This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Emergence Myths gathers three Native North American narratives describing humanity's ascent from a series of prior underworlds into the present one, a distinct structure from creation out of nothing or from a single primordial being's body.
Dine Bahane, the Navajo Emergence, holds the people passed through a series of worlds beneath this one, most commonly four, each ended by conflict or flood, before emerging into the present Glittering World through a reed growing up through a hole in the sky of the world below; First Man and First Woman take form in this account, which continues into the origin of Changing Woman and the Hero Twins. The atlas records this narrative's public shape only; specific ceremonial tellings belong to particular Navajo practitioners and clans and are not reproduced here. The Hopi Emergence Myth tells how humanity climbed upward through a series of earlier, flawed worlds, driven out of each in turn by wrongdoing and disorder, before emerging into the present Fourth World through a hole in the earth called the sipapu, a site the Hopi hold lies within the Grand Canyon, and every kiva, the ceremonial chamber central to Hopi religious life, recalls the emergence. The Zuni Emergence Myth tells how the Zuni ancestors climbed up from a dark fourth underworld through three further underworlds, guided by the twin war gods Ahayuda, before reaching the present world and searching out Itiwana, the Middle Place, where Zuni Pueblo now stands.
All three share the same underlying shape: not a world spoken or built from nothing, but a people already existing who ascend, stage by stage, out of prior and lesser worlds into this one, each account naming a specific place in the present landscape as the site where the ascent ended.