A winter telling around a fire will differ from a summer telling at a gathering. An elder's telling to children will differ from a telling among adults. This plasticity is not corruption. It is the form the tradition has always taken. Written versions — Schoolcraft's, Johnston's, Benton-Banai's — are snapshots of particular tellings by particular tellers at particular times, and their differences are a feature of the living tradition rather than evidence of error. Readers coming to the cycle from Abrahamic textual traditions sometimes expect a single canonical version. There is no such version. There are tellings, and they are all part of how the story is alive.

Significance

Narrative inheritance, not comparative footnote. The Nanaboozhoo cycle is the narrative inheritance through which the Anishinaabe peoples hold their account of who they are, how the world they live on came to be, and what the protocols of living rightly on that world require. Treating him as a comparative footnote to Noah or to Mesopotamian flood survivors misreads the structure of the tradition. He is the figure through whom the whole Anishinaabe theological architecture is held together — cultural hero, trickster, transformer, teacher, and mediator between Kitchi-Manitou and the people.

A different flood grammar. Among the global flood narratives, Nanaboozhoo's Earth-Diver variant is structurally distinct from the Abrahamic ark pattern and from the Mesopotamian ship-borne survivor pattern. There is no righteous man preserved by a deity's instructions. There is no engineered vessel. There is no pairwise rescue of species. The flood is a pre-existing condition — sometimes caused by conflict, sometimes simply the fact of the world being what it is at that point — rather than a punishment. What is saved is a spirit-being, a handful of animals, and the single grain of mud that muskrat carries up at the cost of his life. The new world is built on a turtle's back, not restored from the previous one. Scholars like Christopher Vecsey, Theresa Smith, and Michael Pomedli have argued that respecting this difference matters for reading the Anishinaabe tradition at all.

Humility as cosmogonic principle. The Nanaboozhoo flood installs humility as a generative principle of the Anishinaabe world. Muskrat — small, weak, laughed at — succeeds where loon, beaver, and otter fail. Turtle — slow, grounded, unassuming — offers her back where no other animal can. The strong and capable die in the attempt. The humble carry the world. This reading runs against the hero-archetype pattern familiar from Indo-European mythology and is a distinct contribution to world cosmogonic thought.

Surviving an assimilation campaign. The Nanaboozhoo cycle survived a roughly century-long systematic campaign to break its transmission. The Indian Residential Schools in Canada (1870s to 1996) and Indian Boarding Schools in the US (1870s to 1970s) explicitly targeted the oral tradition through which the story moves from elder to child. Children were removed from families, punished for speaking Anishinaabemowin, and taught contempt for their own stories. The survival of the cycle into the present — carried by elders like Edward Benton-Banai, Basil Johnston, Anton Treuer, and the Three Fires Midewiwin Society — reflects deliberate intergenerational effort under real suppression. This makes modern publication of the stories, from Benton-Banai's The Mishomis Book (1988) onward, a recovery act rather than a neutral scholarly exercise.

Reception under colonial conditions. The first major written recording was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Algic Researches (1839), transmitted via Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, an Anishinaabe woman whose role was long under-credited. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855) drew on this material and infamously fused Nanaboozhoo with the unrelated Haudenosaunee statesman Hiawatha — a confusion still present in popular culture. Every subsequent scholarly handling of the cycle has had to work out a position relative to these early mediations. Gerald Vizenor's decades of work on the trickster dimension, Vecsey's sociology of Anishinaabe religion under historical change, and Smith's literary reading have all been in part correctives to the early comparative frame.

