Flood Myths of North America

The rope that holds

Four traditions along one stretch of the Northwest Coast tell the same story with the same piece of equipment. Water rises; families load canoes with food and water; they tie the canoes to a mountain with cedar-bark rope; the rope holds; they come down afterwards and rebuild.

At Nch’ḵay̓, the mountain settlers renamed Garibaldi, the Squamish account opens at the end of the glacial period itself: the ice melts, the water climbs, and the cedar line is made fast to the peak. Across the strait the W̱SÁNEĆ tie themselves to ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱, the last ground above the flood, and when Raven announces land they come off the mountain with a new name — the Emerging People — which is the point of the story. In the K’ómoks valley Quoi Qwa Lak dreams the warning in time, the rain covers the mountains, and the glacier itself turns into the White Whale Queneesh and carries the people through. On the Elwha, Ed Sampson Sr. told it as families tethering freight canoes to two peaks that grow taller as the water rises.

These stories sit on a coast that genuinely moved. Rising seas cut the larger Ice Age landmass into the Haida Gwaii archipelago, and Haida accounts remember people walking across places that are open water now. Marine diatoms — the glassy shells of sea plankton — survive in sediment on the high Tsinni Tsinni terrace above the Bella Coola valleys, exactly where Nuxalk tradition puts an older ocean and dangerous tidal currents miles inland. An arm of the sea filled much of the Fraser Valley at the close of the Pleistocene, and a Fraser River Salish elder said the great water began at salt water and came up the valley; another remembered ancestors living in a country newly out of the water and still bare of trees. Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson laid the traditions and the sediments side by side and found them describing the same coast.

The rope is the detail to hold on to. It is not an ark that drifts wherever it is sent. It is a mooring: the people stay where they belong, above their own country, and when the water goes down they climb back into it. Four times along one coast, the line holds.

The rope that breaks

Then, on the upper Skeena, it parts.

The people of Temlaham mistreat a trout. The water begins to rise, and it rises for twenty days. They stretch elk skin over the canoes to keep them dry and drop anchor-lines to the mountaintops. Some families climb the mountains on foot instead and drown up there. One line after another gives way, and the canoes go off in every direction across a submerged country. When the water falls, twenty days later, each family is somewhere else — and stays.

The people of TlEmlạx·ám are bad. They maltreat a trout, and then the Deluge sets in. For twenty days the waters rise. They cover their canoes with elk skin. The anchor-lines of many canoes break, and they drift away. Some people climb the mountains and are drowned… Then the waters sink again, and the people settle in the places where they happen to be. In this manner the crests are scattered over the whole coast. After the Flood, there is only clay, no trees, and the people live in tents.

— Franz Boas, Tsimshian Mythology, 31st Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1916), p. 727

That second-to-last sentence is the whole point. The crest is the Northwest Coast’s legal instrument: the carved and painted figure that says which house you belong to, which names you may take, which stretch of river and beach and hunting ground is yours, whom you may marry. A crest belonging to Temlaham turning up two hundred miles down the coast is not decoration. It is a title deed with a history, and the history is a rope that snapped in a flood.

So the failure is the productive one. Where the Squamish and W̱SÁNEĆ lines hold and a people comes back down onto its own mountain, the Tsimshian lines break and a whole social geography goes out with the current. Temlaham does not explain how one village survived the water. It explains why the coast is arranged the way it is — why these people hold that crest in that place — and it does the explaining by the specific mechanical accident of a mooring giving way.

And one further line in Boas. After the flood, he reports, there is only clay, no trees, and the people live in tents for a long time. The Skeena valley was under Cordilleran ice, and freshly deglaciated ground is exactly that: bare clay, no forest, a long wait before anything will grow. The detail is not the Tsimshian’s alone — a Fraser River Salish elder remembered ancestors living in country newly out of the water and still bare of trees, which is the same unusual specification on the same coast in an unrelated telling. Two peoples describing the ground the water left behind describe the ground the ice left behind.

