Last updated: July 30, 2023
This is a post I need to write while it’s still winter. The Anishinaabeg, like most Algonquian and many other Native peoples, have a traditional prohibition on telling traditional sacred stories (aadizookaanag) during the warmer months. During the warmer months, unwholesome creatures—frogs, toads, serpents, and their kin—are active and may be listening, as are all the manitous (gods/spirits) and other characters mentioned in the stories. One of these characters in particular must never be named until winter, for to name him is to risk drawing his attention. And you do not wish to draw his attention. His domain is that of the waters, so it is only in winter, when the lakes and rivers are frozen over with ice and he is trapped slumbering in his domain, that the stories can be told.[1]
The Great Lynx
Were there not creatures inhabiting the deep waters more deadly and dangerous than any of the fish species? How should they be named? . . . How does one name one’s deepest, unspoken fears?
—Dewdney, The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway, pg. 125
Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster . . . . He’s a devil, that one. . . . Our mothers warn us that we’ll think he’s handsome, for he appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child’s. But if you fall into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You’re fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He’s made of gold. He’s made of beach moss. He’s a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive.
—Erdrich, Tracks, pg. 11
The character in question is the manitou of the waters and the underworld, Mishibizhiw or Mishibizhii, whose name literally means “Great Lynx,” but is often referred to as the “Underwater Panther,” “Underwater Lion,” and similar variants, and whose Ojibwe name has been spelled in dozens of different ways, most often as something like “Mishipeshu” or “Mishepishu.”[2] Mishibizhiw was originally distinguished from another manitou, the giant horned serpent Mishiginebig “Great Serpent,” but at least in many cases the two have since merged in Anishinaabe conception, with the name Mishibizhiw coming to cover the aspects of both (or mishiginebig, pl. mishiginebigoog, being the name of some of his underlings), and in this post I will treat both under the rubric of Mishibizhiw. In any event, as a result of this merger, there are basically two forms in which he is conceived. One is as his name would suggest, a large feline creature with an exceptionally long serpentine tail and horns, usually those of a bison; and he often has other chimera-esque features, such as spines along his back, fins, copper scales, etc., and is frequently described as white, or otherwise somehow visually exceptional or stunning (e.g., Waasaagoneshkang in Jones [1917:94, 96] doesn’t describe his physical form at all except to say waabishkizi “he is white” and geget sa onizhishiwan “he was truly beautiful,” while Eshkwegaabaw and Debi-Giizhig in Josselin de Jong [1913:14] say: Geget sa . . . bishigendaagozi, gooning izhinaagozi “He was truly magnificent; he looked like snow”).
This is true of the most well-known depiction of Mishibizhiw, the “most famous rock art painting in Canada” (Conway 2010:36), done in red ocher on the massive cliff face of Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park on the northeastern shore of Lake Superior:
The precise age of the painting is uncertain, but there is some evidence that the Mizhibizhiw panel—there are approximately 17 panels at the site, containing 117 distinct images in total—was done in 1849.[3] Mishibizhiw is accompanied by two serpents, identified by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as mishiginebigoog, while a canoe filled with people stands off to the side; most rock pictographs of Mishibizhiw somewhat ominously include a painting of one or more canoes. Note that he has a feline body, lynx’s cheek tufts, and bison’s horns, and a row of spines down his back. His tail in this image, as with other pictographs of him, is not as long as in images on other media, but otherwise it’s fairly representative. The image is justly famous. Mishibizhiw, “extraordinarily large compared with the usual rock painting” (Dewdney 1975:129), is a haunting, faceless, mesmerizing presence.
In almost all representations of him, Mishibizhiw is facing the viewer head-on as on Agawa Rock. To take another example (this time showing him with the more usual long serpentine tail, as well as with facial features), the following drawing is provided in John Tanner’s 1830 narrative of his life among the Odawas and Ojibwes, taken from a birchbark scroll featuring a curing song:
Beyond rock art and other highly “religious” contexts like healing scrolls and amulets, Mishibizhiw in his feline form was also fairly regularly represented on bandolier bags, pouches, sometimes clothing, and other daily items:
Aside from the feline form, the other form of Mishibizhiw, derived originally from Mishiginebig, is of a gigantic serpent, again with a bison’s horns on his head and a powerful tail, and again, sometimes fins or short legs, copper scales, etc. According to Smith (2012:97-99), for the Odawas and Ojibwes of Manitoulin Island, ON the serpent version is now the only one in which they visualize Mishibizhiw in terms of his actual physical form, though some of them continue to depict him in the feline form in works of art.
At least one Midewiwin birchbark scroll may represent the two forms at once. The Midewiwin was a society of curer-“shamans,” which had a minimum of four “degrees” or stages of increasing knowledge and power to which members could ascend. After they completed their training, the candidate for each new degree was blocked by hostile manitous guarding the entrance to the midewigaan (Midewiwin lodge) through which they had to pass to successfully progress, with the manitous for each successive degree being more powerful and dangerous, and those of the fourth degree incredibly so. In the image below from a ritual scroll depicting the candidate’s task in successfully passing into the fourth degree midewigaan, Mishibizhiw in his two forms, panther and serpent (or Mishibizhiw and Mishiginebig), appear linked together guarding the entrances:
It is significant that Mishibizhiw, in whatever form, is always envisioned and depicted as having horns. In Anishinaabe iconography, horns are a symbol of tremendous spiritual power, and are a conventional way of indicating a powerful medicine man, for example, as in the images below. As we’ll see later, a “Horned Serpent” figure was an extremely widespread belief across North America; still, Mishibizhiw’s representation as horned is a sign of his overwhelming power and majesty—he is the only manitou consistently depicted as having horns.
Additionally, Mishibizhiw’s horns are normally said to be made of copper, a fairly common mineral in the Great Lakes region, frequently found here as native copper, very unusually for copper deposit sites around the world, and which is considered both sacred and spiritually powerful medicine by the Anishinaabeg. In fact, copper is believed to have been deposited by Mishibizhiw, or to actually be his scales or pieces of him. The Jesuit missionary Claude Allouez, writing around 1665, observed that the Anishinaabeg “say . . . that the little nuggets of copper which they find at the bottom of the water . . . are the riches of the gods who dwell in the depths of the earth” and that “[o]ne often finds at the bottom of the water pieces of pure copper . . . . [T]hey keep them . . . as presents which the gods dwelling beneath the water have given them, and on which their welfare is to depend. For this reason they preserve these pieces of copper . . . among their most precious possessions. Some . . . have had them in their families from time immemorial.”[4] The connection between copper and Mishibizhiw is illustrated in some common stories. In one widespread one (told, among others, to William Jones by John Pinesi (Gaagige-Binesi) of Fort William, ON in the early 1900s, to Paul Radin by an anonymous consultant from near Sarnia, ON in 1912-1916, and to Robert Ritzenthaler by Pete Martin at Lac Courte Oreilles, WI in 1942 [Jones 1919:258-259; Radin 1924:513-514; Barnouw 1977:132-133]), Mishibizhiw appears in a whirlpool attempting to drown some girls in a boat; one of the girls strikes his tail with her paddle and a piece of his tail falls off as a chunk of copper (erroneously translated by Radin as “brass”), which provides the people with great power and good luck in the future.
Mishibizhiw is also envisioned as the guardian of copper, at least in some instances; while people could make use of copper they found if they treated it and Mishibizhiw with proper respect and gratitude, “stealing” copper without his assent was not tolerated, as in a story, first written down by Claude Dablon in the Jesuit Relations (JR 54:152-159), about four men who attempted to take a large amount of copper from Michipicoten Island but all ended up dead.
The German traveler Johann Georg Kohl, who visited the Lake Superior Ojibwes in 1855, also noted their veneration of copper. He relates a story told to him by an ex-fur trader, who described how in 1827 he attempted to obtain a large chunk of copper from the chief of one Ojibwe band, with whom he had good relations and who had in the past offered one of his daughters as a marriage match. When the trader made his request, the chief was reportedly silent for a while before responding:
Thou askest much from me, far more than if thou hadst demanded one of my daughters. The lump of copper in the forest is a great treasure for me. It was so to my father and grandfather. It is our hope and our protection. Through it I have caught many beavers, killed many bears. Through its magic assistance I have been victorious in all my battles, and with it I have killed many foes. Through it, too, I have always remained healthy, and reached that great age in which thou now findest me.
The chief eventually relented in return for a large payment of goods—which he subsequently offered as a sacrifice to Mishibizhiw—but insisted that the trader not reveal their transaction to anyone (obviously . . . not a request the trader honored . . .), and is described as “trembling and quivering” while the trader actually picked up the lump of copper. He eventually “bitterly repented” the deal “and ascribed many pieces of misfortune to it” (Kohl 1985:61-64).
As god of the waters, Mishibizhiw controls access to all the fish and other creatures within them—as well as, particularly in the creation myth cycle, land game as well—and can withhold them from humans at his whim. He is also responsible for the dangerous aspects of Lake Superior and other bodies of water in the region: sudden squalls, rapids, unseen currents, whirlpools which he creates through the lashing of his long tail, which is sometimes pictured as having a “heavy knob at the end” (Dewdney 1975:124) that can overturn boats. Many have drowned as a result of his activities. (“Appropriately” enough, several visitors to Agawa Rock have been washed off the slippery, narrow viewing ledge under the cliff by unpredictable rough waves and been injured or killed.) While he sometimes tolerates human presence, ultimately humans are creatures of the earth, and are not meant to cross the limits of their world and stay long on the waters, especially the large lakes. To do so is to trespass into Mishibizhiw’s world. Adding to the level of unease, Mishibizhiw is rarely actually seen in person. He may be seen in dreams and visions (JR 50:288-289), and his effects may be seen in rapids and whirlpools, but it is very rare to catch a glimpse of the manitou himself. You are more likely to simply be pulled into the depths by an unseen paw or tail, to drown, perhaps never to be found, as many drowning victims are never found—or perhaps to be found much later with your mouth, eyes, and ears stuffed with mud (Skinner 1923:47-48 quoted in Howard 1960:217).
Tobacco is a sacred substance for the Anishinaabeg, as it is for many Indian peoples, and is offered to various manitous in thanksgiving, in supplication, or simply as a sign of respect and devotion. Traditionally, Anishinaabeg present a tobacco offering before venturing onto the water, respectfully asking Mishibizhiw to forgive their temporary incursion into his world, take no reprisals against them, and keep the waters calm. They may also offer tobacco or food for him to ensure the supply of fish remains bountiful. In the past, Anishinaabeg would also occasionally sacrifice dogs to Mishibizhiw. Allouez, for instance, described how “[d]uring storms and tempests, they sacrifice a dog, throwing it into the lake. ‘That is to appease thee,’ they say to the latter; ‘keep quiet.’ At perilous places in the Rivers, they propitiate the eddies and rapids by offering them presents . . .”[5] He later directly mentions Mishibizhiw by name, saying, “They hold in very special veneration a certain fabulous creature . . . which they call Missibizi, acknowledging it to be a great spirit, and offering it sacrifices in order to obtain good sturgeon-fishing.”[6]
While dogs are no longer sacrificed, the practice of providing Mishibizhiw with tobacco offerings has continued to the present day for some people. For example, Niiskiigwan of White Earth, MN told Frances Densmore (1979:81) of an instance in which he was traveling with a group of Ojibwes by canoe when they reached a stretch of impassably rough water; Niiskiigwan offered “the Spirit of the Water” some whiskey and tobacco, and within “half an hour the wind veered and they were able to proceed on their way.” Chamberlain (1890:153) reports that when Euro-Canadians began constructing a bridge over part of Lake Simcoe, ON, a consultant of his, Niibinaanakwad, “sacrificed tobacco to appease the lion (mīshībīshī) which the Mississaguas [Mississaugas, an Ojibwe subgroup] believed lived there.” And Hilger’s (1992:62) consultants from the 1930s and 40s gave comments such as, “My aunt always strews tobacco on the water . . . before leaving the shore in order to drive away the evil spirits.” Although Smith (2012:120) reported that her consultants on Manitoulin Island no longer made offerings to Mishibizhiw in the late 1980s-early 1990s, a documentary short film by Francis (2018) shows some Manitoulin residents offering cornmeal to the manitou of a lake, so the practice is clearly still found there as well.
Failure to give proper offerings or show proper respect can have dangerous consequences. Marlene Stately (Anangookwe), an elder from Leech Lake, MN, describes how one day her grandmother forgot to leave a food offering for the water manitous, and they were caught in a whirlpool and barely escaped (GLIFWC 2013:169-171). Barnouw (1977:111-112) relates a story told to him by “Tom Badger” (a pseudonym) at Lac du Flambeau, WI in 1944, in which two girls are crossing Leech Lake in a boat when a giant leech appears in “a current . . . going just like rapids”; one of the girls quickly takes off her beads and other ornaments and throws them into the water as an offering, but the other girl “didn’t know that she should do this,” and is dragged to the bottom by the leech and drowns.[7] And one of Hilger’s consultants from Mille Lacs, MN commented, “Some white men drowned here in the lake, and that did not happen for nothing. Some things are sacred to Indians and white people who make fun of it can expect to be punished. Whites have laughed at Indians putting tobacco in the lake. We put tobacco into the lake whenever we go swimming, or when we want to cross the lake” (Hilger 1992:62).
