Compare And Contrast The World on the Turtle’s Back and The Creation

The similarities and differences between Native American creation stories and the purpose they serve. How the Iroquois and Osage’s creation stories are similar and different and the purpose they share. “The World on the Turtle’s Back” and “The Creation” are two Native American creation stories belonging to the Iroquois and Osage people that are very similar yet different in the interpretations of how the Earth was created.

Some of the similarities and differences between “The World on the Turtle’s Back” and “The Creation'' have to do with the characters, the settings, and the plots of the two stories. In: The World on the Turtle’s Back,” Flint and Little Sprout, while creating the land, saw that they could not give the people who are to live there land, yet no way of eating or surviving. They decided that they needed to find a way to make it so that the people to come could not only have land, but could also have access to other things they would need such as food and animals. It is similar in the Osage’s story, “The Creation." In “The Creation” the Osage people go to live on Earth, sent by their parents. Upon getting to Earth, they saw that there was no land, food, or animals. Knowing that they set out to find a way to not only get land, but also food and animals. Another similarity between the two stories is their settings and plots. In both of the stories, you see people needing to drain or part the oceans so that they can gain land. They also talk about how the land grew bigger and bigger allowing them to set out and find or create the food, animals, and other things they would need to survive. Though there are many more examples of similarities between these two stories, I chose these two because of how similar they are in the sense of their character’s ambitions, the settings, and the plots of these two Native American creation stories.

Ways in which “The World on the Turtle’s Back” and “The Creation " are different. While yes, there are many similarities in the two stories, there are also some differences. One of those differences is how Flint and Little Sprout were creating the food and animals, while the Osage people were doing more searching than they were creating. In the Iroquois story, it focused on how Flint and Little Sprout were creating and modifying the land, food, and animals, while in the Osage’s story, it focused more on how they had to walk the rocky lands and search for the soil, food, and animals. Another difference between the two Native American creation stories is the character’s themselves. While reading the stories, it tells how Flint and Little Sprout were the great-grandsons of a Chief, while the Osage were the children of the sun and the moon. The sun is their father and the moon being their mother. The differences of the two Native American stories may not be big, however it shows the small differences between the characters and the plots of the two tales.

In conclusion, there are both similarities and differences between these two creation stories. The purpose of these stories is to tell the Iroquois and Osage people the stories of which had been passed down from their ancestors on how they came to be. Though the stories of the two people are similar and different in ways, it gives them something that they can believe in and pass down for generations to come.