Proving you can make it rain

The most exact flood in North America comes up out of the ground inside a single village.

Four years earlier a ghost had told the people of Palatkwapi where to plant their prayer-sticks. On the fourth morning of an old man’s counting song, water begins coming out of the ground at every one of those places at once — and out of the fireplaces in the kivas, and out of the water jars standing in the houses — with Balolookongs, the horned water serpents, shooting up through it in all parts of the village. The walls come down on the people inside. In one house a few old men climb the meal shelves, crouch there, and turn into turkeys; the water rises until their tails hang in it, which is why turkeys today have no feathers on their heads.

The chiefs, gathered in the high house at the east end that the water has not reached, grind beads and turquoise to powder and make it into two balls on a tray of prayer-sticks. Then they dress the village chief’s son — the young man whose behaviour caused all this — in a plain white kilt, with black zigzag lines painted down his legs and arms and body, and they dress his sister as a Flute maiden: white robe, white kilt, an eagle-breath feather above the forehead, her chin painted black with white lines running ear to ear. The two of them wade out into the flooded village carrying the offering. The young man takes hold of the great serpent and presses it under. Brother, sister and serpents go down together, and none of them comes back up.

The turquoise powder hardens the ground, because turquoise is a hard substance. The people bake piki, set out a food altar east of the ruin, eat a little of each kind as they file past it, and walk north over the mud.

Where they walk to is the rest of the story, and Sikanakpu of Mishongnovi told H. R. Voth that part separately. The Batki clan and the Sand clan come up from Palatkwapi together. On the road they feed themselves by a division of labour: the Sand clan spreads sand on the ground and plants corn in it, and the Batki clan sings until it thunders and rains, and the crop comes up in a day. They stop a long while at Homolovi. They try Awatovi and are not welcome. They arrive at Mishongnovi, where the Bear, Parrot and Crow clans already hold the village and its ceremonies — and there, in Voth’s flat rendering, they were asked what they knew to produce rain and crops.

They spread the sand. They make the corn grow. And their leader is made chief of the village.

Then the practical sequel. The spring at Toriva was small, so the Batki emptied into it the mud, grass and water they had carried up from the Little Colorado in a móngwikuru, and the flow increased. They were taken into the Antelope and Blue Flute fraternities, which is why Sikanakpu, a Batki man, is the one who lays out the cloud symbols in the Blue Flute ceremony. Before the Batki came, Voth was told, the corn at Mishongnovi was small; they made it rain and it grew large.

This is a charter in the strict sense: a flood story whose work is to say who holds which office in a named village, and on what grounds. The grounds are weather power. The clan is admitted because it can make it thunder and rain.

The Atlas holds that object. It came off Second Mesa in 1903, from the village the Batki reached, and its recorded purpose is to make thunder and bring rain — the exact competence the clan had to demonstrate at the door. The flood tradition and the instrument meet in one village, among one people, on one piece of business: the clan that came out of the water holding weather power, and the whirled board that makes the weather.

Two hundred miles north the Diné flood is a different kind of object again: not a landscape at all, but a floor. In the fourth world Coyote steals the Water Monster’s two children and hides them in the fold of his robe, and nobody sees him do it. Deer and antelope start running past from east to west. On the fourth morning the Locust scouts come back and say a vast flood is coming from the east, and by dawn the water stands as high as mountains all round the horizon. The Squirrels plant piñon and juniper, the Weasels plant spruce and pine, and every tree branches out and stops growing. Then two men come up the hill with bags of earth from seven sacred mountains, and out of that earth grows the great reed the people climb to reach the world above. The flood is the mechanism by which one world is exchanged for the next.

The survivors who were corn

On the upper Missouri the Arikara answer the flood with agriculture.

Long ago, the narrator Hand told George Dorsey, there were large people on the earth, strong enough to fear nobody, and they made fun of all the gods in the heavens. Nesaru looked down and said he had made them too strong. Before the water came, the animals helped him take the people he liked and turn them into grains of corn, and carry them down into a cave big enough for animals and people together.