One may cross into Mishibizhiw’s world not just by entering the water, but simply by being too close to the water. There is a very common story in which an infant is carelessly left alone near the shore for a brief period by a parent, who returns to find the child vanished. Usually someone in the village then hears the child crying underground, and the people try to track down the child, and sometimes even to kill Mishibizhiw. They reach Mishibizhiw’s lair, and sometimes do succeed in killing the manitou, but even when they “succeed,” they have usually come too late and the child has already been killed. Such stories can be found for example in Blackbird (1887:82-84), Radin (1924:493-494, 525-526), Skinner (1928:169-170), Jones (1919:258-261), Morrisseau (1965, cited in Smith 2012:134-135), King and Rogers (1988:74-75), GLIFWC (2013:126-129), and a somewhat different version in Webkamigad (2015:98-109).[8] While the normal version involves a stolen baby, in at least one story (Radin 1914:81-83) Mishibizhiw kills an adult woman walking beside a river.
Although the entirety of the water and underworld realm is Mishibizhiw’s domain, and he can appear anywhere at any time, there are particular sites which are much more intimately linked with him than others. Certain lakes with unusual features are said to be signs of his presence: a lack of fish, oddly colored water, a sudden drop-off in the lake floor or a deep hole or chasm—all these are dangerous signs that Mishibizhiw makes his home here, and these places are usually avoided. Such areas include a deep underwater cavern that gave Manitoulin Island (Old Odawa *Manidoowaaling “The Manitou’s Den”) its name.
Smith claims that in addition to the “Den,” there are a couple of “bad lakes” on Manitoulin as well, Whitefish Lake and Quanja Lake. She describes her visit to Quanja Lake, which she found both “striking and disturbing” (Smith 2012:114):
On our side . . . the lake was extremely shallow, just one to two feet, and banked by a sandy beach. The far shore was ringed by forested cliffs, and on that side the water was a very deep green-blue. The drop-off from shallow to deep water was so extreme that it appeared as if a line were drawn straight down the middle of the lake between the light shallows and the dark depths. What the lake recalled more than anything was a water-filled crack or ravine which had overflowed its banks on our side.[9]
A similar “bad lake” associated with Mishibizhiw, located several miles inland from Lake Nipigon, was described by the missionary Frederick Frost, who refers to it as “the mysterious lake” (Frost 1904:130-136). He states that “[t]he Indians go to it in winter, but never in summer . . . . They would not think of embarking in a canoe upon its surface for any consideration” and notes that there are other lakes they avoid in summer as well, because these “are, they believe, inhabited by fishes of enormous size and vicious habits, something like the sea serpent, that destroy any canoe and eat up any poor Indian who happens to come near.” Frost and a brave Ojibwe companion set out to explore the lake. When they arrived, Frost found that:
It was truly a wonderful sight [i.e., a sight inspiring wonder and amazement]; the water was, indeed, a peculiar color, a glittering, lustrous, greenish blue, not like the color of the water at Bermuda, or the blue of the Mediterranean, nor like the water in the harbor at Barbadoes, nor a mixture of these. The Indian was right when he said it was ghastly. It was a beautiful color, yet somewhat repulsive. I have never seen a blue snake, but it was the same color a snake would be, supposing it were blue. It was intensely brilliant, glittering in the sunshine; it looked like a pigment . . . . I do not wonder that they were struck with the unusual appearance of the lake. It was not sunshine that made it that peculiar color; it was not the reflection of the sky. It was the same when cloudy; it was the same always, in the daytime, probably.
Until now I’ve spoken of Mishibizhiw as an individual, but this is not strictly accurate. There are many such beings, though they have an ogimaa or chief. “Mishibizhiw” as a term is thus vague, and can refer to the individual, chief Great Lynx, or to the class of Great Lynxes of which he is chief, or to some specific non-chief Great Lynx. This multiplicity of Mishibizhiwag explains, in part, how he can be intimately linked to so many specific places, as well as how he can be killed—as in some of the “lost child” narratives mentioned above, and in other narratives that will be described below—yet still survive. However, I will continue to speak of “Mishibizhiw” in the singular, for the most part.
As noted, Mishibizhiw is god not just of the waters but of the land underneath the earth. This is another part of the explanation behind his ability to appear in so many places: he moves between different bodies of water through hidden underground passageways, to emerge when one least expects him. Where he comes close to the surface, or travels across the surface, bogs, spongy ground, and quicksand are created. James Simon of Manitoulin told Smith (2012:100), “Sometimes when the land goes soft on you, he’s been there.”
Just as humans were not meant to spend too much time on the water, we are not meant to traverse this other boundary of our world by traveling under the earth. There are stories in which people foolishly do so, and wind up suffering negative consequences. In one tale from William Jones’s collection, by Gaagige-Binesi, one village of people is having trouble catching enough fish in a large lake, so they dig an underground passageway (zhiibaayaag) connecting the lake to a smaller manmade pond, with their chief undertaking the task of funneling the fish into the smaller artificial pond, while the people will close off the passageway once he has done so. But their action—not merely digging underground but making an underground passage that connects bodies of water—is exactly what Mishibizhiw does, and what humans should not do, and the villagers, with the exception of their chief, are annihilated by Thunderers (see discussion below), though the chief is eventually able to restore them to life (Jones 1919:240-245).
Humans interact with manitous in several ways, depending on the situation, but primarily the relationship between manitou and human is one of respect and dependence on the part of the human and consequent benevolence and pity on the part of the manitou.[10] This is reflected in the customary address of a manitou as “Grandfather” or “Grandmother.” As long as a person behaves respectfully and follows the proper ceremonies, a manitou will indeed take pity on them and their relationship mirrors that between a grandparent and grandchild, with the manitou guiding and providing to the person support and blessings of power or a good long life. These are deeply personal relationships—especially those with one’s tutelary/guardian manitou (called a bawaagan in some dialects) acquired during the childhood vision quest—despite the usually enormous gap in power between the person and manitou.
This is not the case of all human-manitou relationships, however. For instance, the only relationship humans had with windigos, the anthropophagous ice monsters, was one of abject terror. Likewise, although people show Mishibizhiw great respect in recognition of his power and rights, and ask for his protection, the Mishibizhiw-human relationship is not one of pity and dependence respectively, but one in which the best humans can usually hope and ask for is forgiveness and benign neglect.
Nonetheless, in exceptional cases, some people have formed personal relationships of sorts with Mishibizhiw. These could take three main forms. In one form, Mishibizhiw showed up during someone’s vision quest fast and offered himself as their bawaagan; the proper response in such a dangerous situation was to reject the vision and try the quest again. The youth might also have their tongue scraped with a cedar knife to help render the bad vision impotent. (The vision quest was never held during the summer, at least in part to lessen the likelihood that Mishibizhiw or a similar manitou would appear. Likewise, the location where the quest-taker spent their fast was often in a platform in the trees or some other raised location [see, e.g., Densmore 1910:119; Kohl 1985:235-237]—as far from the ground, and thus the influences of the underworld/underwater realm, as possible.) But in some cases a person willingly accepted the vision,[11] and in other cases a person failed to recognize that they were speaking with Mishibizhiw until it was too late.
Dahlstrom (2003) presents a story of just such a situation for a Meskwaki boy. (The Meskwakis or Foxes are another Algonquian people, like the Anishinaabeg; the story was written by Alfred Kiyana, a native Meskwaki speaker, around 1912.) In this case the boy is not on a traditional fasting vision quest, but swimming in the icy water during winter as a substitute for fasting, when he suddenly winds up in a lodge with four manitous, who tell him, “Now, grandchild, we certainly bless you.” Other than the fact that this takes place in the water, so far this may seem like a normal, propitious vision—the manitous offer to bless the boy and address him as a grandchild. However, the manitous immediately reveal that “they” have been deceptive: “‘But we are not really four now,’ they told him. ‘I am just one,’ he said.” The now visibly singular manitou then explains that the young man should return in the summer, and he will provide him with the actual blessing then. Despite the warning signs—the young man had no tobacco, he met the manitou underwater, the manitou was acting alone rather than appearing with other manitous, he had initially been deceptive, and the blessing must take place in summer and not winter—the young man agrees. The manitou does give him a blessing that summer, which the youth uses to successfully kill many Sioux. Immediately after receiving the blessing, however, another, winged manitou arrives and scolds the boy for accepting the blessing from the underwater manitou instead of from the winged manitou, whose blessing would have been far superior. Much later, the underwater manitou kills the youth’s parents, and is about to kill the youth himself when the winged manitou intervenes to save him.
Kiyana included in his manuscript of the story an illustration of the underwater manitou (of whom the boy says “wîna-nîhka kîshâkochi-meko-neshiwinâkosikwêni” “he must really look extremely terrifying!”), which shows him as a chimera, somewhat similar to Mishibizhiw, with a bison’s head and horns, fins, two legs, a reptilian/serpentine body, scales, and rattlesnake’s tail:
A second type of relationship humans could have with Mishibizhiw, or at least indirectly with some of his serpent underlings, was a sexual or potentially sexual one. Pomedli (2014:181-183) relays several stories from Rama, ON, collected by G. E. Laidlaw, in which women take a serpent for a husband or as a close friend. In most cases, a male relative kills the serpent. In one of the stories, a 12-year-old girl befriends a serpent, but her father shoots it; she complains, “Why did you kill the best friend that I had?” and dies several days later from grief. In a story from Laidlaw (1927:68), told by Lottie Marsden, a young woman disappears from her family for several years, and returns with a serpent daughter, having married a serpent in her absence. Her father secretly murders both her husband and the child, but tells his daughter that the husband was killed by Mohawks, which the daughter believes (and also believes the child’s death to be an accident). In a Plains Ojibwe story (Skinner 1928:169), an unknown man comes and sleeps with a Sioux woman for several nights; there’s no indication that she knows who he is, but the narrator states that another “girl saw him; he was a horned snake.” She becomes pregnant, and while her husband at first assumes the child is his, the woman eventually gives “birth” to a hundred eggs. Unlike in most other versions, here the husband does not murder the snake, his wife, or the offspring—instead he places the eggs by a lake, following instructions received in a dream. Since the protagonists are Sioux, it’s likely that the story was taken by the Plains Ojibwes from the Sioux and is not originally an Ojibwe one; it is evidently found among other Plains peoples as well, such as the Blackfeet (see here for example), and I suspect is a more broadly distributed Plains tale.
The most widespread version of this theme is the “Rolling Head” story, which is very common among Algonquian and neighboring peoples. Though the details vary somewhat, in general the story begins with a family with two children, in which the husband learns his wife is being neglectful of her duties and is always dressed up when he returns home from hunting. Hiding himself, he discovers she is having an affair; he then proceeds to kill the wife and sometimes the lover. (The story then continues with the wife’s severed head, or reanimated body, chasing the children, who have to throw magical objects behind them to obstruct her, usually followed by further episodes which need not concern us.) In most instances, the wife’s lover is a serpent, usually one living in a hole in a tree, and often multiple serpents; though in the traditions of some other cultures, and occasionally in Anishinaabe versions, the lover is a bear instead. The lover is a serpent in a tree in the version collected by Ray and Stevens (1971:48ff) and both versions of the story in Jones’s collection—the first told by Marie Syrette of Fort William, ON (Jones 1919:44ff), and the second by Waasaagoneshkang of northern Minnesota (Jones 1919:404ff). Laidlaw (1915:74-75) also relays a version of the story from Peter York of Rama in which the lover is described in the text itself as a “man,” but where the preface reads: “The story of a woman who visited a man who lived in a tree, and who could change himself into a serpent when he wished.” Most interesting of all, in a Cheyenne Rolling Head story given by Leman (1996), the lover is explicitly named as a méhne, the Cheyenne equivalent of Mishibizhiw! In addition, Kroeber (1900:184-186) gives a different Cheyenne version which omits the actual Rolling Head episode which follows the adultery, and in which the lover is “a large snake” that lives in a lake; since the story was told to him in English and not Cheyenne, the term méhne is not used, but that’s clearly what’s involved.[12]
These stories are part of the larger class of Anishinaabe stories in which a young man or more often young woman marries or cavorts with an animal, normally with negative consequences, though the relative consistency in the woman-serpent stories of a male relative murdering the serpent lover, the wife, and/or any children of their union is noteworthy, as is the attribution of malevolence to the serpent and/or woman. More often, in other “animal spouse” stories, the human is simply “foolish” or the animal is somewhat deceptive or acting improperly in some way, but is not portrayed as actively malevolent.
The final case in which someone can form a personal relationship with Mishibizhiw is when a person, usually only a very powerful sorcerer (and usually an evil one), actually seeks such a relationship out. Mishibizhiw’s power is tremendous, and he can provide enormously powerful medicine to those strong and brave and talented enough to acquire and wield it. Sometimes Mishibizhiw will indeed agree to provide the person with some of his power. Yet their relationship in such cases usually remains very different from the normal relationship between a beneficent manitou and a human; this is a Faustian bargain. Mishibizhiw’s power “is given neither freely nor with any affection, not in the way a grandfather would give it” (Smith 2012:121).
