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In 2002 I was asked to take part in a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The panel was to be a recognition of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Charles H. Long’s Alpha: The Myths of Creation, a book that has been published in numerous editions and has become a standard work among historians of religion.1 In thinking about my presentation, I decided that I would turn to Alpha as an entrée into a discussion of Kluskap, a mythic hero among the Mi’kmaq of northeastern North America. In spite of a flurry of ethnographic work focused on Kluskap in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, he has not received much scholarly attention in recent years. So I decided that I would consider current Kluskap myths in light of Alpha. It seemed to me that the plan was relatively straightforward, but I could not have been more mistaken. The research I began at that time led me on a journey that would last for a number of years and ultimately leave me somewhere far removed from where I would have imagined in 2002. In retrospect this seems somehow appropriate, given that Alpha is a book in which journeys of all kinds figure prominently. There are human journeys from formless potential, through various nonhuman places and modes, to fully human existences in a human worlds.2 There are journeys of divine beings from places of primordial chaos to the order of the natural world and journeys from water, darkness, or embryonic modes to earth, light, or being of some form or another.3 My own journey now seems appropriate, too, since I was 1 treaties and aquatic parasites 8 finding kluskap pursuing Kluskap—a figure who, whatever else may be said of him, was continually on the move. Envisioning my American Academy of Religion presentation, I imagined an exercise in which I would wed certain aspects of Alpha with the figure of Kluskap. And I was initially fairly confident that this would be an uncomplicated project. From written accounts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century missionaries, journalists, travelers, and ethnographers, I had learned that this ancient hero of the Mi’kmaq had given animals and birds their voices, he had created the wind that moved the water, and he had made great rocks and chasms simply by blowing smoke from his pipe.4 According to some accounts, Kluskap was one of a set of primordial twins who had to outwit and murder his evil brother to avoid being killed by him.5 Among his most spectacular exploits was his journey up a great river with his lifelong companions, Marten and Grandmother Bear. The cliffs suddenly began to close around them, and the water began to flow downward into the earth, the river becoming increasingly narrow and tempestuous , the deadly current pulling the three voyagers down through rocks and ravines. Marten and Grandmother died from fear, but Kluskap continued to guide the canoe through the night until he broke into sunlight. When he reached the shore, he carried his companions to a wigwam, where he brought them back to life.6 Prior to his leaving the Mi’kmaq, it was said that he rid the world of primordial monsters, cleared rivers for navigation, and taught the people all they needed to know to survive in their world.7 In the summer of 2002, with a presentation hanging over me, Kluskap seemed almost too good to be true. He was one of a set of primordial twins representing good and evil; he had descended into watery chaos to bring regeneration; he had taught human beings to know themselves. Resonating with the scenario of primal hostility between divine figures that Long had presented in Alpha, here was a situation in which “an evil brother seems to posses greater physical power, [but] he cannot finally defeat the good twin”; and, again, reverberating with Long’s discussion of mythic descent into water, Kluskap’s journey down the great river was “analogous to a descent into the underworld or a return to the womb. The purpose of such descents into the unformed and chaotic is renewal and stability.” In addition, a story concerning Kluskap’s birth (which I will consider more fully later) mirrored precisely those myths that Long described in which the “evil twin refuses to be born in the usual manner and breaks through the side of the mother, killing her.”8...

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