Placement in the current interest surge. Current public interest in cross-cultural flood memory and non-human-intelligence traditions — accelerated by the lineage from Erich von Däniken through Zecharia Sitchin and Mauro Biglino to Graham Hancock, L.A. Marzulli, Timothy Alberino, Paul Wallis, and Billy Carson, and by the April 2026 Anna Paulina Luna moment focusing attention on the Watchers of 1 Enoch — has drawn the Nanaboozhoo material into adjacent conversations. The figure does not assimilate neatly into the ancient-astronaut reading — he is a manidoo, a local spirit-being, not an extraterrestrial visitor — but the broader catastrophist frame associated with Hancock's Younger Dryas hypothesis does engage Indigenous flood memory seriously. The significance here is less doctrinal and more infrastructural: the story is being read by more people than it has been in generations.

Model for living with the land. Within the tradition, Nanaboozhoo is not an object of worship but an elder brother whose example teaches proper conduct. He names the plants and teaches their medicines. He institutes the pipe ceremony and the songs. He shows the protocols of thanks owed to the animals hunted. His failures teach as much as his successes — the trickster stories are not comic relief but pedagogical core. The cycle's ongoing significance for contemporary Anishinaabe land-relationships, articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer (a Potawatomi scholar) in Braiding Sweetgrass and by others, is not an afterthought to the flood story but its natural extension.

Connections

Flood-survivor cross-references. Nanaboozhoo stands within a dense web of flood-survivor narratives with which his story shares structural features while remaining theologically distinct. The Abrahamic Noah narrative is the reference point most English-speaking readers reach for and also the one whose assumptions most readily distort the Anishinaabe pattern — there is no righteous-survivor selection and no ark in Nanaboozhoo's telling. The Mesopotamian predecessors of Noah — Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ziusudra in the Sumerian flood story — share the ark motif and the divine-judgment frame. The Vedic Manu tradition preserves a survivor guided by a divine fish. The Greek Deucalion and Pyrrha narrative follows the ark-and-survivor pattern with stones becoming new humans. Against these, Nanaboozhoo's Earth-Diver pattern is a structurally different genre of flood story, and The Great Flood motif only comes into full view when both patterns are held side by side.

Global flood corpus. Nanaboozhoo's story fits into the global flood myth corpus documented across hundreds of traditions. It is one of the key representatives of the Earth-Diver subtype in North America, alongside Haudenosaunee Sky Woman narratives and closely related Huron/Wendat and Algonquin variants.

Scientific-hypothesis connections. The Black Sea Deluge hypothesis of Ryan and Pitman proposes a specific Mediterranean breach around 5600 BCE as a candidate event underlying some flood memories. The Younger Dryas catastrophic flood hypothesis — elaborated by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and others, and popularized by Graham Hancock — proposes a much earlier and geographically broader catastrophe around 10,900 BCE that would have been witnessed by the ancestors of the Anishinaabe. Hancock has explicitly argued that Indigenous American flood memories, Nanaboozhoo's included, may preserve recollection of this event.

Ancient-astronaut-theory lineage. The ancient-astronaut interpretive tradition — mapped in the ancient-astronaut lineage timeline — runs from Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? (1968) through Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976), through Mauro Biglino's Hebrew-Bible retranslations and current disclosure-era researchers including L.A. Marzulli, Timothy Alberino, Paul Wallis, Billy Carson, and adjacent catastrophist work by Hancock. Nanaboozhoo is not a central figure in any member of this lineage — the Indigenous American material has mostly been engaged in gestures rather than sustained treatment — but the overall climate has pulled his story into wider reading.

Conceptual-frame connections. The Nanaboozhoo cycle connects to forbidden-knowledge transmission questions insofar as colonial suppression of oral tradition and the Indian Residential and Boarding School targeting of that transmission raise the same questions of deliberate disruption that Enochic narratives raise in a different register. It connects to non-human intelligences in wisdom traditions through the manidoog — spirit-beings — of which Nanaboozhoo is himself one, situated in a cosmology populated by loon, beaver, otter, muskrat, and turtle as moral agents. And it connects to the methodological question posed by interpreting ancient religious texts as eyewitness accounts: what do we do with a tradition that claims to remember the remaking of the world, and how does the answer change when the tradition is an oral one whose transmission has been deliberately attacked?

Further Reading