Why Should We Teach Students About Creation Myths?

There is a creation myth which I really like–Sedna, an Inuit Tale.

Have you ever wondered why the ocean is calm sometimes and other times it is a huge storm?

Or why fisherman can have a good catch one day and not the next?

Here is a story about it–Sedna is about a beautiful young Inuit woman who is wooed by a handsome man. Once she agrees to marry him and travel to his home, he tricks her leaving her there by herself.

Her father goes looking for her and paddles his kayak to the loon bird’s island. He finds his daughter and escapes with her. However, on the way home, a dangerous storm comes up on the ocean. The kayak tips this way and that, and in desperation to save himself he throws his daughter overboard!

Sedna swims to the kayak and begs to be let back in the kayak, but her father is so afraid he stabs her hands three times with a knife.

Here’s where the creation myth comes in–as the blood swirls in the ocean, it makes a whale, the seal and walrus.

Because of her father’s fear and shunning, Sedna sinks to the bottom of the ocean and lives there for all of eternity.

Have you wondered why fisherman can find fish sometimes and other times not? It’s because of Sedna.

When she is happy, she releases a fish or walrus. But when she is not, the waters are stormy and there is no fish to be had.

Why Should We Teach Students About Creation Myths?

For some teachers, this creation myth is too violent. I don’t see it that way, because many creation myths are violent. Heck, just look at fairy tales!

However, I did some researching and found a few articles about this issue. I compiled them.

“Our students should study mythology, or in this case, creation mythology because myths are ways in which cultures attempt to explain the world and answer questions of human concern. For instance, mythology delves into such basic debates as good versus evil or looks into the nature of man.

Mythology also illustrates different cultures and their narratives. The mythology of each culture is the accumulation of that culture’s knowledge, wisdom and experience. Although mythologies differ, they often follow the same basic themes.

Why Should We Teach Students About Creation Myths?

With roots in the oral tradition, folk and fairy tales have morphed and changed from generation to generation. Mimicking elements of society, folk tales have provided a vehicle for sharing caution, fears, and values, while entertaining adults and children with fantasy.

Over time, folk tales have been created organically and moved haphazardly across borders, societies, and generations germinating minds like pollen being spread by the wind. “In fact, the literary fairy tale has evolved from the stories of oral tradition, piece by piece in a process of incremental adaptation, generation by generation in the different cultures of the people who cross-fertilized the oral tales and disseminated them” (xi) according to Zipes in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm.”

How should a teacher address the conflict in the story?

In my world, the drama world, plays always have conflict. The best stories conflict makes you think and consider the issues–what choices did the character have in the situation?

I think this article says it the best. From Violence and Fear in Folktales by David Boudinot, “It is important to recognize that perceptions of fear and violence change from generation to generation. Marina Warner examines these perceptions in her book From the Beast to the Blonde, and says that to fully understand folk tales you must be aware of the environment it was told or written in.

“I began investigating the meanings of the tales themselves, but I soon found that it was essential to look at the context in which they were told, at who was telling them, to whom, and why.” (xii) As times change, so do the meanings of folk and fairy tales—what was once frightening is now laughable or vice versa. Jack Zipes in Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales contributes this to the current consumer culture obsessed with branding and fairy tale image.

Exposing children to controlled violence in books and stories allows for healthy discourse and provides a means to discuss fears and insecurities in the real world. Make-believe characters and fantasy contribute in a positive way to the dialogue—in ways in which a violent television show or movie could not. Gillian Cross wrote in the School Library Journal, “I think [violence is] crucial to the nature of children’s fiction. Death and danger and injury are hard, definite, dramatic things. Either they have happened, or they haven’t. They change you. Real life is like that, too.” From Violence and Fear in Folktales by David Boudinot

Death and danger and injury are hard, definite dramatic things. If a teacher approaches the conflict in the story by minimizing it, I think the students will accept it.

My Sedna, an Inuit tale comes in three versions: a unit, just the play or as a reader’s theater piece.

If you are interested in any of them, check them here:

Sedna, an Inuit Tale Play Only

Sedna, an Inuit Tale Reader’s Theater

15 Minute Play and Unit, Sedna and Inuit Tale

I performed The Steadfast Tin Soldier for a theater class in high school. It’s one of my favorites, too. I directed The Red Shoes and it is a very dramatic play! A funny folk tale I like is The Brave Little Tailor. I adapted the story into a class play.