The flood killed the giants. And the people underground knew nothing about any of it — because they were not people then. They were corn.

Nesaru planted corn in the sky to remind him where he had put them. When it ripened he turned an ear of it into Mother Corn and sent her down to find them, with Badger and Mole digging the way out toward the light. There is no mountain in this story and no raft. The survival mechanism is seed: dormancy, storage, germination. The Arikara come out of the flood the way a crop comes out of a cache pit, and the primacy of corn in Arikara life is the same fact as the survival of the Arikara.

South of Panalachic in the Sierra Madre, the Ráramuri put two children on a mountain called Lavachi, which means gourd, and let the water go down. They come off it carrying three grains of corn and three beans. The rock is still soft after the flood, and their footprints are in it, and you can go and see them. They plant the corn, sleep, dream that night, harvest — and every Ráramuri alive is descended from those two children. A whole people and its agriculture restart from six seeds and a soft rock.

In the same sierra the Wixárika restart from a warning and a dog. Nakawé, the grandmother of growth, tells Watákame to build a box-shaped vessel, carry seeds and take a black female dog. After five stages of flood the vessel grounds beside a sacred mountain, and birds cut the valleys that let the five seas out. Then the dog becomes a woman, and she and Watákame renew humanity and agriculture together — a goddess at one end of the story and a dog-wife at the other, and the seed corn riding between them.

Their Cora neighbours keep the flood itself in daily use. A few miles east of Santa Teresa there is a deep lake in a volcanic hollow, and the Cora say it is the only thing remaining of the great flood. They call it Mother, and also Brother, after the Morning Star. There are no fish in it, only turtles and ducks. Its water heals the sick and strengthens the well, and there is no ceremony in Cora religion for which it is not required: it is mixed with ordinary spring water and sprinkled over the people with a red orchid, or with a deer tail stretched on a stick. Elsewhere on this map the flood leaves a shoreline, a charter, a stone. Here it leaves a liquid, and the liquid is still working.

Further south the flood clears the ground for the corn people. The effigies carved of wood in the Popol Vuh looked like people and spoke like people and filled the whole earth, but their faces were dry, and they had no blood in them, and they did not remember who had shaped them. So Heart of Sky planned a flood, and a great resin came down out of the sky, and a black rain fell day and night, and everything the effigies owned turned on them. The grinding stones spoke first: every day you did holi, holi on our faces; now we will grind your flesh. Then the dogs: you never fed us; now try our teeth. The ones who got away into the forest are the monkeys, which is why a monkey looks like a person.

It is a destruction with a purpose. The wooden people are cleared off the board so that the maize people can be made, and the reader is left with a working explanation of why the animal in the trees has a human face. Even here, where the flood is resin falling out of the sky and no shoreline is at stake, the water is doing the job it does at Temlaham and Mishongnovi. It is the hinge on which the present arrangement of the world turns.

The man who walks in once a year

At the Mandan village on the Knife River the flood was not recited. It arrived.

Once a year a man appeared on the prairie to the west, painted, carrying a pipe, and the chiefs went out and brought him in. He was Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah, the First or Only Man. Everyone else stayed shut inside. He went to each lodge in turn and stood in front of the door crying until the owner came out and asked who was there and what he wanted.

To this Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah replied by relating the destruction of all the human family by the Flood, excepting himself, who had been saved in his “Big Canoe,” and now dwelt in the West; that he had come to open the Medicine Lodge, that the Mandans might make the necessary sacrifices to the water, and for this purpose it was requisite that he should receive at the door of every Mandan’s wigwam some edged tool to be given to the water as a sacrifice, as it was with such tools that the “Big Canoe” was built.