In one story, relayed by Kohl (1985:422-425), a man dreams of Mishibizhiw over several nights, and eventually gives in to the temptation and approaches the water where he is instructed to summon the manitou by drumming on the water with a stick. A massive whirlpool appeares, sucking in everything around it while the water level of the lake rises and nearly drowns the man, then eventually recedes, and at last “the water king emerged from the placid lake, in the form of a mighty serpent. ‘What wilt thou of me?’ he said. ‘Give me the recipe,’ he replied, ‘which will make me healthy, rich, and prosperous.’” Mishibizhiw tells the man to take a substance from off of his horns, which will serve as powerful medicine. In this story the substance is vermilion, but normally it is copper, which as we’ve seen Mishibizhiw’s horns are usually said to be made of. The manitou then consecrates the vermilion and instructs the man in how to use it. Then he adds the dagger thrust, warning the man that “one of thy children must be mine in return for it.” “‘Every time that thou mayst need me,’ he then added, ‘come hither again. I shall always be here. Thou wilt have, so long as thou art in union with me, so much power as I have myself. But forget not that, each time thou comest, one of thy children becomes mine!’” The man returns home, and finds his wife is already dead. He greedily uses the power gained from Mishibizhiw to become “a successful hunter, a much-feared warrior, and a terrible magician,” while his children die one by one. The story ends with the note that “at length a melancholy fate befel him, and he ended his days in a very wretched manner,” though the details are not specified.[13]
(This practice has continued to the present—people interested in “bad medicine” still go to lakes where Mishibizhiw is thought to live in order to collect it [Smith 2012:114].)
This brings us to Mishibizhiw’s role in the Midewiwin. As was noted, the Midewiwin consisted of multiple degrees—usually eight, but only four primariy degrees; very few people progressed past the third degree, and almost none past the fourth degree, beyond which further advancement was generally seen as unnecessary—with candidates for each new degree undergoing a long apprenticeship with an experienced mide (Midewiwin member, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a “priest”) to learn herbal and other medicinal cures, proper protocol for their initiation into that degree, and Midewiwin lore, songs, and rites. Once they were ready, the candidate was admitted to the given degree in a special annual or semi-annual ceremony. However, each increasing degree, since it would confer on the initiate increased—and, in the wrong hands, potentially deadly—power, was guarded by dangerous manitous who had to be “conquered” to advance. As we’ve seen, in Midewiwin scrolls the entrances to the higher degree lodges are illustrated as being blocked by horned serpentine manitous or images of Mishibizhiw in his feline form. In the fourth degree in particular, the candidate was blocked by Mishibizhiw or his emissaries, breathing fire and pestilence across the entrances to the midewigaan lodge, which they would have to dispel, with the encouragement of their mide teacher and other officiating mideg (Dewdney 1975:110, 158).
Once the initiate had succeeded in this task, however, they were believed to have at least some of the powers of Mishibizhiw and the other powerful yet dangerous manitous at their disposal. Some of the images from birchbark scrolls reproduced in Tanner’s narrative, for example, illustrate songs in which the mide identifies snakes or Mishibizhiw himself as their “friend” or helper in their healing or other rites (e.g., Tanner 1830:345-347, possibly 376-378). Kohl (1985:150-152; 1859:207-210) also examined a Midewiwin scroll held by the Fond du Lac, WI chief Maangozid in which the square representing the fourth degree had three “paws of the ‘Great Lion’” in it (“Tatzen des ‘großen Löwen’”; shown below), though Kohl did not understand the reference. It may also be noted that the number four is a spiritually and symbolically significant one in the traditional Anishinaabe world, as it is for most Indian peoples, while the number three is at best meaningless, or at worst is associated with darker powers.
Furthermore, the miigis (a small seashell, in post-contact times usually the cowrie Monetaria moneta), one of the most sacred objects in the Midewiwin, and the symbol of the society—and, in some versions of the Midewiwin origin myth, the carrier of the Midewiwin itself to the people—was “said to appear on the surface of a lake when the action of a manido causes the water to seethe” (Densmore 1979:88), or were even “thought to be the scales . . . of the Underwater panther” (Howard 1977:141). Densmore (1910:14) also reported that it was “not unusual for a member of the Mĭde´wĭwĭn to sit beside the water for hours at a time, singing Mĭde´ songs and beating the Mĭde´ drum or shaking a rattle” in the hopes of a “visitation” from a water manitou. This is part of the broader idea that “power” gained from Mishibizhiw is by means of possession of a physical part of his body—as a slice of his horns, as pieces of copper, or as miigis shells, both of the latter two viewed as his scales.
Midewiwin instruction constantly emphasized to initiates the importance of staying on the correct “Path of Life,” acting with moral rectitude and not succumbing to the temptation to pervert their newly acquired powers for selfish or evil means; but the very fact that this was such a strong emphasis is an indication that such perversion was not uncommon. Mideg of higher degrees, especially of the fourth degree and above, were widely perceived by other community members as often being evil and sometimes murderous sorcerers, and viewed with the same combination of awe, reverence, and terror with which Mishibizhiw himself was viewed.[14]
There is one final, crucial link between Mishibizhiw and the Midewiwin, but we will hold off discussion of this link until later in the post.
One final connection between humans and Mishibizhiw which has not been mentioned is the role played by a serpent in the path that the souls of the dead must take to reach the afterworld. This involves a four-day journey toward the west (or south), where the Land of the Dead is located. Along the way, there is a sweet berry, usually a strawberry, by the side of the path, sometimes with a being next to it urging the soul to take it, but the soul must resist temptation and avoid eating it, or they are extinguished. There are usually other trials as well, such as a giant dog blocking their way. Finally they reach a raging river, which they must cross over a rocking log. If they fall off, they fail to reach the Land of the Dead and are turned into frogs, toads, or fish instead, or simply cease to exist. If they successfully navigate the river/log to the other side, they enter the afterworld. However, as is repeatedly clarified when Anishinaabe cosmology is explained to outsiders, the “log” is not really a log, but a horned serpent, either Mishibizhiw (/Mishiginebig) himself or one of his underlings. Navigating treacherous waters, by means of the god of waters himself, is thus the final step required to obtain a place in the afterlife—and those who fail the navigation end up as his minions if they are not extinguished altogether.
In all of the preceding discussion, it may appear as though Mishibizhiw is simply an evil manitou. Certainly some outsiders and even some later Anishinaabeg have drawn this conclusion. It didn’t exactly require a great leap for plenty of Christian missionaries to make a connection between Satan and this horned, long-tailed monster of the underworld who was deeply associated with serpents (or even pictured as one). And on the ever-reliable Wikipedia we can find the statement: “The Algonquins and Ojibwe believe that the cougar lived in the underworld and was wicked.” But although he does have a malevolent aspect, this misses Mishibizhiw’s true essence. Mishibizhiw is incredibly dangerous, responsible for rapids and whirlpools and eddies and undertows and swamped boats and squalls and quicksand and missing children and drowning. Mishibizhiw is incredibly powerful, reigning over all of the lands under our own and over the waters—and the fish within them—that are vital to Anishinaabe life, while exerting an erotic fascination on the part of women and a great temptation for power on the part of both sexes. Mishibizhiw is unpredictable, appearing when least expected, traveling from lake to lake through hidden tunnels, and sometimes even offering his powers to people, though often at a terrible cost. But Mishibizhiw is not evil. He is a force of great power, great danger, great uncertainty, and great mystery, and deserving of the utmost respect.
Mishibizhiw is the embodiment of water itself, with all its chaos and uncertainties and dangers and mysteries, with its unplumbable depths. He is, as Erdrich says, “death by drowning,” one of the most feared means of death for the Anishinaabeg: “the death a Chippewa cannot survive.”
But although Mishibizhiw and the other underwater manitous present many dangers to humans, humans also have great and powerful allies who can help keep them subdued on our behalf.
The Thunderers
My great-grandfather used to tell us that the birds were our friends, and would kill the snakes and the dragons. . . . So at a certain length of time the clouds pass over a place and you see the fire going into the water. The birds are killing the dragons.
—Elizabeth Philemon in Dorson, Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers, pg. 40
Bekhokhó ragá haYám,
uvitvunató mákhats Ráhav,
Berukhó ⸢sam Máim⸣ shifrá,
kholelá yadó Nakhásh baríakh.
Hen éle ktsot drakháv,
umá shémets davár nishmá bo?
veráam gvurotáv mi yitbonán?With His power He subdued the Sea,
and with His cunning He smashed Rahav,
With His wind He bagged the Waters,
His hand cut down the twisting Serpent.
Look, these are but the least of His ways,
what mere whisper of a word do we hear of Him?
and the thunder of His might who can grasp?
—Job 26:12-14[15]
These allies are the animikiig or binesiwag, translated “Thunders,” “Thunderers,” or “thunderbirds.” Animikii also means “lightning bolt” and can form the verb animikiikaa “there is a thunderstorm,” literally “there are many Thunderers/lightning bolts,” while binesi contains the root bine- “bird” and can also refer to any large bird, especially raptors. Thunderers are likely to be more familiar to non-Indians; “thunderbirds” have penetrated into the white popular consciousness while “Great Lynxes” have not.
Conceived of as both the cause of thunderstorms and as immanent within them, Thunderers are usually pictured as giant, hawk- or eagle-like birds, though they were occasionally viewed as humanoid beings with wings, and like most manitous they are able to shapeshift, so they can appear to people in human form. The identification with birds is reinforced not only by the often rather bird-like shape of thunderclouds, but also by their behavior. Like many other birds, they are migratory, appearing only during the warmer months and vanishing in winter. (Though admittedly many other manitous, including Mishibizhiw, are inactive during winter.) And “like birds of prey, [they] travel through the sky on currents of air, striking the earth in search of food” (Smith 2012:76). Unlike with Mishibizhiw, where there are multiple and quite disparate forms in which he has been conceived and represented in images, there is a very standardized Thunderer motif, which is similar or identical to the motif used for normal raptors as well. Interestingly, while Mishibizhiw is almost always illustrated facing the viewer head-on, Thunderers are almost always illustrated with their heads in profile:
As with Mishibizhiw, Thunderer images were frequently added to bandolier bags, clothing, and other items. In fact, it was very common to represent Mishibizhiw on one side of a bag and Thunderer(s) on the other.
This type of image has continued to be popular in modern times:
The noise of thunder itself is either caused by the beating of the Thunderers’ wings or is considered to be the sound of their voices as they speak. A. Irving Hallowell (1975:158) relates the following anecdote from his time working with the Ojibwes of Berens River:
There was one clap of thunder after another. Suddenly the old man turned to his wife and asked, “Did you hear what was said?” “No,” she replied, “I didn’t catch it.” My informant . . . did not at first know what the old man and his wife referred to. It was, of course, the thunder. The old man thought that one of the Thunder Birds had said something to him. He was reacting to this sound in the same way as he would respond to a human being, whose words he did not understand.
Like Mishibizhiw, there are multiple Thunderers. Sometimes there are specifically four or eight, or at least four or eight primary ones, associated with the four Winds and cardinal directions; but other people believe there exist an indeterminate number of them. Unlike Mishibizhiw, however, who almost always seems to live and travel alone, the Thunderers come in groups. Thunderstorms represent the presence of multiple Thunderers, and when humans have been able to observe their nests (see below), they find that they live in families or even larger societies. Thunderers thus accord with the normal Anishinaabe social order, in which people are dependent upon one another, and familial, clan, village, and other interpersonal relationships carry great importance, while Mishibizhiw, despite representing a multitude of individual beings, generally remains outside this order, an alien in a world where social bonds are so crucial.
As noted, Thunderers are generally seen as some sort of giant bird of prey; while thunder is their voice or beating wings, lightning flashes are produced when they open their eyes, and lightning bolts are them hunting for prey, the arrows or “thunderstones” (baaginewasiniig) which they fire at their victims. And their prey is Mishibizhiw and the other underwater and underground manitous, especially serpents. As we have seen, Mishibizhiw holds incredible power—but the Thunderers hold more, and are almost always victorious in their hunts. As Smith (2012:134) notes, in the battle between Thunderer and Mishibizhiw, it is always the Thunderers who are aggressively “on the offensive.”
The Thunderers are thus vital to humans not just for bringing life-giving waters, but for continually keeping the dangerous manitous in check. As Andrew Blackbird (1887:103) put it—though, as a Christian convert, with an overemphasis on the “evil” aspect of underworld manitous—the Thunderers “water the earth and . . . keep down all the evil monsters that are under the earth, which would eat up and devour the inhabitants of the earth if they were set at liberty.”[16] By ridding bodies of water of their manitous, Thunderers also help cleanse these waters and return fish to them. Andrew Medler tells a story from when he was a boy (Bloomfield 1958:190-191), in which he noticed that a spring from which he had gone to fetch water was “dirty” (wiinaagmi) and “muddied” (bkwebiigmi). He realized: “It seems as if there may be some creature in the spring from which we get the water” (“gnabaj ⸢wya⸣ wesiinh yaadig maa ndahbaaning”), and his grandfather assured him that there would soon be a thunderstorm. The next night there was indeed a great thunderstorm, and “[o]nly then did the water flow, in the morning” (Mii eta nbiish gaa-bmijwang gegzhebaawgak).
