Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past Read Online Free PDF

just a story. But it is far more than that to the people who have been telling it since Shonkwaya’tíson told it to the first human beings.
    For starters, when Shonkwaya’tíson told the first human beings the story of their creation, it wasn’t in English. He told it to them in
His
language—the language He gave them when He gave them the gift of speech. And beginning with the first human beings, our people have handed down the story of our creation in the Creator’s language ever since. Only in the most recent generation has the story been widely shared in English.
    And when Shonkwaya’tíson gave us our language, He gave us a unique way of looking at the world around us
—His
way. He made it clumsy for us to express things that involve negative concepts. For example, we don’t have a word in our language for “zero,” “empty,” or “failure.” We
can
say them but only by saying, “It isn’t something,” “It doesn’t have something in it,” or “Something did not succeed.”
    He did not make us obsessed with objects. If He had, He would have given us the need and the ability to separate, categorize, and classify everything on earth by giving them all different names, just as Western society through the English language does. He could have given us this obsession, but He didn’t.
    One thing He did give us through our language, though, is an obsession with people. We have many more ways of describing exactly who is doing what than English has. For example, although there is only one word for “we” in English, there are four in our language, depending on the numberof people involved in the “we” and whether “we” includes the person being spoken to. As a result, we are much more precise and much less ambiguous than we are in English when we are talking about people—which is to say, nearly all the time.
    From these few observations about our language, outsiders can gain a few insights into our traditional values and way of thinking—the way our Creator wants us to think. We know from the language that our Creator has given us that we should not think “negatively;” that we should not be obsessed with objects; and that we should be more concerned with people and relationships. Pretty good advice, don’t you think?
    One telling aspect of the Creation Story is that all the nations of the Iroquois tell the story the same way. Many details vary from one version to another but the major elements are all the same: a woman fell through a hole in the sky-world and came to rest on a turtle’s back. She gave birth to a daughter, who died giving birth to twin boys. After creating the features of the earth, the twins battled for control. The right-handed twin won and created the first human beings with a handful of clay.
    Those first human beings we call
onkwehón:we
, the real, first, original persons. Today we say that an
onkwehón:we is
someone who speaks the language of the Creator, who still carries the unique way of thinking and looking at life that stems from our language. More important, an
onkwehón:we is
someone who still honours the instructions of the Creator—who loves people and respects the earth and who gives thanks to Him.
    The Creation Story gives all
onkwehón:we
a shared way of thinking and looking at the world. But it does even more than that.
    It specifically tells us that the
onkwehón:we
did not arrive here on what we now call Turtle Island by walking over some land bridge from Asia.
    It explains why we call the earth our mother, the moon our grandmother, the sun our elder brother, and the thunder our grandfather.
    It explains why we spend so much time giving thanks in our longhouses and in our daily get-togethers.
    It gives us comfort, security, and a sense of purpose.
    It tells us that the only things we were given were the knowledge of how to survive