— George Catlin, O-Kee-Pa: A Religious Ceremony of the Mandans (1867), p. 12

He collected an edged or pointed tool of iron or steel from every household — kept ready, Catlin noticed, for the occasion — and carried them into the Medicine Lodge, where they lay for four days. At sundown on the fourth they were thrown from the rocks into deep water in front of the whole tribe. At sunrise the next morning he called out the fifty or so young men who had come of age in the past year, and they appeared painted head to foot in white and red and yellow and blue and green, each with his shield on his left arm and his medicine bag in his right hand, and followed him into the lodge for the O-kee-pa. Then he handed the conductor of the ceremonies the great pipe that had been saved in the Big Canoe with him, shook hands with the chiefs, said he would be back in a year, and walked off over the hills he had come from.

What makes this the sharpest case on the continent is that the tradition has a calendar and a bill. The flood is not a memory the Mandan hold; it is a debt they service, in metal, at a fixed date, at the door of every house — and the same event determines which young men are initiated this year. Catlin was scrupulous about one thing: he argued that the willow bough, the turtle dove and the whiteness of Lone Man were mission teaching laid over the rite, and those are left out of the Atlas’s row. The Big Canoe, the edged tools, the four days and the sacrifice to the water are not.

Flesh into stone

Catlin got the pipestone tradition four years before he wrote it down, on the Upper Missouri, from a Nehiyaw man who had been to the quarry and who was giving him a red stone pipe at the time.

That in the time of a great freshet, which took place many centuries ago, and destroyed all the nations of the earth, all the tribes of the red men assembled on the Côteau du Prairie, to get out of the way of the waters. After they had all gathered here from all parts, the water continued to rise, until at length it covered them all in a mass, and their flesh was converted into red pipe stone. Therefore it has always been considered neutral ground — it belonged to all tribes alike, and all were allowed to get it and smoke it together.

While they were all drowning in a mass, a young woman, K-wap-tah-w (a virgin), caught hold of the foot of a very large bird that was flying over, and was carried to the top of a high cliff, not far off, that was above the water. Here she had twins, and their father was the war-eagle, and her children have since peopled the earth.

The pipe stone, which is the flesh of their ancestors, is smoked by them as the symbol of peace, and the eagle’s quill decorates the head of the brave.

— George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, vol. 2 (1841), Letter 54, p. 168

Look at what that tradition is doing. It has to account for three things at once — why the stone is red, why the ground is neutral in a region where nothing else is, and why the pipe smoked over a peace agreement is cut from this seam and no other — and it accounts for all three with a single event. Everyone drowned in one place, together; the stone is their flesh; therefore no nation can own the quarry, and therefore the pipe made from it is the instrument of peace between nations. The flood does not merely precede the institution. It is the institution’s title.

Catlin also recorded what was said to him and his companion when they arrived to take some of it away. It is the clearest statement of the doctrine anyone has put on paper, and it was delivered by a man holding the pipe against his bare arm.

“You see that this pipe is a part of our flesh. The red men are a part of the red stone. If the white men take away a piece of the red pipe stone, it is a hole made in our flesh, and the blood will always run. We cannot stop the blood from running.” — a Dakota speaker at the Red Pipe Stone Quarry, in Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, p. 174

The Coteau des Prairies is in fact a highland that stood between two lobes of the Laurentide ice sheet, and the pipestone is a soft seam sealed under quartzite and glacial till. That is where the material comes from geologically; the tradition is making no claim about it, and neither is this page. What the tradition makes is a rule about who may dig, and the rule has held for as long as anyone has been watching.

The dog that showed the bone

In the Cherokee telling a man’s dog starts going down to the river every day to look at the water and howl. The man loses patience and scolds it, and the dog speaks.

“Very soon there is going to be a great freshet and the water will come so high that everybody will be drowned; but if you will make a raft to get upon when the rain comes you can be saved, but you must first throw me into the water.” The man did not believe it, and the dog said, “If you want a sign that I speak the truth, look at the back of my neck.” He looked and saw that the dog’s neck had the skin worn off so that the bones stuck out.