Finally, Thunderers help the world not only by cleansing bodies of water, but by creating the fires which renew the earth and allow the flourishing of new growth.
People are usually unable to see when a Thunderer actually captures its prey, for as they dive down to grab it, they are enveloped in clouds or fog or otherwise obscured. For example, in a story about a giant leech manitou that used to live in Leech Lake, MN, Dorothy Dora Whipple (Mezinaashiikwe) describes how the Thunderers came to attack and remove the leech from the waters (Whipple 2015:3; brackets in the original):
There were people around the lake on a perfectly clear day, not a cloud in the sky. Then they saw a very small dark cloud coming from the north. It was coming very, very fast. It came right above the leech. Then the cloud was there in the middle of the lake. And they [the thunderbirds] made lots of thunder, really loud thunderclaps. They killed the leech. Then it got really foggy and it rained. That’s when the leech disappeared.[17]
Similarly, Coleman (1937:37) reports that “[w]hen they [the Thunderers] dived down into the water and brought up the wicked spirits in their claws . . . the whole place was enveloped in fog.” And interestingly, Elizabeth Philemon, a Potawatomi from Hannahville, MI, told Dorson (1980:39) a story in which a Thunderer gives a young chief various powerful gifts, including “a rare little stone to make a fog.”
However, sometimes people can glimpse the underwater manitou itself as it is taken up. Raymond Armstrong of Manitoulin told Smith (2012:136) of an old woman he knew who was sitting by her window overlooking Lake Huron during a thunderstorm: “And she seen all kinds of fire, lines of fire going back and forth at that bay—like as if it was searching. Every now and then there would be a big Thunder. At one time her whole house shook.” Then suddenly “she seen this all [sic] fog, it was all fog, water. And she seen this big thing. They used to say it was about seven or eight feet wide in diameter that was going up in the sky. And she saw the tail end of it. It was going like this [a whirling movement -Smith’s interpolation]. It was a big snake—maybe fifty, sixty feet, or a hundred feet long.” Peter Jones (Gakiiwegwanebi) (1861:86) also says that “[s]ome Indians affirm that they have seen the serpent taken up by the thunder into the clouds.”
Just as Mishibizhiw is associated with an awesome and potentially deadly force of nature, so too are the Thunderers. Yet while Mishibizhiw is feared, the Thunderers generally are not. They are addressed as “Grandfather”/“Grandmother” and welcomed as extremely propitious and powerful visitors when they appear in dreams or as bawaaganag in visions. Upon their arrival in thunderstorms, they should be given an offering of tobacco as a sign of respect and thanksgiving—though this offering also serves, somewhat as in offerings to Mishibizhiw, as a request that they pass by in peace. Unlike Mishibizhiw, who according to at least some Anishinaabeg may still choose to drown you even if you show him respect, the Thunderers view humans kindly, and as long as they are shown proper respect they will not harm someone. As Mrs. Joseph Feathers of Nahma, MI told Dorson (1980:56), “Best thing to do is burn tobacco and say, ‘That’s for you, granddad.’ They’ll protect you.” Several of Smith’s consultants in fact insisted that Indians are never struck by lightning, only white people, and Mrs. Feathers made the same claim.[18] When threatened by Mishibizhiw or one of his underlings, humans can even directly call on the Thunderers for help. For instance, Barnouw (1977:226) relays the report of an Ojibwe man from Lac Courte Oreilles, WI, who “was once chased by a supernatural snake about six or seven inches in diameter. He managed to reach home and . . . . smoked [his pipe] and called upon the thunderbirds for help. Soon some clouds appeared in the sky; then a thunderbolt came down and killed the snake.” Then “one of the thunderbirds carried the snake away.”
There are two exceptions to these statements. The first is found in a widespread traditional story which takes place in the far distant past, evidently from a time when Thunderers did not subsist solely on underworld manitous. The Thunderers ask some mosquitos where they have found all the blood they eat, and the mosquitos protect humans by lying that they have gotten it from trees (i.e., sap). The Thunderers attack the trees in order to feed—explaining why trees are so often struck by lightning—and humans are spared. Thomas Sandy of Rama, as reported by Laidlaw, is explicit on this last point, saying that “if they had told the Thunderbirds where they did get the blood, all the Indians would have been killed” (Laidlaw 1927:54).
The other exception involves young Thunderers. As noted, Thunderers, like humans, live in families, and have children. Their children, however, have not yet learned how to properly harness and control their powers, and may accidentally unleash them against innocent people. James Redsky (Ishkwe-Giizhig) of Shoal Lake, ON explains that “when the young thunderbirds go by, they cause destruction because they don’t know any better. . . . They knock down trees with lightning from their beaks. Houses are struck and smashed also. The older thunderbirds try to correct these foolish young birds, but they do not learn because they are so young” (Redsky 1972:110-111 quoted in Smith 2012:84). Smith notes, however, that “[t]his destructive behavior is never understood as malevolent.” A few earlier white observers did describe the Thunderers as evil, e.g., Hoffman (1891:158, 163) (“malevolent” and “malignant”), but this is not an accurate reflection of the traditional Anishinaabe worldview; presumably Hoffman (and others) inadvertently imposed their own bias in which thunderstorms are dangerous and therefore “bad.” Hoffman also viewed the jiisakiiwininiwag or Shaking Tent shamans, whom he said derived their powers from the Thunderers, as evil, which probably contributed to his negative evaluation of Thunderers themselves.
How do Anishinaabe people know the social and family lives of Thunderers? Aside from someone learning of them through dreams or visions, there are a number of accounts of humans who have visited Thunderer nests, either of their own initiative or after being taken there. One common version has one or more men deciding to figure out what is causing the loud thunder they hear, so they scale the mountain where a Thunderer nest is located (e.g., P. Jones 1861:86-87; Radin 1914:59; Jones 1919:190-193; Radin and Reagan 1928:145-146; Smith 2012:83-85). The precise details of what they discover vary, but usually include multiple Thunderers of different ages including young ones—again, indicating that they have human-like families—as well as the bones of the serpents on which they’ve been feeding. Peter Jones (1861:86), for example, describes the scene a man in such a situation encounters: “I saw the thunder’s nest, where a brood of young thunders had been reared. I saw all sorts of curious bones of serpents, on the flesh of which the old thunders had been feeding their young; and the bark of the young cedar trees pealed [sic] and stripped, on which the young thunders had been trying their skill in shooting their arrows before going abroad to hunt serpents.” Similarly, in Radin and Reagan’s (1928:145) version collected at Sarnia, ON, the two young men who reach a nest discover “many snake bones because the birds eat nothing but snakes.”
In some cases the men are treated courteously by the Thunderers, but more often they are punished for disrespectfully violating the Thunderers’ home. In Gaagige-Binesi’s version told to William Jones (1919:190-193), two young men, after fasting for eight days, scale the mountain which the other people are afraid to approach due to the constant sound of the Thunderers. There they find two adult Thunderers and two young Thunderers, but clouds quickly obscure the nest; one of the men has seen enough and decides to turn back, but his companion insists on staying, and is struck by lightning and killed. (Similar stories are still told to this day.) On the other hand, in Radin and Reagan’s version, despite one of the young men initially shooting an arrow at the first Thunderer he sees in the nest (!), the Thunderers invite the boys into their lodge, tell them stories, and have them spend the whole summer with them, including accompanying them, in the form of clouds, on their hunts for horned snakes. At one point the narrator even says, “The old Thunder told his children (including the two young men) to go along quietly . . . ,” suggesting the men have essentially been adopted by the Thunderers. In a different kind of story from the Plains Ojibwes (Skinner 1928:161-162), a young boy is taken by some Thunderers to their home for four days. They tell him not to watch them eat, but he does so anyway and sees they are eating “enormous snake[s],” although they feed him “Indian food.” They return him home, “[b]ut the four days and nights were four years. They took him home and he was a grown man.” The idea that a brief period of time for manitous is a long period of time in the human world—and more specifically, that a manitou day is equivalent to a human year—is a recurring and very widespread one, and with parallels throughout the world.
Thunderers can attack the underworld manitous directly, or they can do so indirectly, by providing humans with some of their powers and thus having humans act as their proxies in this war. For example, in the stories mentioned earlier in which some girls in a boat are nearly pulled underwater by Mishibizhiw before one strikes him with her paddle, severing part of his tail (Jones 1919:258-295; Radin 1924:513-514; Barnouw 1977:132-133), I left out one important detail. In Pete Martin’s version in Barnouw, the girl who strikes Mishibizhiw says “Thunder is striking you.” This may at first seem like simply her way of trying to frighten Mishibizhiw, but the versions of the story in Jones and Radin provide the real explanation. In Gaagige-Binesi’s version in Jones the girl, as she strikes Mishibizhiw, says: “While I was young, I fasted for visions often. And at that time the Thunderers gave me their war club” (“Megwaa gii-oshkiniigiyaan moozhag ningii-makadeke. Mii dash iwapii Animikiig gii-miizhiwaad obagamaaganiwaa”). In Radin’s version her wording is similar: “When I was fasting I was blessed by the thunder-spirits.” In other words, the bawaaganag she acquired during her vision quest were the Thunderers, who have provided her with their own power to vanquish Mishibizhiw, thus transforming her paddle into a Thunderer’s weapon.
Interestingly, there are a couple of Plains Ojibwe stories, which have parallels in several neighboring cultures, in which humans bafflingly side with an underwater manitou over a Thunderer, with predictably disastrous consequences. In one (Skinner 1928:161), two men see a Thunderer grab what is named as Mishiginebig out of a lake. “The snake wept; he said he had dreamed of two young Indians who would give him life.” One of the men then shoots the Thunderer, who drops Mishiginebig and admonishes the men, warning them, “You’ve made a big mistake not to help me, for Micekine´bik will soon take you.” A decent period of time evidently passes, but one day as the men are collecting eggs in a knee-deep swamp, the one who shot the Thunderer “saw a whirlpool twisting before him. Laughing, he was carried along.” Later that year Mishiginebig kills the other man as well. Another version (Skinner 1928:169) is very brief: “A thunderer once pounced on a huge snake and entangled his claws in its back. Neither could escape. A passing Indian, being asked by both for help, shot the thunderer, whereas he should have killed the snake.” The story ends with the somewhat enigmatic comment: “There underneath snakes do not steal children, but subterranean panthers do,” which at least indicates that Mishiginebig (or perhaps serpentine underwater manitous generally?) were kept distinct from Mishibizhiw for the narrator.
Just as there are traditional stories in which women marry serpents, there are stories in which men or women marry Thunderers (in—at least initially—human form) (e.g., Radin 1914:75; Jones 1919:132-149; Skinner 1919:293-295; Radin and Reagan 1928:135-137; Ray and Stevens 1971:88-92; Hallowell 1975:156-157; Morrisseau 1965:7-8 cited in Smith 2012:91-92). While these aren’t as thoroughly negative as the “serpent lover” stories, they nonetheless tend to be at least ambiguous, often featuring serious violence, or death or presumed death, and reflecting a degree of antipathy or, one might say, xenophobia, between Thunderers and humans not present elsewhere in Anishinaabe thought and mythology (but a normal feature of stories that involve humans marrying non-humans). Jones’s, Skinner’s, Ray and Stevens’s, Hallowell’s, and Morrisseau’s stories are all variants of a very common tale, in which early on the Thunderer wife is shot by her husband’s eldest brother out of jealousy, though she does not die; in fact in several versions, after a long quest by the husband, she and her sisters marry all his brothers in turn. In Radin and Reagan’s version, the Thunderer woman’s husband must hide from her brothers, who it’s said will be angry if they learn who he is. (And later the child of their union is stolen by an underwater manitou, though they oddly seem to take this in stride.) In Ray and Steven’s version the Thunderers conclude that it is impossible for a human to live with and like a Thunderer, and send the Thunderer woman and her human husband away to spend their lives on the earth. Radin’s very short version of a woman taking a Thunderer husband is the only one without any real negative undertones or evidence that Thunderers and humans disapprove of intermarriage.
Thunderers did not occupy anywhere near as central a role in the Midewiwin as Mishibizhiw did. However, Hoffman (1891:176) does state that according to his consultant Ziigaasige of Mille Lacs, MN, the second degree “is owned by the Thunder Bird”—though elsewhere Gichi-Manidoo, the creator god, is identified by a different consultant as “the guardian of the second degree” (Hoffman 1891:182). Thunderers are also mentioned in several Midewiwin songs.
