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Dramatic Irony
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Skywoman and Eve:
As Kimmerer tells it, Skywoman and Eve, the respective first women in the Haudenosaunee and Judeo-Christian creation stories, are foils. Kimmerer argues that these two women have had wildly different impacts on the cultures to which they are important:
One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.
Both Skywoman and Eve leave behind gifts, or legacies, for their descendants. The main difference between the two of them lies in the legacy itself. Skywoman leaves behind a legacy of creation. She gives her life to making a "good green world" for her descendants to inherit and continue nurturing for future generations. Eve, meanwhile, leaves behind a legacy of suffering on earth until she reaches her "real home in heaven." She teaches her descendants that there is nothing good for them on earth and that they must strive for happiness in the afterlife. Kimmerer remarks on the unsurprising outcome when these two legacies meet: Eve's descendants battle against the perceived cruelties of the earth Skywoman's descendants have been trying to nurture, and the entire earth becomes a monument to the conflict between people committed to honoring their own foremother.
Kimmerer goes on to comment wryly on what would happen if Eve and Skywoman met:
They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick …”
Kimmerer leaves it ambiguous which woman is speaking and which woman has been scorned. On the one hand, Skywoman has gotten "the short end of the stick" because the world she created and the people she mothered have suffered such violence at the hands of Eve's descendants. On the other hand, Eve is the one who initially received a raw deal when she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden. All this time, she could have been growing her own garden with Skywoman. Kimmerer does not necessarily advocate sweeping centuries of historical violence under the rug, but she does use the similarities between Eve and Skywoman to suggest that Indigenous and Judeo-Christian people alike would benefit from working together to nurture a more hospitable earth.
Related Themes:
