Arnold Aron Jacobs Onondaga Nation, Turtle Clan Skywoman Descending Great Turtle Island, 1997 (after 1981 painting) Lithograph, 23 3/4" x 33 7/8" Iroquois Indian Museum 98:124
Skywoman: Haudenosaunee Art and the Creation of a New World, an exhibition at Colgate’s Longyear Museum of Anthropology last fall, included contemporary work in various styles and media by 15 artists. In Haudenosaunee society, women are keepers of the culture, so the Skywoman is seen as a primordial mother, pioneer, and cultural heroine.
Legacies
Local
By Rebecca Costello
Long, long ago, there was no land, only water. Powerful beings lived in a place called the Sky World. One day, a woman who was expecting a baby fell through a hole in the sky at the base of the Tree of Life. She grabbed a handful of seeds at the tree’s roots as she fell. A flock of geese saw this Skywoman falling. They caught her and placed her on the back of a giant turtle. With the handful of soil and seeds, she danced the earth into being. How Turtle Island, or North America, came to be is the creation story of the peoples who settled the region surrounding Colgate more than 10,000 years ago: the Iroquois*, or as they call themselves today, the Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse”). *The name Iroquois originated with French colonists who transliterated a pejorative Algonquin term.
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scene: Winter 2013