One mention of the Thunderers could be interpreted as referring to a role as guardians of the Midewiwin, but it rather seems to reflect their more general role as punishers of those who egregiously transgress moral boundaries or defile sacred spaces, items, or rites. In a powerful passage, Waasaagoneshkang or possibly Midaasoganzh has the manitou who transmits the Midewiwin to the Anishinaabe people tell them (Jones 1919:568-571):
O’ow idash Midewiwin gaawiikaa da-wekwaashkaasinoon. A’aw wayaabishkiiwed giishpin wii-maji-idang Animikii da-nishkaadizi. Oga-biigwa’aan i’iw oodena; misawaa gichi-michaag i’iw oodena booch oga-niigwa’aan a’aw Animikii. Giishpin goda aapiji-wii-paapinendang a’aw wayaabishkiiwed, mii iw ge-izhichiged a’aw Wegimaawid Binesi. Aapiji-manidoowi, gaawiin gegoo oga-bwaanawitoosiin. Booshke gichi-asiniin, mii go iw ji-niigwa’waad.
But this Midewiwin shall never come to an end. The white man, if he would speak ill of it, the Thunderer will grow incensed. He will shatter [his] town; no matter if the town is enormous, the Thunderer will break it all to pieces. If the white man should thoroughly mock it, that is what the Chief of Birds will do. What a manitou he is; at nothing shall he fail. Though it be a great rock yet he can break it all to pieces.[19]
There is a temptation to view the cosmic battle between the forces of the air, the Thunderers, and the forces of the depths, Mishibizhiw and the underwater manitous, as a battle between “Good and Evil.” It was seen as such by many earlier white Christians, and is presented as such by some modern Anishinaabe people too, whether or not they are Christian. But this rather simplistic dualism seems to be pretty clearly due to Christian influence; there is no good evidence that earlier Anishinaabeg originally conceived of the manitous this way.[20] Rather, the conflict was one in which the ideal outcome was balance, not destruction of “evil.”
Indeed, as we have already seen, while Mishibizhiw is very dangerous and has many “negative” qualities, he is not purely evil, and in fact has on occasion helped people, as their bawaagan or otherwise. In fact, in one rather extraordinary story, Mishibizhiw actively intervenes to save someone’s life through no apparent prompting or request, and demands nothing in return. Radin (1924:501-502) relates the story from a consultant near Sarnia, ON of a man who falls through the ice during winter and is “seized by a lion” who “take[s] him home with him.” They spend the winter in Mishibizhiw’s underwater home, with the manitou providing him with food. Once the ice melts in the spring, Mishibizhiw has “his children” carry the man safely back to the surface, saying, “I hope you will some time think of me for I had compassion for you when you broke through the ice.” Yet the same narrator gives other stories in which Mishibizhiw kills and attempts to kill people. Clearly he is a complex figure, capable of acts that affect humans negatively but also ones that affect humans positively, equally capable of drowning someone or providing someone with a bounty of fish and safe passage across a lake.
Likewise, the Thunderers, though seen in a more positive light than Mishibizhiw, are capable of actions that both help and harm humans. They may keep the forces of the depths at bay and provide many Indians with great power as bawaaganag, but their young can wreak destruction, and people who too boldly transgress moral boundaries or the sanctity of the Thunderers’ homes may be killed for their presumption. Few manitous were or are seen as purely good or purely evil; instead, like humans themselves, manitous possess complex personalities, and are capable of both “good” and “evil.”
Ultimately, the battle between Thunderer and Mishibizhiw, the battle between the two greatest forces in the Anishinaabe universe, the waters and the storms of the air, is a battle that has no end. The underwater manitous, and Mishibizhiw himself (themselves) may be killed a million times over, yet they remain present still, to be killed and reappear again. As David Migwans, one of Smith’s consultants, put it, “Nobody ever really wins” (Smith 2012:130). And indeed, as Smith (2012:137-138, 140-141) points out, both the Thunderers and underwater manitous, perversely, need one another. Though part of the Thunderers’ purpose on earth is to keep humans safe from underwater manitous, they depend on these manitous for food—in all the narratives in which humans observe their diet, they only subsist on serpents/underwater manitous. Meanwhile, the domain of Mishibizhiw and his underlings is the water, and without the rains provided by the storms their home and kingdom would evaporate into thin air.
This need for balance, this interdependence and “blurring of boundaries” between Mishibizhiw and the Thunderers, between water and thunderstorms, underworld and skies, is also found in Anishinaabe iconography. One example is the very common practice of picturing Mishibizhiw and Thunderers on opposing sides of the same bag, already discussed and illustrated above. A second is observed by Corbiere and Migwans (2013). Beyond the quite concrete images used for Mishibizhiw and the Thunderers shown earlier in the post, they can be represented much more abstractly—the Thunderers as an hourglass figure, a radical simplification of their concrete representation; and Mishibizhiw as a spiral or diamond/octagon, apparently representing whirlpools. But here’s where it gets interesting: Corbiere and Migwans point out that there are images of Mishibizhiwag which include hourglass shapes within their bodies, and images of Thunderers which include spirals within their bodies.
Corbiere and Migwans (2013:44) compare this with “the Anishinaabe adage that everyone must bear within them something unbearable” and give as an example Maude Kegg’s (2011:14-15) quoting her grandmother’s description of a windigo—a giant maneating monster with a heart of ice, originally a human who resorted to cannibalism—as having “ice he must bear within himself” (“maagizhaa . . . mikwamiin awiiya iidog gegishkawaagwen”, where—as they note—the verb gigishkaw “to bear in or on one’s body; wear” is frequently associated with pregnancy, and in some dialects actually just means “be pregnant” or “give birth”). While windigos may now be frightful ~cannibal ice monsters~ they were once human, and their heart of ice, representing the loss of this precious humanity to the brutality of winter and its terrible temptations when starvation sets in, is an “unbearable burden.” By the same token the interrelationship and interdependence of Mishibizhiw and the Thunderers is simultaneously necessary and unbearable to both—and hence, iconographically, both carry the burden represented by the other. In their interdependence, and their struggle for supremacy which only leads to balance, each carries a piece of their mortal enemy.
The Anishinaabe world, then, is far richer and more complex than simply a stage where Good and Evil wage a battle over the fate of humanity, and where the creatures of the depths are mere “monsters” to be destroyed.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the origins of the Midewiwin and of humanity itself; but to understand that, we must first look at the origins of our current world, and the pivotal role that Mishibizhiw played in bringing it about.
The Deluge
But beneath, the Evil Spirits
Lay in ambush, waiting for him,
Broke the treacherous ice beneath him,
Dragged him downward to the bottom,
Buried in the sand his body.
—Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, Book XV
Er verlebte den ganzen Reſt des traurigen Winters in Einſamkeit und Betrübniß. Aber er wußte wohl, wer ſeinen Bruder getödtet hatte. Es war der Schlangenkönig, dem er jedoch im Winter nicht beikommen konnte.
Als es endlich Frühling geworden war . . .He spent the whole rest of the sad winter in loneliness and sorrow. But he knew well who had killed his brother. It was the Snake King, yet during winter he could not get at him.
But at last spring arrived . . .
—Kohl, Kitschi-Gami, Erster Band, pp. 323-324
Ezhi-odaapinaad ogii-gashkaakonijaandamini,
eyiidawinik odakonamini i’iw aki;
gaye ozidaaning, eyiidawizid ozidaaning ateni i’iw aki.
“Aaniish mii sa i’iw ji-gashkitooyang ji-ozhitooyang i’iw aki,” ogii-inaa’.As [Nanabush] picked [Muskrat] up, he was holding it tightly clenched in his paws,
in both paws he was holding that earth;
and in his feet, in both of his feet there was that earth.
“Well, now we will be able to create the earth,” [Nanabush] said to them.
—Waasaagoneshkang in Jones, Ojibwa Texts: Part I, pp. 152-153
There at least 50 written versions of the Anishinaabe creation myth cycle, probably many more, not to mention the versions still being retold orally. As might be expected, they vary in content over time and space, from narrator to narrator, based on the setting of the telling and the needs and interest of the audience, and many other variables. Nonetheless, there is a basic core that remains reasonably consistent. Here I’ll summarize this core, but it should be firmly kept in mind that most versions of the myth diverge from it in at least some details.
The origin myth is actually part of the much larger and varied collection of tales about the culture hero and trickster Nanabush (Ojibwe Nenabozho, Wenabozho, and a number of other variants, including in some northern communities the alternative name Wiisakejaak, the name of the equivalent Cree figure; his name in Potawatomi is Wiské), though the origin myth cycle only follows certain specific episodes of the Nanabush corpus of tales. In any event, we will pick up the story as Nanabush joins a pack of wolves one winter. They’re not especially keen on having him along, and he continually disregards their advice and instructions, resulting in predictable negative consequences for Nanabush and culminating in an episode where he injures or kills one of the wolves out of spite (though he pretends it’s an accident, and brings him back to life). The wolves decide to part with him, but they leave one of the young wolves with Nanabush to serve as his companion and hunter for the rest of the winter. While this companion may variously be described as Nanabush’s “brother,” “nephew,” “cousin,” “son,” or “grandson,” I’ll refer to him as his brother from now on since that’s the most common way the relationship is perceived.
Nanabush’s brother is an exceptional hunter, and provides them both with a great deal of food during the winter. At some point, Nanabush has a dream warning him that his brother will be killed if he crosses or jumps over a stream without laying a stick or log across it. He warns his brother of this, but soon afterward the brother, hot on the heels of an animal he’s chasing, neglects to do so at one small streambed; it either suddenly turns into a giant river as he jumps over it or he falls through the ice, and drowns, murdered by Mishibizhiw. Mishibizhiw here appears to be acting in his role as controller of access to fish and land game: while some versions of the story don’t attribute a motive to the wolf’s killing, in many cases it is explicitly tied to his success as a hunter. In these versions, then, Mishibizhiw is essentially removing someone who represents a threat to the game supply.
Nanabush is distraught over his brother’s death, and determines to avenge him. He comes upon a kingfisher, who tells him that Mishibizhiw is the one who killed his brother and gives advice on how to defeat him: specifically, where Mishibizhiw comes up on land with his guards and underlings to sun himself, and where to shoot Mishibizhiw in order to kill him (in his shadow, which contains one of his souls, and not in his body). Nanabush goes to their sunning spot as pointed out by the kingfisher, and transforms himself into a stump as a disguise. A host of underwater manitous soon come up onto the beach, including the chief Mishibizhiw. There follows an episode in which the manitous notice the stump, and several of them are sent to test it to make sure it’s really a stump and not Nanabush in disguise. Despite a serpent wrapping tightly around him and a bear clawing at him, Nanabush is barely able to maintain his composure and remain as a stump, and the manitous are at last satisfied and go to sleep.
Nanabush immediately runs over to Mishibizhiw and shoots him, but regardless of whether he follows the kingfisher’s advice, Mishibizhiw is seriously wounded but not instantly killed, and all the manitous retreat to the water. At this point, in some versions, there is a temporary flood sent by the underwater manitous which Nanabush must escape but which eventually subsides, while in others there is no flood, and we move immediately to the next episode.
Searching for Mishibizhiw, Nanabush comes upon an old toad-woman, a curer who is helping to heal Mishibizhiw. Nanabush kills and flays her, and puts on her skin. Using this disguise he infiltrates the underwater manitous’ lair and enters Mishibizhiw’s lodge, where he is infuriated to see his brother’s pelt is being used as the entrance covering to the lodge. Under the guise of healing Mishibizhiw, he approaches, sees the arrow sticking out of the Great Lynx’s body, and shoves it in deeply, finally killing the god of the waters and exacting his revenge.
Or so it seems. As Nanabush flees the lodge, he trips some basswood fiber cords that have been set up all around the area as a sort of home invasion alarm, instantly alerting all the manitous to his presence. And of course Mishibizhiw—the mighty god of the waters, the one with endless avatars, the one who can be everywhere at once, the one who can be killed a thousand times by the Thunderers and still appear in every whirlpool and eddy to drown the unwary—Mishibizhiw cannot ultimately be destroyed, not even by the powerful Nanabush. Immortal as the waters themselves, in his terrible wrath he sends a torrent that floods all of the earth and wipes it from existence.
Nanabush survives, but barely, either by climbing to the top of the highest tree which stretches itself higher still for him, or by cobbling together a small raft. Surrounded by a handful of animals, he realizes he needs to create the world anew. He sends three of the animals diving down to try to retrieve some dirt of the original world from the bottom of the waters, but each fails and floats up dead, though Nanabush revives them. Finally, the fourth animal, Muskrat, succeeds. With the dirt Muskrat collects Nanabush creates a tiny island of mud. He then works on continually enlarging it, sending out animals to test its size each time. Finally he determines the world is big enough. Though his own actions and Mishibizhiw’s rage nearly destroyed everything in the cataclysm, a new earth has been created. And though the new earth can never be the same as the old one, life can continue.
The Mortals
Awenen,
Dewine,
Bemaaji’ag?Who is this,
Sick unto death,
Whom I restore to life?
—Midewiwin initiation song in Densmore, Chippewa Music, pg. 59
While the myth explaining the origin of the current earth has been relatively consistent, if differing in some details, there does not seem to have been any single Anishinaabe myth explaining the origin of human beings that was consistent across all communities. What does seem reasonably consistent is that humans were created after the Deluge and formation of the new earth; the old earth had been populated by animals and manitous (though sometimes manitous described as though they are people; this notion is also not completely consistent, for some Anishinaabeg do believe that humans existed in the old earth and were created a second time after the Deluge). The most “basic” version of the human origin story involves the creator god, Gichi-Manidoo, creating humans from some earth or clay by closing his hand around it and/or blowing on it, but this is probably at least partially of Christian origin. Most of the recorded human origin myths have been related in the context of Midewiwin teachings on the origin of both humanity and the Midewiwin itself, and it’s to these that I will now turn.
