Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass: Foil 1 key example

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.