— James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 19th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1900), p. 261

He believes it then. He builds the raft, loads his family and provisions, and the rain covers the mountains and drowns everyone else. When it is safe to come off, he hears dancing and shouting on the other side of the ridge; he climbs to the top and looks over, and everything is still, and all along the valley lie great piles of the bones of the drowned. Then he knows that the ghosts had been dancing.

Mooney knew perfectly well that most of the Cherokee flood versions he was offered were the Bible handed back to him, and he said so. He singled out this one, and that ending in particular, as the part that was not.

Now the Natchez version, taken down by John Swanton from Natchez speakers living among the Creek. A man’s dog looks westward and howls, and the man’s hen and chickens start dancing about in the stomp dance. The dog gives him four days’ notice, tells him to build a raft, to pile wood on it and keep a little fire burning, and to plait a hickory rope to tie it so it will not drift into the ocean. Then the mountains burst open and the water pours out of them. From the raft he watches people climbing into trees and dangerous creatures swimming about eating them. At the top of the flood the dog asks to be thrown off. Seven days after the water begins to fall, people start coming to the raft for fire — some naked, some in rags, some very well dressed — and afterwards he keeps hearing noises to the east like a crowd, and goes to look and finds nobody, only insects. An old man comes and stands by him and explains: the people who came for fire were people who had died a long time ago, and all those noises are made by people you think are not living.

Two peoples five hundred miles apart, with different languages and different histories: a dog that watches the water and howls, a dog that speaks, a dog that demands to be thrown in, a raft, a drowned world, and an ending in which the dead can be heard but not seen. Swanton drew the conclusion and named a direction.

The Flood myths of the Natchez (Natchez 1) and Cherokee (Cherokee 14) are so nearly alike that it is evident they are from a common source. The most probable suggestion regarding them would be that the Natchez had borrowed their tale from the Cherokee.

— John R. Swanton, Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, BAE Bulletin 88 (1929), p. 269

That is a diffusion chain with an arrow on it, drawn by the man who collected both texts. It is worth more than a dozen resemblances noticed from a distance, because Swanton is arguing from the shape of two narratives he took down himself, and he commits to which way the borrowing ran. Traditions travel. When a story turns up twice, the interesting question is the route, and the Southeast is one of the few places on the continent where somebody has answered it.

A light in the north

Peter Pitchlynn, Catlin’s Choctaw informant and later Principal Chief of the Choctaw Nation, gave him the shortest deluge on the continent and the most cinematic.

Our people have always had a tradition of the Deluge, which happened in this way: there was total darkness for a great time over the whole of the earth; the Choctaw doctors or mystery-men looked out for daylight for a long time, until at last they despaired of ever seeing it, and the whole nation were very unhappy. At last a light was discovered in the North, and there was great rejoicing, until it was found to be great mountains of water rolling on, which destroyed them all, except a few families who had expected it and built a great raft, on which they were saved.

— Peter Pitchlynn, in Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2 (1841), p. 127

Darkness over the whole earth, a light appearing in the north, rejoicing — and then the light resolving into mountains of water rolling on. The Laurentide margin lay to the north of Choctaw country, and a wall of ice on the horizon is a light in the north. In Pitchlynn’s telling the light comes first and then resolves into water, which is the sequence in which anyone standing south of an ice sheet meets one.

Two other Southeastern floods turn on who laughed. In the Alabama telling a frog predicts that the world will be nearly lost in the waters. One man throws it in the fire; another takes it out and heals it, and is told to build a raft and pack a thick layer of grass under the deck so the beavers cannot cut holes through the wood. He builds it out in the open and people stand around laughing at him. When the flood comes the fish come with it, and some of the people catch them and say they are having a good time. The raft rises. Nobody else gets on. The birds fly up and take hold of the sky and hang there with their tails half in the water, and the red-headed woodpecker, pressed flat against the sky, says: my tail is in the water.

