Ottawa Creation Story

Author: Traditional Ottawa

Time Period: 1001 CE–1500 CE

Country or Culture: North America

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

In Nicolas Perrot’s account of the Ottawa (Odawa) creation story, after the earth is created, each species of animal lives in the environment most suited to its needs and abilities. After some of these first animals die, a spiritual power known as the Great Hare creates humans out of the corpses of these dead animals. Perrot notes that many Ottawa people believe they are descended from those people who were created from various animals, the names of those animals or birds having become attached to certain clans and villages among the tribe. He also notes that the Ottawas, when they first encountered Europeans, believed these strange people must have been created by a different deity or spiritual power, since the Europeans’ culture and technology was so different from their own.

The account goes on to describe how some of the basic aspects of the Ottawa culture developed. “Inspired by the Great Hare with an intuitive idea” (Perrot 38), they learn to make bows and arrows, which they can use to hunt animals for food. When they cannot eat this meat raw, they learn to make fire and use it to cook the meat. They also learn to make clothing out of the hides or furs of the animals they have killed. Since deep snows make hunting difficult in the winter, they learn to make what Perrot calls “a sort of racket” (snowshoes), and they build canoes for navigating the nearby rivers (39).

SIGNIFICANCE

The Ottawas are a tribe who originally lived in the Eastern Woodland cultural area of North America. Their language is a part of the Algonquian language family, which is typical of the tribes of eastern North America. They were closely related to the Ojibwas (also known as the Ojibways, Ojibwes, Anishinaabeg, or Chippewas) and the Potawatomis. The three tribes together were sometimes referred to as the Council (or People) of Three Fires and represented a powerful confederation that sometimes balanced or countered the power of the Iroquois in the region. When they first encountered Europeans, the Ottawas were living on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron and in parts of present-day Ontario along the lake. Later, many of the Ottawas moved into the Lower Peninsula region of what is now Michigan. The Ottawas, like other Eastern Woodland peoples, lived by hunting, fishing, trading, collecting wild foods, and some farming in semipermanent settlements.

This version of the Ottawa creation story was recorded by a French fur trader, Nicolas Perrot, around 1720. Although Perrot’s recounting of the story betrays a Eurocentric bias that places little confidence in the reliability of the account, it does preserve some traditional teachings of the Ottawas. In this brief story, the Ottawas sum up the creation of humans, the origins of their own clans, and the beginnings of the ways of life that were important to the Ottawa culture. Like most Indian cultures, the Ottawas traditionally believed a host of spiritual powers, called “manitous,” inhabit the natural world and are closely connected to the lives of human beings. In the Ottawa account of creation, the manitou known as the Great Hare creates both the land and the first humans. The concept that those first humans are brought forth from the corpses of dead animals shows the intimate connection between humans and the natural world around them. The Ottawas also traditionally believed that their different clans, which each had a totem representing an animal or bird, traced back to those animals from whom the first people were created. The spirits of each of these animals were thought to have special significance to members of that particular clan.

The close connection between the spiritual world and human life is also shown in the way that the Great Hare shows the early humans how to make the weapons they would need for hunting for the animals and birds they would need for food. Because the Great Hare endows humans with minds and intuition, they also learn to develop other things needed for their lives, such as the use of fire for cooking, making garments from the hides and furs of animals, and making snowshoes for travel in the deep snows of winter. Many of the handicrafts that were necessary for creating the material culture of the Ottawa people are thus attributed to direction and providence of the Great Hare, the original creator.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cash, Joseph H., and Gerald W. Wolff. The Ottawa People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1978. Print.

Feest, Johanna E., and Christian F. Feest. “Ottawa.” Northeast. Vol. 15 of Handbook of North American Indians. Ed. William C. Sturtevant. Washington: Smithsonian Inst., 1978. 772–86. Print.

Frazer, James George. “Totemism among Other Algonkin Tribes of the Great Lakes.” Marriage and Worship in the Early Societies. Vol. 3. Delhi: Mittal, 1986. 64–68. Print.

Kinietz, W. Vernon. The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1940. Print.

Leavalle, Tracy Neal. “Histories: Origins and Experience.” The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. 19–46. Print.

Perrot, Nicolas. “Belief of the Savages Regarding the Creation of Man.” The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and the Region of the Great Lakes. Vol. 1. Trans. Emma Helen Blair. Ed. Blair. Cleveland: Clark, 1911. 37–40. Print.

Petrik, Paula. “Native American Creation Stories.” Exploring US History. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason U, Apr. 2004. Web. 18 June 2013.