The Midewiwin’s myths of its own origins are as varied as the myths of humanity’s origins, but there are a few major versions. In one major version, a council of the most important manitous, seeing how weak people are and how beset they are with illness and death, takes pity on them and resolves to provide them with the Midewiwin in order to ensure they can have (mino-)bimaadiziwin, a healthy, good, and long life. The council appoints a messenger to bring the Midewiwin to the people; the identity of the messenger—Otter, the miigis shell, Bear, Nanabush, or multiple messengers in succession—varies. The messenger usually must cross the ocean before carrying the Midewiwin to each Anishinaabe community westward in stages. In another major version, rather than sending a messenger, the manitous instead take a young boy, sometimes named as Giishkizid “Cutfoot,” to be instructed in the ways of the Midewiwin. He is eventually returned to the people and imparts the Midewiwin knowledge to them. In a third major version, the Sun or East manitou is born to or adopted by an elderly human couple and when grown helps restore a relative to life using the Midewiwin, teaching it to the people in the process. This last version, involving the more-or-less virgin birth of a god (who can raise the dead) to human parents, is, I suspect, ultimately at least partially of Christian origin. The Cutfoot version is not found in the earliest sources—I don’t think it appears in the written record until 1909, and it becomes more common over time—and it’s possible it represents a later tradition as well. (Several other minor versions, only appearing in one or two sources, also exist, which I won’t cover here; see the accompanying footnote for two notable examples.)[21]
These Midewiwin origin myths obviously don’t deal with the creation of humans; humans already exist, though in a pitiable state. The other versions, however, do deal with human origins in addition to Midewiwin origins, and are more significant for our purposes in this post. I will first simply describe them all, before giving an analysis.
Landes (1968) relates a few different versions of human origins, as given to her by several different consultants. (Given Landes’s research practices as mentioned in footnote 14, some caution should be taken in approaching her descriptions.) The first (1968:90-91, 94) is of the type described above, in which Gichi-Manidoo closes his hand around some dirt and in doing so creates an Indian. In the second, shorter version of this story given to Landes by a lower-ranking mide, Gichi-Manidoo simply creates a woman in one hand and a man in the other; in the longer version, told by a fourth-degree mide, there is a clear Christianization of the original myth, in which the first person created is a woman, and her rib is then removed in order to create the first man. The second human origin story (1968:94-95, 102) is more interesting and enigmatic, and seems more archaic. A giant “snake” wraps himself around the first midewigaan, and “[t]he guardian Tiger [or Lion]” (Landes’s brackets; on pg. 102 this is reversed to “Lion [or Tiger],” and some of the other wording is also slightly different) is distrustful of Snake. Snake, mirroring Gichi-Manidoo’s actions in the other version of the human origin story, takes a “handful” (somehow) of dirt, from which a “black” Indian is created, but Lion rejects this Indian as improper and knocks the dirt out; instead, Lion takes two handfuls of dirt and opens them to reveal a woman in his left hand and a man in his right, both of them not dark but “glistening like glass.”
The reference to the Indians “glistening like glass” reflects the widespread belief that the first humans were “enameled with a plate, like a finger nail,” which “sickness could not penetrate . . . , so [they were] capable of perpetual life” (Landes 1968:90). This belief is found in many origin stories, and also features in many stories concerning the origin of death. Although the details vary, death is often attributed in one way or another to the fact that it is necessary to control the human population (a concept also found, though I feel like people often fail to recognize it, in the Garden of Eden story: Adam and Eve’s acquisition of “knowledge” which leads to their condemnation to mortality very prominently involves sexual knowledge, and thus the inevitable growth of the human population).[22] One such death origin story was told to Landes (1968:92-93) by the fourth-degree mide who narrated the longer version of the first origin story. Nanabush learns that he was not invited to the great manitou council which created the first first human couple and provided them with gifts. Concerned that humans, who are immortal, will eventually multiply and overrun the world, Nanabush finds another manitou who was excluded from the council, Mishi-Makadewaabik “Great Black Rock,” whom he bedecks in silver and gold scales and convinces to carry out his plan to turn humans mortal. Following Nanabush’s instructions, Mishi-Makadewaabik gives a child one of his scales; when he does so, the child’s own scales fall off, except for 20 remaining as his finger- and toenails, and he and all other people are now subject to illness and death.
The same idea is also present in the human origin story which was related to Kohl (1985:195-202) by Gaagaagiins of Lac du Flambeau, and although Kohl gives no indication that Gaagaagiins was a mide, the end of the myth clearly is describing the origins of the Midewiwin. One day while he is walking along a beach, Gichi-Manidoo discovers “a being coming out of the water entirely covered with silver-glistening scales like a fish, but otherwise formed like a man.” Gichi-Manidoo realizes the man needs a companion, so he fashions a woman (named Maanii, i.e., “Mary”), giving her the same scales. After she and the man meet, they are brought by Gichi-Manidoo to a beautiful garden. He warns them that the tree in the middle of the garden has been planted by Maji-Manidoo (see footnote 20) and they should not eat its fruit. Nonetheless, one day Maanii is tempted by an unfamiliar, handsome Indian to eat the fruit, which she does, as does her husband. Immediately upon doing so, “the silver scales with which their bodies had been covered fell off,” again except for their finger- and toenails. Gichi-Manidoo sadly informs them that since they have eaten the fruit, they “must now die.” Clearly many aspects of the Garden of Eden story have been incorporated into the aboriginal story in which human frailty and death result from the loss of our protective scales—though most other versions dealing with the origin of death make clear that the loss of the scales/death was necessary because otherwise the earth would become overpopulated, as in the Biblical story.
Gaagaagiins’s tale continues, with the first human pair banished from the garden and forced to fend for themselves in the world. One day the man discovers a book under a tree. It starts speaking to him, giving him “a whole series of orders and prohibitions.” He doesn’t like it, and while Maanii suggests he keep it, he retorts that it’s too bulky and he can’t carry it in his medicine bag. (Kohl correctly observes that this is obviously a reference to the Bible.) Soon, however, he discovers a new “book” under the same tree. This one is lightweight and portable, made of birchbark, speaks to him in Ojibwe, and “taught him the use and advantage of the plants in the forest and on the prairie.” Using this book—pretty clearly a Midewiwin scroll—he is able to acquire knowledge of a host of medicinal cures, “good in every accident of life.” Although the Midewiwin is never explicitly named, we have here another story of its origin and its importance in providing humans with mino-bimaadiziwin.
Another, somewhat more opaque human/Midewiwin origin myth is told by Waasaagoneshkang (or possibly Midaasoganzh) in Jones (1919:530-609). This is separated in Jones’s collection into four distinct stories: two versions of the same story, “The Creation, Origin of Death, and the Mystic Rite [i.e., the Midewiwin],” followed by “The Mystic Rite is Tested,” and then “Mighty-One, Black-Tail-of-a-Fish, and the Mystic Rite.” But the third story seems to be a direct continuation from the preceding story in its two versions, and the fourth story clearly directly follows the third. In my summary I’ll treat the two versions of the first story (“Story One”) together.
Story One picks up immediately following the Deluge and “Earth-Diver” episodes of the Nanabush cycle/creation myth. Nanabush and his wolf brother—either temporarily revived or in the form of a ghost—create all the life forms of the new world out of earth: animals and “a man,” as well as various manitous, including some maji-manidoog (bad manitous). Nanabush places the man down and returns the next morning to find the man missing. He tries creating another person, but the same thing happens—they have vanished by the next morning. He realizes the people are being “stolen from him.” Though he never specifies who the thief is, tellingly his next act is to create numerous Thunderers to guard humanity, who attack the rocks and mountains in a fearsome display (bi-gichi-baabaaginaawaad iniw asiniin “they came fiercely striking all the rocks with lightning”). The terrified “bad manitous” flee underground, and Nanabush then creates yet another man, who is still there the next morning, so Nanabush, satisfied that humans are now safe from depredations, creates a woman to serve as his companion.[23]
Having successfully created humanity, Nanabush then announces to his brother that humans must die, or the earth will become too full—a common theme, as we’ve seen. His brother disagrees and weeps for them, but Nanabush holds firm, explaining that they will live on in the afterworld (“Meshkwad i’iw gaa-nibojin, a’aw anishinaabe da-onji-aanikoobimaadizi; bakaan danakiiwin da-izhaa awiya gaa-nibojin, iniw ojichaagwan ji-izhaanid bakaan danakiiwin” “Rather, one who dies, that person will continue to live on again; someone who dies will go to another home, their soul going to another home” [Jones 1919:554-555]). He then appoints his wolf brother as the ruler of the Land of the Dead, which necessitates the brother’s death yet again.
Story Two begins with the world now apparently containing a number of people, after Nanabush and his brother’s successful creation of the first couples in Story One. One person, Zhoongepaanh (translated as “Mighty One,” who is both a Potawatomi blessed by an underworld manitou and a manitou himself; “Zhoongepaanh” is my best guess at a phonemicization of Jones’s ⟨Cōngä‘pān⟩) challenges a “manitou from the underworld” (anaamakamig dazhi-manidoo), named as Makadezhigwan (“Black Fishtail,” who is also described as “[a]n Ojibwa of the Bullhead clan”) to a contest of powers—a wizard’s duel, as it were—with the lives of their own wives and children as the wagers. Though the Midewiwin has not yet been mentioned, both participants are apparently powerful mideg, and make use of onamani-midewiwin “vermilion Midewiwin” (translated by Jones as “the mystic rite of magic paint”) and other Midewiwin rites in their battle.[24] Zhoongepaanh begins the battle, building a midewigaan lodge and then shooting a miigis at one of Makadezhigwan’s sons, whose resultant death is the first human death in the new world. Using his mastery of Midewiwin sorcery, Zhoongepaanh continues attacking until all of Makadezhigwan’s family is dead; however, he fails in his attempt to kill Makadezhigwan himself, who is too powerful. Makadezhigwan now builds his own midewigaan and after learning Midewiwin songs from Nanabush, kills all of Zhoongepaanh’s children and his wife with his own sorcery.
The people of the world hear of the battle, and six of them (or possibly six manitous?) come to visit Makadezhigwan. They offer him tobacco and gifts and ask for his knowledge of “medicines and songs.” Makadezhigwan, evidently as part of Nanabush’s plan, proceeds to teach them the Midewiwin, and instructs them to carry it to all the Anishinaabe people. He also resolves to end his feud with Zhoongepaanh, and the two are reconciled. (Zhoongepaanh’s words on the occasion echo Nanabush’s earlier about the fact that death is merely a transition to a new realm: “Aa-sh wiin gii-aapijinanadwaa igiw niniijaanisag gidaa-nishki’? Anishaa dash wiin gii-aandakiiwag” “But how did you really kill my children, that you could anger me? They have merely gone to another land” [Jones 1919:572-573].) The two of them then call together all the beneficent manitous and tell them that although the Midewiwin now exists, people may still “not know how to go through life,” and instruct the manitous to assist the people and appear to them as bawaaganag.
Time passes, and Zhoongepaanh and Makadezhigwan have grown old. Zhoongepaanh dies after instructing his granddaughter to cut into his body. She does so, and his whole body turns into vermilion, which she gathers together; people begin coming to her to collect it to use as medicine. Makadezhigwan, for his part, goes to Nanabush to request a “grandson,” which Nanabush grants him. Following Makadezhigwan’s instructions, the boy also cuts into his grandfather’s body once he dies, and Makadezhigwan’s body also turns into vermilion (also sometimes termed simply mashkiki “medicine” in the Ojibwe original), which people also come to collect. The vermilion provides the boy with success in hunting, but he realizes people need songs in addition to medicine, and visits Makadezhigwan in the afterworld, who teaches him Midewiwin songs.
The final human and Midewiwin origin story, told most fully by Tom Badger in Barnouw (1955:220-223; 1977:41-45), also follows immediately from the Deluge and Earth-Diver episodes of the Nanabush cycle/creation story. After creating the new world, Nanabush is still distraught and furious over the death of his brother. He threatens both “the manido . . . who is the boss that rules the bottom layer of the earth” and the manitou who rules the top layer of the sky (of whom Badger says he “has no name, but you can call him Gičimánido”), warning that he’ll drag them to his level and he “can . . . do whatever I want with them.” The two great manitous are deeply concerned—Nanabush is clearly not making an idle threat. Mishibizhiw asks Gichi-Manidoo if he heard what Nanabush said, and Gichi-Mandoo says yes: “He will do just what he said. I told you never to make him angry in any way.” The two of them resolve to placate Nanabush by offering him new “parents” (alternatively—and conventionally—termed his “aunt” and “uncle,” as they are his grandmother’s children) in the form of two humans.