Down on the Louisiana coast the Chitimacha keep the same woodpecker — claws hooked into the sky, tail half under water, and the sediment the disturbed water left on it marking his tail off sharply from the rest of him to this day — and they put snakes on the ark. When the great deluge came the people baked a great earthen pot, and two of them rode the water in it, and two rattlesnakes rode with them. That is why the rattlesnake is the friend of man: in old times one guarded each house, entering whenever the owner went away and retiring when he came back. After the sea subsided the woodpecker was sent to find land and came back with nothing; the dove came back with a single grain of sand, and it was laid on the water and stretched out to make the dry land, which is why the dove is called Ne-hé’temon, Ground-watcher — it saw the ground come out. Two survivors in a pot, and the flood’s lasting charter is a snake with a domestic office, the guardian of the house, whose friendship with people dates from the water.

West of there, the Caddo begin from the opposite problem. A long hot dry season came and all the waters of the earth dried up, and the people wandered looking for water until they went out of their minds. In the dry riverbeds they found dead fish and turtles and cut them to pieces and threw them about, blaming them for the water going away. Then they looked up and saw a man coming toward them out of the western sky with a small green leaf in his hand. He moved the leaf in four directions and drops of water fell from it, and the water rose over the treetops and over every mountain but one; and he led the people he chose up that mountain and made it rise as the water rose, because he was stronger than Cold or Heat. The ones left behind did not drown. They turned into alligators.

On the far side of the continent, at Jolon in Salinan country, two mussels live in a lake and raise the water every so often until a man is thrown in to them. This goes on until the people are so reduced in number that they refuse to throw in any more. So the mussels make the water of the lake and the water of the ocean come together, and the deluge follows. Afterwards the diving ducks go down for earth and fail; Eagle puts a heavy weight on Kingfisher’s back and sends him down, and he reaches the bottom, but the sea is so deep that he is dead when he surfaces; Eagle takes the earth from between his claws, brings him back to life, and makes the world out of it. H. W. Henshaw took that down in 1884. It is the one plot in this group in which a lake and the ocean join and land becomes sea, and it belongs to a people living inland of a coast that moved many kilometres east as the sea rose.

The drowned edge

At St Michael on Norton Sound, E. W. Nelson recorded a flood in which marine water covers the whole country except one central mountain. People survive in an umiak and fish as they drift above the drowned land; the current and the waves, working over the submerged ground, cut the ridges and hollows the story then points to. When the water falls they follow the retreating shore back toward the coast.

Norton Sound was dry country in the last glacial period. It went under as the early- and middle-Holocene sea advanced across the Bering shelf, drowning a landmass the size of a continent and cutting Asia from America. Which stage of that long rise the St Michael story describes has not been established. What the story insists on is local: the water comes from the sea, the refuge is a nearby mountain, and the flood leaves the shape of the land behind it as its signature.

Further east the Arctic accounts turn on evidence rather than refuge. Franz Boas recorded a Central Inuit tradition in which the ocean rises over the mountains and carries drift ice across their summits, leaving fish, shellfish, seals and whales stranded high above the later shore — and the stranded sea life is offered inside the story as the proof that this happened. At the Mackenzie Delta, Émile Petitot recorded a flood driven by wind rather than shaking: the water goes over the dwellings, the families lash all their boats into one great raft, and An-odjium, Son of Owl, throws his bow and his earrings into the water and calms it.

And several hundred kilometres inland, among people with no coast at all, Petitot took down from Sa-kfa-nél-kfa-woha in June 1864 a story that ends in a wave. A young man walking by the sea calls to a whale to swallow him, and throws himself in. The whale keeps him three days. His sister stands on the shore crying, and when the whale surfaces she hears his voice from inside saying its insides are burning him, and telling her to throw in one of her moccasins and keep hold of the laces. The whale swallows the moccasin, the young man catches it, and his sister pulls until the whale vomits him onto the beach half dead. Then the whale, furious at losing him, hits the sea with its tail so hard that the waves stand up like mountains, and when they come down on the land they swallow it, and only the two of them are left.

