Aataentsic

The Huron believed that Aataentsic, although “the mother of mankind” in their creation story, was a deity who brought harm to human beings.

According to the Huron, Aataentsic had originally dwelled in the sky with her husband, where spirits lived in a forested land much like earth. One day she fell to earth through a hole in the sky. As she fell toward the ocean that covered the world, the tortoise saw her falling. He told the other water animals to dive and bring up earth. As they returned, they piled the earth on his back, forming the land. Aataentsic fell safely on this land. Soon after her fall, she gave birth to twin sons, Iouskeha and Tawiscaron. Iouskeha sought to help human beings. He brought good weather, made the lakes and rivers, and showed human beings how to hunt. He also taught people to use fire and grow corn. His brother Tawiscaron was not favorably disposed to humans, and when the brothers grew up they fought, and Iouskeha drove him away. His blood, which fell on the ground as he fled, turned into flint. After this time, Iouskeha and Aataentsic lived together in a bark house far from Huron country.

Aataentsic, who may be identified either as Iouskeha’s mother or his maternal grandmother, tried to undo his good works and to harm human beings. She sent disease, made people die, and controlled the souls of the dead. If a traveling Huron found her cabin, she would try to harm him, but her son would try to help the unfortunate traveler. She appeared as an old woman, though she could make herself young again as she pleased. Iouskeha grew old like any human being, but when he became old could rejuvenate himself and become young again.

The anthropologist Bruce Trigger suggested that the story of Aataentsic and Iouskeha functioned to compensate both men and women for the limitations in their roles in daily life. Men, who killed animals in the hunt and other human beings in war, were aggressors in daily life. The male deity Iouskeha, on the other hand, was a life-bringer who gave human beings corn and fire and tried to help them. In

Huron society, women raised crops and cared for children, but through the story of Aataentsic they were “flattered by being mythically endowed with dangerous and aggressive qualities.” The idea that Aataentsic and her son, though very different in personality, lived together in a bark cabin may have emphasized the complementary roles men and women played in daily life.

Further reading: Elisabeth Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, vol. 1

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976);-,

The Huron: Farmers of the North (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969).

—Martha K. Robinson