Watch artist Marie Watt explore the story of Turtle Island | West to East | Full Documentary

This story begins in the far west, in the present-day city of Portland, Oregon, where thousands of years ago the largest meteorite ever discovered in the United States collided with the earth. This is one of many replicas in Oregon, smaller than the original meteorite. For some, it's known as the Willamette meteorite. But for the indigenous peoples of these lands, the Clackamas Chinook, it's known as Tamanawas. They believe that it came to the earth as a representative of the sky people. Here in America, a place that for some of its earliest inhabitants was named Turtle Island, many people still turn to the sky for answers to timeless questions about our deepest origins. I am a member of the Seneca Nation, and I'm an artist. I think in a lot of my work, I use stories that have, for me, cultural resonance, and they are often passed on in one's family. In our community, Turtle Island is considered North America, but in some tribes, Turtle Island is the planet Earth, and it's an integral part of our creation story. My mother did tell me the story. I guess I'm Marie Watt's mom. She was raised in a time where most indigenous people, there was this expectation to assimilate. I grew up on the Cataraugus Reservation in upstate New York. My parents spoke to each other in Seneca, but school was in English, and that's what we spoke. That impacted the way cultural knowledge was shared, and it doesn't mean that it wasn't there, because it was. We know it was. There's many renditions of that creation story. I'm interested in hearing her tell the story again. She looks down, and she sees a world of water. All of a sudden, she loses her balance. She's trying to grab on the roots of the tree, but the only thing she got in her hands was dirt. She's going down and down and down. The birds fly beneath her, and just then, a great turtle comes to the surface of the water, and the birds gently put her on the back of the turtle. She releases the dirt in her hands, and it multiplies. It just keeps growing and growing until there's a large, large piece of land. We call it Turtle Island. That's the creation story my parents gave to me. What does it mean to call a place like North America Turtle Island? How does that change our relationship to this place, or how does it invite us to steward this place in a different way than maybe we had treated it before? Art triggers our imagination to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, but maybe some ideas have much more in common than we think. Like Sky Woman, the Willamette meteorite fell to Earth, leaving no visible trace of its impact, but becoming part of the story of the people native to this place, bringing with it a glimpse into the origins of this planet, this land. This is another replica of the Willamette rock, just 13 miles from Maria's studio. Until a new plaque was installed in 2022, it made no mention of the indigenous peoples of these lands, the Clackamas Chinook, or how they knew about the meteorite long before Ellis Hughes stumbled upon it in 1902. The Clackamas believed that the meteorite had supernatural powers and used the rainwater it collected for healing and protection. In the 1850s, the Clackamas Chinook people, along with more than 20 other tribes, were forcibly relocated to other territories. Tamanawas, their sacred rock, was left behind. I love the knots on this one. Yeah, I know nothing about knitting, but that looks hard. This looks hard and I know a little bit about knitting. You know, when you touch this blanket, you know that somebody spent all this time making it. In our community, we give a blanket away to honor a person for being witness to an important life event, and yet I also am aware of how blankets exist in the world in other contexts. I really wanted to make a sculpture of folded and stacked blankets that would reach skyward and connect earth and sky, especially thinking about our creation story. I realized very quickly that blankets were stories and markers for memory, and so I put a blank book out wherever I'd be installing, and I invited people to start the book with some stories. October 5th, 2006. When I was about eight or nine, my mom got hepatitis C from using drug needles. They said she had two months to live, so she started to make us these quilts to remember her by. When my father passed away in 2001, he had a favorite blanket. I received my uncle's blanket as a child. That blanket protected her granddaughter. They both went off to the hereafter together. My blanket became a very important part of my life. I won't ever forget her or the blanket. Kathy Holler, Talena Hampton, Cindy Weakland, Shoshone, Moscow, Idaho, Westbrook, Wyoming. Marie's art not only connects the earth with the sky, but also becomes the safekeeper of the stories that the blankets carry. It's a reminder of the fragility of stories, that if they can't be told, are lost, and with them, their teachings. Just as the meteorite and the story it carried nearly vanished when it fell into the hands of the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, who planned to melt it down for its valuable iron and nickel. But before they could, an East Coast philanthropist purchased it and donated it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where Timonuous was studied by scientists interested in solving the mysteries behind the celestial object. Timonuous became the museum's star attraction in a city that was also in the midst of its quest to conquer the sky. Like the meteorite, Marie also relocated for a while to New York, closer to the native lands of her own Seneca people, bringing with her the stories she had gathered in the Pacific Northwest. I felt like I left the conifers of the Pacific Northwest for these skyscrapers. I learned that there were a bunch of Haudenosaunee, and specifically Mohawk, iron workers who were significant contributors to building Manhattan skyscrapers. They were walking at these incredible heights, often without a harness. That's how they received the name Skywalkers. I saw myself in that name, Skywalker, and I saw my community in that name. So I am paying homage to our indigenous skywalkers. Working with I-BEAMS was a way of acknowledging this history and this sky space that connects to Sky Woman, but also that kind of connects us back to Earth. Our steel supplier, Abe, shared that my ancestors could have touched these beams. Well, steel is the most recycled product on Earth, and it's 100% recyclable. And so it was a logical possibility that something she's working with today was touched by her ancestors at one time. I love working with materials that perhaps somebody from a past generation, somebody in my community, has also held in common. In some ways, I'm continuing a story. Part of that might be attached to this reality that there were gaps in the history of telling stories. It goes back to who is telling the story, also the power of the pen, who can write it down and distribute that story. How many meteorites might have been melted for their metal? How many sacred stories erased? But perhaps there's hope, because stories, like metal, don't always disappear. Sometimes they meld with others and emerge once more. The Clackamas people never forgot their sacred rock. For years, they fought to reclaim it. Now, they visit and honor Tamanawas thousands of miles away from their land, among the planets and stars, not in the sky, but in a museum dedicated to contemplating the mysteries of the universe. Because we are all still seeking to reach the sky, to understand our origins, to understand our future. One thing that's really fascinating to me is this human predilection to occupy this sky space. It's a spiritual space, and it's a vulnerable space. There's a story called lifting up the sky. At some point, the sky is starting to create darkness, it's starting to settle with these clouds, and the residents realize that they're in peril. But everybody speaks different languages. A young girl comes up with this idea, and she says, if we all say one word, yahau, then we can together work on lifting the sky. Once everybody goes and gets these sticks, and they know the word that they're all going to share in common, they say, yay, ahau. And they, yay, ahau. Yay, ahau. And then eventually the sky kind of goes back up. For me, the story is about finding a language, or a way of talking with one another, and working together. When we talk about lifting up darkness, and our creation story, it's a cautionary tale. Sky Woman fell through a hole in the sky, and now when we talk about holes in the sky, we're talking about global warming, right? Something that might bring an end to us all. These stories remind us that we're custodians of the Earth and Turtle Island, this place that we live.