Legends of the Flood in the Western Hemisphere Part 2

Posted by -

In the first part of this series, we considered Flood legends from indigenous peoples of the continental United States area. Nick Liguori is the author of this three-part series, and also the book Echoes of Ararat. He has accumulated a body of evidence about disparate peoples having fragments of Genesis Flood memories handed down by their ancestors.

There are many tribes of which most people have never heard, some were isolated from each other, but they had verbal traditions. (Something I should have mentioned before is the Walam Olum, the "Red Record", a written document of the Delaware Indians that has many surprising parallels to the biblical accounts.) Now we can venture north, out of the continental U.S.

The previous post was about Great Flood and Noah's Ark legends of indigenous continental U.S. peoples. Now we venture much further north. This Kwakiutl probably knew of some.
Hamasaka, a Kwakiutl chief in Tluwulahu costume with speaker's staff—Qagyuhl (principal chief)
Modified from Library of Congress / Edward S. Curtis, ca. November 1914

Crossing the border into Canada, these groups are even more widely separated and had even less contact with white people than their counterparts further south. I'll allow that some of the legends are way off the mark when compared to the biblical narrative, but there are still certain elements in common even in the more unusual legends.

Let us begin with the Cree people, that settled a vast section of Canada. Their ancient tradition, passed down from generation to generation, states that God sent the flood because people became completely disobedient. But a good man named Wesaketchan “built a large raft on which he boarded all his family, as well as a pair of all the birds and all the animals.” The man sent out a raven and a dove, the latter of which “returned with a piece of clay in its legs. The man concluded that the earth was quite dry, and he landed.” The Montagnais or Innu of eastern Canada said, “God, being angry with the giants, commanded a man to build a large canoe. The man did so, and when he had embarked in it, the water rose on all sides, and the canoe with it, till no land was anywhere to be seen.” They have a memory of Noah’s raven too.

To read the entire article, see "Flood Legends from the Americas, Part 2: Canada and the Arctic". In the short video below, Calvin Smith gives an overview of worldwide Flood legends, and points out that it's always a flood in  judgement. The final article in the series is here.