Orendism

Orendism takes its name from orenda, a term scholars have used for a power that the Iroquoian peoples were thought to see in people, songs and natural things. It stands here for the traditional religion of the Haudenosaunee, among them the Mohawk, Oneida and Seneca, of the Northeastern Woodlands.

In their creation story the ruler Hawëni:yo’ lets the pregnant Sky Woman fall from a floating island above the clouds. Birds bear her down to the Turtle, on whose back Muskrat’s mud grows into the earth. She dies giving birth to the twins Hahgwehdiyu, the Good Mind, and Sawiskera, the Flint, who fought over the world.

Each village had a storyteller, and tales were not told in summer. In the late 1700s the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake gathered elements of the old religion into his Code.