The twins Sapling and Flint
At a Glance
- Central figures: Sapling (also called the Good Mind or Tharonhiawakon) and Flint (also called the Evil Mind or Tawiskaron), twin grandsons of Sky Woman, born to her daughter who died giving them life.
- Setting: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) tradition - the Five Nations of upstate New York and southern Ontario; the story takes place on the new earth formed on Turtle’s back after Sky Woman’s fall from the sky world.
- The turn: Flint forces his way out through his mother’s side, killing her, and the twins grow to shape the world in opposition to each other - Sapling creating what sustains life, Flint twisting and obstructing it.
- The outcome: Sapling defeats Flint in a final contest and drives him beneath the earth, though Flint’s work remains in the world as illness, harsh weather, and dangerous creatures.
- The legacy: The earth as the Haudenosaunee know it - its rivers, animals, seasons, and the presence of both good and difficulty - bears the mark of both twins, and the story remains central to the Haudenosaunee understanding of how the world took its shape.
Sky Woman’s daughter was pregnant with twins, and the twins argued before they were born. They argued inside her body. One of them, Sapling, was quiet-natured and came into the world the usual way. The other, Flint, refused to follow. He pushed through his mother’s side and she bled and died on the new earth that had only just been made on Turtle’s back.
Sky Woman wrapped her daughter’s body and buried it. From the grave, plants grew - corn from her body, beans, squash, tobacco. The earth was still young. It was dark much of the time. The twins were small, and Sky Woman raised them, and they grew fast the way beings grew in those first days.
The Body in the Ground
Sky Woman grieved, and she watched the twins. Sapling was gentle with the new plants. Flint pulled at things. He broke sticks. He squeezed stones until they cracked.
Sky Woman asked Flint how he had been born. He told her that Sapling had killed their mother - that Sapling had torn his way out and left her to die. Sky Woman believed him. She favored Flint after that and was cold to Sapling, and Sapling did not correct her. He went off by himself to the edges of the new land.
The earth on Turtle’s back was still mostly water and mud. Sapling began to work. He shaped the land, pushed up hills, smoothed out valleys where rivers could run. He made the rivers flow in both directions so that people, when they came, could travel easily upstream and downstream. He made animals - deer, elk, beaver, birds that filled the air. He made fruit trees and berry bushes. He set the sun in the sky so there would be warmth, and the moon so there would be light enough to travel at night. The work took a long time. He was thorough.
Flint’s Countershaping
Flint watched what Sapling made and went behind him. Where Sapling had made rivers flow in two directions, Flint changed them so they only flowed one way - downstream - and put rocks and rapids in the water. Where Sapling had made fat, gentle animals, Flint made creatures with teeth and claws. He made mosquitoes. He made thorns grow on the berry bushes. He put bones inside the fish so they would be harder to eat.
Sapling made the land flat enough to walk on easily. Flint crumpled it, pushed up mountains with jagged rock faces, opened gorges and crevices. Sapling made corn grow tall and full. Flint made the growing season short and sent frost.
They did not always confront each other directly. They worked on the same world but at different times, in different places. Sapling would find the changes when he returned to a place he had shaped. He would see the rapids in the river, the bones in the fish, the winter settling over the land, and he would know.
He did not undo everything Flint did. Some of it he left. The world needed difficulty in it - or at least, Flint had made the difficulty part of the world’s structure, and pulling it out would have meant unmaking too much.
The Contest of Making
The twins met. They had grown to their full size. Sapling stood in front of Flint and said that only one of them should have authority over the shaping of the earth, that the world could not keep being built and torn apart at the same time.
Flint agreed to a contest. Each would make something, and the one whose creation was greater would rule.
Sapling made a deer. It stood in the clearing - alive, breathing, warm, its coat reddish in the light. It turned its head and walked into the trees.
Flint tried to make a deer. He could not get it right. The legs came out wrong, stiff and uneven. The body was heavy and would not balance. He pushed and reshaped the thing and what he ended up with was something low to the ground, hard-shelled, with a flat tail and thick limbs. It was not a deer. But it was alive. He had made something. Some say this was the first turtle made by Flint’s hand - not the great Turtle who carried the earth, but smaller turtles, stubborn and slow.
Flint was not satisfied. He could not match what Sapling made. The contest did not settle things cleanly.
The Fight at the Edge of the World
What settled things was fighting. The two twins fought, and the fight was serious.
They each had a weakness. Sapling could be hurt by corn stalks or cattail reeds - soft things, growing things. Flint could be hurt by the antlers of a deer. Each twin knew the other’s weakness. The question was who would use the knowledge first.
They fought across the land they had made. The ground shook. Hills split open. Lakes filled with displaced water. Flint struck at Sapling with flint-edged weapons and with shards of rock torn from the mountains he had raised. Sapling took a deer antler and drove it into Flint.
Flint broke. Pieces of him scattered across the earth. Wherever a piece of Flint’s body fell, chert and flint stone lay in the ground afterward - the sharp-edged stone that people would later use for tools and weapons. Flint was not dead. He could not die entirely. But he was broken and driven beneath the earth, into the dark places under the rock.
Sapling stood on the land. It was scarred from the fight. Some of the rivers had changed course. New valleys had opened where they had wrestled. He did not try to fix all of it.
The World As It Is
Sky Woman was old by then. Some versions say she learned the truth about which twin had killed her daughter and grieved again. Some say she never learned. She died and her body became part of the earth, joining her daughter beneath the soil.
Sapling walked the world he had shaped. It was not the world he would have made alone. The rivers ran only one way. The fish had bones. Winter came and stayed for months. Animals hunted each other. Thorns grew beside the berries.
But corn grew from his mother’s grave. Deer moved through the forests. The sun crossed the sky each day and the moon followed. People would come, and the earth on Turtle’s back would hold them, and they would find flint in the ground and make tools from it - from the body of the twin who had tried to ruin everything his brother built.
The Haudenosaunee tell it this way: the world carries both twins in it. Sapling’s work is in every living thing that feeds and shelters the people. Flint’s work is in the cold, in sickness, in the sharp rocks underfoot. Neither one is absent. The world is the argument between them, and it has not ended.