Blog on the Iroquois Creation Story

I want to discuss the biblical themes in the Iroquois creation story because I think it'll be an interesting thing to look at and because I think it will help me reflect upon my own cultural biases. In addition to his cultural biases, the English writer clearly made a number of just syntax errors in his translation. I think the most obvious one is his use of the word monsters to describe the creatures under the earth. From the story, it seems like the "monsters" are simply neutral observers. But besides this I think the nomenclature is mostly accurate at least there weren't any obvious errors. But now, to discuss the western cultural influences in the retelling. Or at least the similarities between the retelling and biblical stories. The similarity that stands out the most to me is the hell afterlife being under the earth. The other interesting bit was the world creation story and the idea that light was created by god. And interestingly the battle of good vs evil. 

Personally I don't think that I would have these particular biases because similarly to most kids I am not religious, yet anyways these things tend to change with time. But I see these kinds of poor translations or attempts at trying to apply things from one culture to another, especially with language. My family is bilingual and I see people applying sentence structure and especially expressions from one language to another. It applies to ideas as well. I notice this all the time that when I form an idea in Spanish the translation is always poor and the same is true the other way around. If this sort of thing is true only in my brain that I cant imagine what the difficulties must be when attempting cross-cultural communication between two different people or groups.