Inland on the Koyukuk, the flood is the hinge between two worlds, and one of them was better. In the Distant Time the earth was covered by a flood, and only the animals were saved: Raven put them on a raft by pairs — just by pairs, no calves or anything — and that exact balance is what the new world was started from. The world Raven made was at first a world of order and perfection. But Raven is a trickster, and he took his own creation apart and made it over as the imperfect world we have now, a world where rivers flood and people die. It is the one Edenic frame on this map — a post-flood golden age, deliberately broken by its maker — and it is not a museum piece: each spring, Koyukon people watch the rising river with the old floods in mind.

When the ice-dammed lakes broke

The end of the Ice Age moved a great deal of water across the interior, and the interior traditions know it as something that breaks loose rather than something that rises.

In Katzie history the Great Flood drives people to Golden Ears and Mount Cheam, and when it falls the families multiply and salmon return to the rivers; Duncan McLaren compares the sequence with the sudden emptying of an ice-dammed lake in the Fraser system. Kalapuya floodwater fills the Willamette Valley and people run for Marys Peak, and in the longer cycle Panther and Deer appear, Coyote dies, and the survivors recover fire; Grand Ronde scholarship sets that cycle beside the late-glacial megafloods that swept the valley over and over. At Lalíik — Rattlesnake Mountain, whose name means land standing above water — Yakama sources keep the mountain and the Ice Age floods joined in a single sentence.

Flathead country preserves two incompatible stories, and both of them are hydraulics. In one, a wounded lake monster drinks Flathead Lake dry and drags the water off inside its own body through Big Draw; when the water bursts free the people run to Baldy Mountain and Hawk sings the flood down, and Big Draw is left behind as the monster’s path. In the other, a giant beaver dams the old outlet at Big Arm, then dams the southern outlet near Polson, until heavy snowmelt breaks the southern barrier and opens the modern Flathead River. The two dams sit where glacial ridges sit, and the final break follows the last drainage of ancestral Lake Flathead.

In the upper Great Lakes the water beings kill Nanabozho’s wolf relative; when he strikes back they flood the world; he and the animals survive together, and Muskrat dives and comes up with the earth that becomes the ground. A recent Anishinaabe-centred study is the first to place that sequence beside the filling of the upper Great Lakes as the ice withdrew — the water in the story and the water that made this country arriving at the same moment.

On the Peace River the Dane-zaa flood is snow. It piles up through four summers without warmth and then melts all at once, and some of the people escape by becoming waterbirds, and the bird people fetch up the earth and rebuild the land. Of every tradition on this map, that is the one whose physical mechanism sits closest to the thing the whole map is about: ice that accumulates, and then goes.

And on the Atlantic, in Mi’kma’ki, the water builds. It rises fast and islands begin to form; a man and a woman survive in a canoe; Beaver dies trying to make them an island, and Muskrat finishes it. Matthew Betts and Brian Suttie compare the account directly with the rapid postglacial sea rise and island formation of about 11,000 to 10,000 years ago. In Mi’kma’ki the flood is not the end of a country. It is the making of one, by animals who dive and fail and dive again.

The question that makes the answer

Hinrich Rink spent twenty years in Greenland and collected two thousand pages of narrative from about fifty named storytellers. He was therefore in a position to say exactly how a flood tradition gets into the record when there was not one there before, and in 1875 he did.

“The mode most generally adopted by travellers when making inquiries among a barbarous or foreign people about their traditions is that of selecting certain facts as subjects for questioning them upon, such as how their country was originally peopled, if their first ancestors came from the West or from the East, if they happened to know anything about a great deluge, &c. By this mode of inquiry the natives most likely, finding that they have no real information to offer, in order to satisfy the questioner and get rid of the trouble he causes them, will be influenced in their answers chiefly by what they think the questioner would best like to hear.” — Hinrich Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), p. 91

Fifty pages earlier he had applied the rule to the specific case. Statements that some tradition of the Deluge exists in Greenland, he wrote, “cannot be accepted without doubt and reservation, because they may have partly originated from the questioners themselves, who pretend to have heard them from the Greenlanders, but have probably involuntarily acted upon the latter by their prepossessed mode of questioning.” His own method followed from it: never ask about a deluge; ask people to tell you what they actually tell each other at their own gatherings, and take down what comes.