Mishibizhiw creates the first human, a woman, out of clay and a miigis shell, and Gichi-Manidoo then makes the second human, a man. Mishibizhiw and Gichi-Manidoo, and all the other manitous, also teach Nanabush the Midewiwin, telling him that Indians in the future will follow its teachings. In this story as well, the original humans “were made hard, like a shell.” Although it’s not stated that their shells/scales fall off, the immediately following sentences describe the origin of death: in this case, because Nanabush’s brother was not invited to the manitou council on the Midewiwin, which decreed humans immortal—but Nanabush’s brother, as ruler of the afterlife, states, “It’s no use to make your plans that way. I’ve already made that road [to the other world], and everyone who lives on the earth will have to follow that road” (Barnouw’s brackets).
John Tanner (1830:193) also reflects this same tradition, though his recounting is much shorter:
[I]n former times, the Great Spirit having killed the brother of Na-na-bush, the latter was angry, and strengthened himself against the Supreme. Na-na-bush waxed stronger and stronger, and was likely to prevail against Gitch-e-manito, when the latter, to appease him, gave him the Me-tai [Midewiwin]. With this, Na-na-bush was so pleased, that he brought it down to his uncles and aunts on the earth.
While Tanner seems to attribute the murder of Nanabush’s brother to Gichi-Manidoo here, this may be a mistake. One possibility is that he was simply speaking of Mishibizhiw as a gichi-manidoo, a “great” or extremely powerful manitou—just as “Maji-Manidoo” was originally a descriptive term applied to any harmful manitou and not a proper name (see footnote 20)—and his white editor, Edwin James, misunderstood him to be referring to Gichi-Manidoo the Great Spirit.
Indeed, as we’ve just seen in Tom Badger’s version of the same story, “Gichi-Manidoo” was not universally used as a proper name for the high/creator god even over a century after Tanner was dictating his narrative (and he is even today quite often just referred to as Manidoo “the Manitou”); and footnote 14 quotes a reference from the early 1900s to the “evil” “great manitou that dwells on the opposite side of the earth [i.e., the underworld],” the Ojibwe for which is dibishkookamig ebid gichi-manidoo. There are also other examples in older texts of the use of the term as a descriptive one, e.g. in another story from Jones, by Waasaagoneshkang, Nanabush says, “Awenesh wa’aw beminizha’ogwen?! Gechi-manidoowigwen” “Who is this that must be following me?! It must be some great manitou [gichi-manidoo]!” (Jones 1917:114-115). The terms Gichi-Manidoo and Maji-Manidoo were simply not originally names, any more than English “God” originally carried any connotations of being a sort of proper name for the single god of the Abrahamic religions.
Another possibility is that Tanner was combining Mishibizhiw’s murder of Nanabush’s brother with the gift of the Midewiwin being given by both Mishibizhiw and Gichi-Manidoo, as in Badger’s version, with the exact significance of the connection between the two events again misunderstood by James, or perhaps by both men. A final possibility is that Tanner here reflects a genuine tradition in which Nanabush’s brother was killed by—or at least with the support of—multiple manitous from both the upper and lower realms, perhaps including Gichi-Manidoo; this is implied in Schoolcraft’s (1851:317-319) summary. In fact, note that while Tom Badger only lays the blame for the brother’s death at Mishibizhiw’s feet, he has Nanabush, in his resulting fit, curse and threaten revenge on both Mishibizhiw and Gichi-Manidoo. Either Gichi-Manidoo had some sort of limited blame, or Nanabush petulantly blamed him along with everyone else for what happened in spite of his innocence—either possibility could account for Tanner’s version, allowing for some nuances/details lost in translation.
In addition to Badger’s and Tanner’s accounts, Howard (1977:111, 113-114, 134) reports that his Plains Ojibwe consultants believed that Mishibizhiw gave the Midewiwin to Nanabush in recompense for his wolf brother’s death, and Skinner (1920:325) surmises this is the Plains Ojibwe belief but says he was unable to completely verify it. Weeks (2009:238) cites Kinietz (1947:179-187) as indicating the same, and Smith (2012:185) similarly cites Morrisseau (1965:55), though Weeks’s (2009:243-244) summary of Morrisseau’s Midewiwin origin narrative (which he cites as Morrisseau 1965:37-38) just mentions that “a ‘horned serpent’ brought it to the Ojibwa,” with no mention of the wolf brother. Schoolcraft (1851:317-319, 366) reports that the Midewiwin was restitution for the brother’s death but without attributing the murder to Mishibizhiw specifically, but rather to most of the world’s manitous. In any event, the idea that the Underwater Panther figure gave the Medicine Society to the culture hero as compensation for the wolf brother’s death was shared by most peoples who practiced a form of the Midewiwin.
So, what are we to make of all these human/Midewiwin origin myths? First, to summarize, we have the following versions:
- Mishibizhiw and a “Snake” manitou create the first two humans; the Midewiwin originates later from the manitou council sending a messenger.
- Gichi-Manidoo discovers a man covered in scales emerging from the water and provides him with a woman; the first Midewiwin scroll is discovered under a tree.
- Nanabush attempts to create humans but they are “stolen” until he creates Thunderers to protect them; two men/manitous with connections to the underworld battle one another and in the process people discover the Midewiwin’s existence, which the manitous explain to them before turning into Midewiwin medicine themselves.
- To placate Nanabush following the death of his brother, Mishibizhiw and Gichi-Manidoo create the first two humans, with Mishibizhiw creating the first one; they and the other manitous teach Nanabush the Midewiwin.
There is one constant in all these otherwise disparate myths: Mishibizhiw. In two of them he personally creates the first human. In two of them he is not directly mentioned but his presence is felt: in one, the first human emerges from out of the water, as in other cases, covered in scales like a fish (and like Mishibizhiw, for that matter); in another, the first humans are repeatedly stolen by an unnamed manitou who can only be frightened away by Thunderers. Furthermore, he has a pivotal role in imparting the Midewiwin to the people in two of the myths: in one he provides knowledge of the Midewiwin along with the other manitous, while in another, two manitous with some sort of connection to him teach the people the Midewiwin and turn into Midewiwin medicine. There are also the stories from footnote 21, for whatever they’re worth, in which serpents are closely involved in the Midewiwin being imparted to humanity.
All this is to say: for many Anishinaabeg, Mishibizhiw was intimately involved in the creation of mankind, as well as in providing them with the gift of the Midewiwin. Even though not all myths credit him with providing the Midewiwin, the earliest recorded one—Tanner’s, which he likely would have learned sometime a bit before 1800—probably does so, and he is always seen as an important figure in the society, as has been repeatedly illustrated above—as a patron from whom the mideg derive many of their powers.[25] Smith (2012:183-184) not only draws attention to the shining scales covering the first humans, which parallel the copper scales often said to cover Mishibizhiw, but also intriguingly suggests a motive for Mishibizhiw’s theft of the first humans in Waasaagoneshkang’s or Midaasoganzh’s Story Three: they are creatures of the water—in the story related to Kohl, literally emerging from the water in front of Gichi-Manidoo’s eyes—and thus originally part of his realm. She muses this perhaps even accounts for his continued practice of dragging people into the water: he is taking back what he views as his.
Nothing could better illustrate the complexity of Mishibizhiw’s character, and refute the simplistic good/evil dualism mentioned earlier, than this realization that even while he attempts to wrench us back into his world to die, he was involved in giving humans life—both in the sense of our creation out of inanimate matter, and through the mino-bimaadiziwin afforded by the gift of the Midewiwin.
In the end, however, humans shed their scales, sheltered themselves under the Thunderers’ protective wings, and became creatures of the land. Mishibizhiw flooded and destroyed the old world; the new world belongs to Nanabush, who created it himself (as Tom Badger says, “Those manidog had no right to this earth that we are living on. Wenebojo [Nanabush] owned this earth” [Barnouw 1977:42])—and to his people, his aunts and uncles: the human people of the new world.
From Ukteena to Leviathan: Comparative Aspects
[A]nd then we noticed a blue panther floating high in the trees. He had no visible face but from his tail shot flames of fire.
—Edward Cornplanter in A. Parker, Seneca Myths and Folk Tales, pg. 80
Богъ же рече: ты откуду бѣ. птица же рече: азъ есмь отъ нижныхъ. и рече Богъ: а азъ откуду. птица же рече: отъ вышнихъ. И рече Богъ: дай же ми отъ нижныхъ. и понре птица въ море . . .
And God said: “Whence art thou?” And the bird said, “Ego ex infimis.” And God said, “And whence am I?” And the bird said, “De superis.” And God said, “Da mihi ex infimis.” And the bird dived into the sea . . .
—Dragomanov, Notes on the Slavic Religio-Ethical Legends, pg. 80[26]
אתה מושל בגאות הים
בשוא גליו, אתה תשבחםYou rule over the tide of the Sea,
When its waves lift up, it is You who subdue them.
—Psalms 89:10
In this section I will simply note and comment on some parallels between what we’ve just covered and traditions in other societies.
The portion of the Nanabush cycle dealing with his adventures with the wolves, death of his brother, and revenge on the underwater manitous is widespread among Algonquian peoples. The story even appears among the Blackfeet, where the culture hero Old Man (Náápiwa) travels with a wolf pack, getting into the same misunderstandings with them as in the Anishinaabe story (including specific details such as hitting one in the eye with a bone while making grease), they leave him with one “brother,” the brother is killed after jumping over a stream despite a dream warning him not to, Old Man gets help from a kingfisher to shoot “Chief Bear”—the offending manitou in this case—and other Bears in revenge after disguising himself as a stump, he encounters a frog which is planning to help cure the Bears, and he skins the frog and uses its skin as a disguise to kill the Bears (Grinnell 1920:149-152).
For another example, closer to home so to speak, the Menominee version is also similar to the Anishinaabe one, though surprisingly in some ways less so than the Blackfoot version. Starting with the details of the hero Maeqnapos’s birth and other adventures, which very closely parallel the early portions of the Nanabush cycle, it continues with him having a wolf brother or son, or being given one by the gods (often, but not always, lacking the episode where he travels with a wolf pack); the brother is drowned by the underworld manitous in the same manner as in the Anishinaabe and Blackfoot versions, after running over an ice-covered lake in spite of Maeqnapos’s warning. (Maeqnapos then appoints his brother’s shade as lord of the Land of the Dead.) Maeqnapos resolves to avenge his brother’s death, but in this tradition does so after the Thunderers have challenged the underworld manitous to a lacrosse game, thus bringing them out onto dry land. The familiar episodes then follow: Maeqnapos disguises himself as a tree or stump which is tested by a bear and serpent, shoots the chief underworld manitou (usually White Bear in this case—but sometimes the Great Serpent, Mēqsekenaepik—or two chiefs; the White Bear was the chief underworld manitou for the Menominees, with the Underwater Panther below him), kills and skins the old woman serving as his healer and puts on her skin, enters the lodge he’s been taken to, kills him, and trips a basswood twine alarm system when he leaves, triggering the Deluge and Earth-Diver episodes (Hoffman 1890:246-254, 1896:87-88, 113-117, 131-135; Michelson 1911a:68-86; Skinner and Satterlee 1915:239-247, 253-263; Skinner 1920:25-33; Bloomfield 1928:153-159). Aside from other Central Algonquians, this myth, or parts of it, was also shared by a few neighboring non-Algonquian peoples such as the Iowas and Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos).
The Deluge and Earth-Diver episodes of the Nanabush cycle are far more widespread; most people are probably aware that Deluge myths occur worldwide (attributed to many different causes, of course),[27] but the Earth-Diver myth is also found beyond North America. It has been claimed that “[n]o other single folk-idea is so widely held in the world as this” (Count 1961:vii), and it has been called “the most widely distributed of all North American Indian myths” (Wheeler-Voegelin 1949:260 quoted in Köngäs 1960:151). Within North America, the Earth-Diver myth is found throughout the continent but is much more common in the northern half, except among Eskimo-Aleut speakers and in the Plateau and Pacific Northwest. Specifically, it is found among the Algonquians; Iroquoians; many peoples of the Southeast; among Siouan-speakers, the Crows, Hidatsas, Mandans, Dakotans (Sioux), Assiniboines, and Iowas; among Caddoans, only (very marginally) the Arikaras; many Canadian and a few Alaskan Athabaskans (Dene people); among Uto-Aztecans, the Tübatulabals, Guarijios, and most members of the Numic group; Yokuts; Miwoks; Wintus; Patwins; Maidus; Salinans; Modocs; some Salish and Wakashan peoples; Molalas; and Chinooks (Köngäs 1960:157; Berezkin 2007:110-114; see map below). Elsewhere, the Earth-Diver myth is found in some pockets of South America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, and in a broad belt across much of northern Eurasia, among Baltic, Slavic, Uralic, Turkic, Tungusic, Mongol, Yeniseian, and “other Asian peoples,” excepting those of far northeastern Siberia such as the Koryaks (Köngäs 1960:151, 162-163; Berezkin 2007:110-111, 115-116, 118 [quote is from Köngäs 1960:163]).
