Table of Contents
Randall Carlson argues that Native flood traditions remember real catastrophes, not a tale borrowed from missionaries or a river story swollen by retelling. Deluge narratives, he says, turn up across the continents, often with survivors in a great canoe, and the easy reply is to call them late copies of a biblical plot. Against that, he cites the painter George Catlin, who visited many nations and, in Carlson’s telling, found one shared belief. Those peoples said they descended from ancestors who lived through a disaster that destroyed everyone else. When outsiders arrived with a flood story, the answer was that the story was already theirs. He then turns to giant floods in the Pacific Northwest. Speed, he argues, decides cutting power. Water off a plateau can strip basalt, freeze the damage when the flow dies, and leave lines high on mountainsides. He does not argue for one worldwide ocean. He argues that science can show floods able to erase a region. He ties that picture to the brief Clovis presence and the Kennewick remains in late flood deposits.
Key points
- He rejects missionary borrowing and a single Mesopotamian river tale as explanations of Native flood stories.
- George Catlin is his witness that many nations shared a memory of ancestors spared from a wipeout.
- He says those nations already knew the story when Europeans arrived with theirs.
- Scoured bedrock and high waterlines are his picture of floods that can destroy a region without covering the planet.
- Clovis camps and the Kennewick remains are brought in as possible human traces beside those floods.
Short quotes
they were descended from ancestors who survived a great catastrophe that wiped out everybody else
Randall Carlson, Randall Carlson on Native flood stories
This is the shared tradition he says Catlin heard across many Native nations. Watch at 3:17
the erosion capacity of moving water is a function of the Velocity
Randall Carlson, Randall Carlson on Native flood stories
He uses flow speed to explain how a flood can strip a landscape down to rock. Watch at 7:10
we now can scientifically demonstrate that there are floods not that universally drowned the whole planet but can destroy a world
Randall Carlson, Randall Carlson on Native flood stories
His conclusion is regional world-ending floods, not one ocean over the entire earth. Watch at 14:03
Video by The Randall Carlson. Watch on YouTube.