North America, Turtle Island, and the Study of Religion

This is the two authors’ response to the comments on their books, The Gods of Indian Country and The Story of Radio Mind, offered by Kathleen J. Martin, Sylvester A. Johnson, Tiffany Hale, and Greg Johnson. It addresses questions regarding the history of land in North America and Turtle Island, and reflects on the authors’ own ancestors’ histories, the use of a variety of sources to tell Indigenous and settler histories, and the politics and protocols of stories.

Questions of the history of land in North America and Turtle Island — and the gaps between those two names for the continent — are at the heart of both our books: how do people draw their sustenance from the land, tell stories that tie them and their communities to particular places, or use power, both political and spiritual, to share land or to steal it? (For two Anishinaabe accounts of the genesis of the name “Turtle Island,” see Johnston 1976: 11–20; Simpson 2011: 65–83.) It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in the minutes before our book panel session at the AAR, we discovered that our Anabaptist ancestors had been neighbors, in relative prairie terms. Our grandfathers — an Amish farmer from Mylo, North Dakota, and a Mennonite farmer-preacher from Halbstadt, Manitoba — were born about a hundred miles from each other as the crow flies, on either side of what our countries consider to be the border between the United States and Canada.