Greenland has no point on this map, and that absence is Rink’s doing. It is the most useful thing any nineteenth-century collector did for a project like this one, because it converts the rest of the map into evidence. Le Page du Pratz asked the Natchez temple guardian about a flood and got a short answer shaped by the asking — which is why the Natchez row now runs on Swanton’s full text instead. Ed Sampson Sr. said plainly that the Elwha flood is the flood in the story of Noah. Angela Sidney compared her Tagish flood with the Bible herself. Where a story survives that comparison and still has a named mountain, a named clan, a named spring, an anchor-line and a crest, the local material is precisely the part nobody imported.

One more body of material is kept off this map on purpose, and for the opposite reason: it is too well dated. The Cascadia traditions — Huu-ay-aht at Pachena Bay, Makah, Quileute, Hoh, Nuu-chah-nulth — describe a night of shaking followed by a wave that emptied villages, and that night can be given a date: 26 January 1700, fixed by Japanese tide records of an orphan tsunami and by the death rings of drowned coastal trees. They are extraordinary documents, and they are reportage. A wave with a year attached is a different object from a flood no telling can date, and letting a documented night in 1700 stand in for the end of the Ice Age would cost this map the thing that makes it worth drawing. Alsek, where a glacier dam failed around 1852, and Mount Meager, whose landslide dammed the Lillooet about 2,360 years ago, are excluded on the same principle.

The world after the water

Set the sixty-seven traditions side by side and the drowning turns out to be the least of what they are for.

The Batki clan comes out of the water with an office: chief of Mishongnovi, held on the strength of thunder and rain. The people of Temlaham come out of it holding crests in places their ancestors never lived, and the map of the Northwest Coast is the record of which lines broke first. The nations on the Coteau come out of it as the stone itself, which is why the quarry cannot be owned and why the pipe that seals a peace is cut from their flesh. The Arikara come out of it as corn and are the people of corn ever after. The Ráramuri come out of it as two children with six seeds, and every Ráramuri descends from them. The Mandan come out of it owing the water an edged tool from every lodge, every year, for as long as the village stands — and the year’s young men are made warriors at the same ceremony. The Blackfoot come out of it into differently coloured waters and three languages. The St’át’imc come out of it with marriages arranged by Ntcinemkin, the man who saved them — one child taken into his canoe from each family, and each survivor sent afterward to the best food place around Pemberton and Green Lake and Lillooet. The W̱SÁNEĆ come off the mountain with a name.

That is the pattern this series has been tracking from the Persian Gulf to Sahul, and North America states it as plainly as anywhere on earth. The water is not primarily a disaster to be remembered. It is the hinge between one arrangement of the world and the next, and the traditions are overwhelmingly interested in the second one, because the second one is where the tellers live. A Tsimshian house explaining its crest, a Hopi village explaining why a Batki man lays out the cloud symbols, a Dakota man explaining why anyone at all may dig at Pipestone: each is standing inside the world the flood produced, pointing at the thing in front of him, and saying where it came from.

Where the water in the story matches water the ground can still show — the marine shells on the Tsinni Tsinni terrace, the sea in the Fraser Valley, the archipelago cut out of Haida Gwaii, the islands built off Nova Scotia, the Flathead outlets, the megaflood floor of the Willamette, the drowned shelf under Norton Sound — the two accounts agree, and the tradition is doing what its tellers always said it did: handing on the shape of a country that changed. The rest of the continent’s floods hand on something better protected than a shoreline. They hand on the clan, the crest, the corn, the ceremony and the peace, which are the parts of that old world their keepers had every reason to carry through intact.

Mapped traditions