Mandan

(map)

The earth is a large tortoise. Once a tribe, digging for badgers, dug deep into the earth and cut through the shell of Tortoise. Tortoise began to sink, and water rose through the knife cut. The water covered all the ground and drowned all the people except one man, Nu-mohk-muck-a-nah, who escaped in a large canoe to a mountain in the west. Today, a plank structure called the "big canoe" stands in the central plaza of a Mandan village. The Mandans celebrate the subsidence of the flood every year with a ceremony called Mee-nee-ro-ka-ha-sha, held when willow leaves are fully grown because the twig that the turtle-dove brought home had such leaves. In the ceremony, a man representing the survivor collects edged tools from each household; these are later thrown into a deep pool. If this sacrifice is not made, the man says, another flood will come and destroy everyone.

Frazer, 1919, 292-294; Judson, Katharine B. Myths and Legends of the Missippi Valley and the Great Lakes (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1914), 20.