Earthmaker

after Earthmaker has created the universe and all its inhabitants, animal and human, he discovers that evil beings are about to exterminate man. In order to help them he sends Wakdjunkaga, the first being comparable to man he has created, down to earth.

This passage establishes Earthmaker's central cosmogonic and salvific role: as the creator who, discovering cosmic threat, dispatches Wakdjunkaga on a redemptive mission — the theological foundation for interpreting the Trickster's terrestrial adventures.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis

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He suddenly recollected the purpose for which he had been sent to the earth by Earthmaker. That is why he removed all these obstacles along the river.

The passage dramatizes Wakdjunkaga's recovered memory of Earthmaker's mandate, linking the Trickster's intermittent moral agency directly to the divine intentionality of his creator.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis

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The person we call Wakdjunkaga was created by Earthmaker, and he was a genial and good-natured person. Earthmaker created him in this manner. He was likewise a chief.

A conservative Winnebago elder's testimony affirms Earthmaker as the deliberate author of Wakdjunkaga's nature and social rank, framing the Trickster not as demonic anomaly but as intentional creation.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis

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How can your uncles and aunts live as you do? Earthmaker did not make them thus. All things have to have an end.

The grandmother's rebuke to Hare invokes Earthmaker as the authority for the necessity of mortality, situating the creator's design as the cosmological ground of finitude contra utopian fantasy.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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He is possibly identical with Bladder, supposed to be the third of the heroes created by Earthmaker but who has, in some myths, been merged with one of the evil spirits.

A footnote traces Earthmaker's creative hierarchy among heroic beings, noting the mythological instability by which one of his creations becomes conflated with an evil spirit — indicating the ambiguity latent within even intentional divine creation.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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