The basic outline of the Earth-Diver myth which is found in all these disparate cultures is that the world is covered in water, one or more individuals dives down and brings up a tiny bit of dirt from the bottom, and a creator uses this tiny bit of dirt to form the Earth’s land. Though not generally the case in most older versions of the Anishinaabe myth, in many eastern North American versions the new world is placed on the back of a turtle for stability. The identity of the diver(s) varies, with Muskrat quite frequently the successful diver in North America, although in many cases worldwide, especially in California, the Missouri River basin, and Eurasia, the successful diver is a water bird. In the Eurasian versions with diving birds, there is usually only one diver, and in a Christianization of the myth he is usually identified as—or replaced by—the Devil, while the creator is identified as the Christian God. The Earth-Diver story need not follow a Deluge story, and many Earth-Diver traditions simply begin with the world existing as an endless expanse of water, without preceding episodes.
Hultkrantz (1983:4) claims that “all over the world aquatic spirits often show evil inclinations.” We’ve already seen Meskwaki and Cheyenne stories involving dangerous or malevolent underwater manitous; this was a pan-Algonquian concept, as well as one held very widely among Indians throughout the continent. The Underwater Panther/great lynx deity was shared by at least the Anishinaabeg, Crees, Miami-Illinois speakers, Shawnees, Meskwakis, Sauks, Kickapoos, and Menominees. Among non-Algonquian groups, Howard (1960:217) mentions the Caddoan-speaking Arikaras, and the Siouan-speaking “Eastern Dakota” (Santee-Sisseton?), “Middle Dakota” (Yankton-Yanktonai?), Mandans, Hidatsas, Omahas, and Poncas. The belief was also shared by the Ho-Chunks, many Iroquoian groups, and at least some peoples of the Southeast such as the Natchez, Creeks, and Alabamas. Beliefs about giant aquatic Horned Serpents are even more widespread in North America, especially in the eastern half and in the Southwest; a full list of all the groups with Horned Serpent traditions would be very long, but a handful of examples will suffice: the Anishinaabeg, Crees, Meskwakis, Menominees, Shawnees, Cheyennes, Maliseets and Passamaquoddies, Penobscots, Mi’kmaq, Blackfeet, Alabamas, Creeks, Cherokees, Northern Iroquoians, Sioux, Mandans, Arikaras, Hopis, Zunis, and many other Pueblo peoples.
In most cases these beings shared many significant characteristics with Mishibizhiw/Mishiginebig. For example, the Creek versions, “tie-snakes” and “water masters,” would appear for certain medicine men and allow them to slice pieces of their horns off to use as powerful medicine (Gatschet 1899:259). This was true of the Menominee Horned Serpent as well, which like Mishibizhiw could be summoned by drumming near the water, and the horn could be sliced off with a cedar knife, the same as the Anishinaabe practice; as with Mishibizhiw, the Menominee Horned Serpent also normally demanded the sacrifice of one’s children in exchange for his powers. The Iroquoian Horned Serpents similarly provided a piece of themselves—part of their horn, scales, or coagulated blood—which granted tremendous power to medicine men, and in some cases also required a human sacrifice in exchange. The Iroquois figures were also often pictured as sky-blue or white as a sign of their power (Hamell 1998), just as Mishibizhiw (more specifically, the chief Mishibizhiw) may be. Many of the rituals involved were shared as well: for example, offering the Panther and/or Serpent tobacco before beginning a journey over the water was “a nearly universal practice in the Eastern Woodlands” (Lankford 2007a:118). Some cultures’ equivalents of the Horned Serpent differed a bit more. For the Wabanaki peoples of northern New England and Quebec, for example, the Horned Serpent (Maliseet-Passamaquoddy wiwílomeq, Penobscot wiwíləyamekw [both lit. “horned fish”], Mi’kmaq jupijka:m) was described as more of a sort of slimy, worm- or slug-like creature, ranging between quite small and very large, and either with deer antlers or with “horns like the eye-stalks of a snail” (LeSourd 2000:457), though it still shared most of the traits of the Horned Serpent in other Eastern Woodland Cultures, such as holding great power, scrapings from its horns providing medicine, and association with danger and at times evil (Walker 1999; LeSourd 2000).
For the connection between the (Horned) Serpent and medicine, we can look well beyond the Americas—all over the world, snakes are associated with healing, medicine, fertility, immortality, and rebirth:
Note, in fact, that in Anishinaabe traditions serpents are associated not just with healing and medicine, but with immortality as well: human and Midewiwin origin stories, which commonly feature Mishibizhiw, also commonly describe the loss of humanity’s immortality, while the last test potentially preventing a soul from reaching the afterlife—as opposed to potentially vanishing forever—is a giant serpent. A familiar example of this theme can also be found in the Bible. The Garden of Eden story features a serpent which essentially “steals” immortality from humanity, though more indirectly than in related myths from nearby cultures, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, where a snake literally steals from Gilgamesh the plant that can confer immortality. Anyway, all of these associations are undoubtedly related to a snake’s ability to periodically shed its dull, dead-looking skin and reemerge, phoenix-like, as a fresh, “new” snake.
A few themes are common among other peoples’ conceptions of Horned Serpents (and Underwater Panthers, see below) which are not common in Anishinaabe conception. Thus, in many traditions, the Underwater Panthers or Horned Serpents were said to have horns of two different colors, which is not the case for Mishibizhiw. In many cases the horns are also the antlers of a deer, not those of a bison—though this is occasionally true in Anishinaabe conception—and in many cases the Serpent has a sort of shining, diamond-like jewel in the center of its forehead which beams out light.
Finally, in many traditions the Horned Serpent/Underwater Panther, or a closely related more dragon-like figure, had a connection with meteors and comets (in fact one of the Miami-Illinois names for the Underwater Panther, lénipinšia, is also the word for “meteor” [Costa 2003:201, n. 69]); in their role as meteors/comets, they might be covered in flames, and their abode in the waters is related to this—they “are consigned to reside in these watery depths, and are permitted only to fly from one deep river or lake to another,” “[l]est they set the world afire” (Hamell 1998:265).
This role is actually one which Mishibizhiw shares, though I did not describe it earlier in the post, largely because it seems to be a much more subsidiary role than in other neighboring cultures, and many Anishinaabeg have not mentioned the role at all when describing Mishibizhiw. Nonetheless, there are references, both older and contemporary, to this role. Schoolcraft, for instance, relying on Chief Zhingwaakoons, distinguished multiple varieties of “Misshibezhieu,” one active during the day, the other at night; of “the fabulous night panther,” he states that it “is generally located in the clouds” (Schoolcraft 1851:406-407).[28] Schoolcraft also mentions what could be the same figure elsewhere, when he presents the interpretation of a Midewiwin/Waabanoowiwin ritual scroll or board and the words to the songs that it represents.[29] One of the images on the tablet, shown below, supposedly depicts “A cloudy sky, with a fabulous animal [i.e. a manitou], called the white tiger, with a long tail, who chases the clouds. He is sometimes represented with wings in the center of his back” (Schoolcraft 1851:371). The image does not include an indication of horns, so this may not actually be Mishibizhiw-as-comet, and overall this must be treated with extreme skepticism; Schoolcraft’s general overconfidence, bias, and unreliability is especially at play here, and there are various suspicious elements about this scroll/board and Schoolcraft’s proffered interpretation. Angel (2002:105) even suggests, not unreasonably, that Schoolcraft’s consultants may have manufactured it for him, figuring out what he wanted to hear and providing him with that instead of divulging actual, secret knowledge.
A modern reference to this role as a comet is in a story by Elizabeth Panamick of M’Chigeeng, ON, who tells of a Mishibizhiw which lived in a small lake near where she grew up and would become angry when bothered by encroaching people (Panamick 2017). While she first mentions some conventional ways that he makes his presence known—a raging whirlpool, the eerie splash as he dives into the waters in the dead of night—she then describes him appearing as a streaking ball of shkode “fire” in the sky which falls to the ground (ellipses in the original; translation partly from Corbiere and Migwans 2013:48, with a few modifications, and respelled/rewritten in a few places):
Mii oodi gaa-bi-njibdeg wi shkode, gchi-shkode gwa. Mii niniibaa…eshkwaa-aabtaa-dbikak go naa maanda, bngan go naa. Maanda-sh bemaabkaag oodi, maanda go gidaaki zhiwi. Aapji go zhiwi nihii, naagwad go wi nihii — ge- gegoo zhiwi zhayaamgak, you know. Mii maa gii-bi-booniisemgag wi nihii, shkode. Mshibzhii dash wa. Waaskone maaba Mshibzhii, nihii, bmibzod niibaadbik. Mmaandaa go gewii wi! Nbiishing dash Mshibzhii, mii yaawid aw. Nbiishi-mshibzhii. Gewii-sh wa gidkamik mshibzhii eyaad, zaawzi gewii wa, you know. Aahaazhoog-sh maaba pizo zhiwi.
Over there’s where the fire fell from, really big fire. This was the dead of night — after midnight, all quiet. Now this ridge over there, that’s up on the bluff up over there. Right there, uh, it appeared, uh — som- something’s coming, you know. That’s where it landed, that uh, fire. And that’s a Mshibzhii. This Mshibzhii shines bright, uh, when it flies at night. Isn’t that something else! And the Panther [Mshibzhii] from the water — that’s what he is: a water panther [nbiishi-mshibzhii]; whereas that panther [mshibzhii] that lives on dry land, that one’s yellow, you know. Well, he flew over across the water.
While the Horned Serpents of the Eastern Woodlands shared many traits, the Water Serpents of the Southwest had fewer points of resemblance with Mishibizhiw. They were associated with bodies of water, most often springs, but unlike Mishibizhiw their most important functions were generally related to fertility (very common cross-culturally, as noted above), floods, irrigation, and the life-bringing rains and waters of the earth in general, and were the subject of the widespread “Snake Dance,” which has later come to be confined to the Hopis (Frigout 1979:572-573; Simmons 1979:179). They did, however, have horns or plumes of feathers—probably related to the Plumed Serpents of Mesoamerica, such as Quetzalcoatl—and, significantly, in some cases were associated with the Mountain Lion deity. Excavations of old Pueblo shrines to Mountain Lion have also turned up large numbers of shell beads, white and quartzite stone, and potential “thunderstones” (Gunnerson 1998:249, 250); we have already seen the connection between Anishinaabe Thunderers and thunderstones, the weapons which they fire at their prey in the form of lightning, but Thunderers are also associated with white quartz and other white minerals—quartz as the result of their lightning striking rocks, and other white minerals on rock formations as their excretions below their nests. While these features are associated with Thunderers among the Anishinaabeg, they were also associated with the Horned Serpent/Underwater Panther figure among, for instance, Iroquoians, so their apparent association with Mountain Lion in the Southwest is probably significant.
In many cases—as has mostly happened with Mishibizhiw and Mishiginebig—a group’s “Horned Serpent” has at least partially merged with the Underwater Panther figure. This is true, for instance, in many Iroquois traditions. For another example, the Sioux water monster uŋčéǧila (a name with many variants, partly depending on dialect: uŋktéȟi, uŋȟčéǧila, etc.) is often said to be a giant horned serpent, but several descriptions of it sound much more like the Underwater Panther. Thus, Skinner’s (1920:339, n. 44) Sisseton consultant Jingling Cloud, in a story on the origin of the Wakȟáŋ Wačhípi, the Dakota Midewiwin equivalent, describes one as “a four-footed, long-tailed monster with shiny horns, somewhat resembling a buffalo. . . . [Its head was] white like snow.” (Note the associon with the Medicine Society. The Wakȟáŋ Wačhípi was said to have been given to the people by one or more uŋčéǧila, just as the Midewiwin is said to come from the Underwater Panther by the Anishinaabeg, Sauks, and Menominees, and a Wyandot medicine society is said to come from the equivalent Horned Serpent/Underwater Panther/meteor being figure.) J. Dorsey (1889:136) also describes an uŋčéǧila among the Lakotas as a being that “resembled a rattlesnake, but he had short legs and rusty-yellow fur.” Likewise, the Delaware Horned Serpent, Unami maxáxku·k (lit. “big/great snake”), is pictured in one carving from some time before 1731 as more of a fire-breathing dragon with legs, though it’s possible this is partly due to European influence:
The most famous representation of the Underwater Panther, along with the Agawa Rock Mishibizhiw pictograph, was a massive rock painting of two such figures on the bluffs above the Mississippi River near modern Alton, IL, first seen by Europeans during Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet’s 1673 exploratory voyage down the Mississippi (JR 59:138-141):
Comme nous Cottoions des roches . . . Nous vismes sur un de ces roches deux monstres en peinture . . . ils sont gros Comme vn veau. ils ont des Cornes en teste Comme des cheureils; un regard affreux, des yeux rouges, une barbe Comme d’un tygre, la face a quelque chose de l’homme, le corps Couuert d’écailles, et La queuë si Longue qu’elle fait tout le tour du Corps passant par dessus la teste et retournant entre les jambes elle se termine en queuë de Poisson. Le vert, Le rouge et Le noirastre sont les trois Couleurs qui Le Composent[.]
While Skirting some rocks, . . . We saw upon one of them two painted monsters . . . . They are as large As a calf; they have Horns on their heads Like those of deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard Like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body Covered with scales, and so Long A tail that it winds all around the Body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a Fish’s tail. Green, red, and black are the three Colors composing the Picture.
Marquette made a sketch of the painting, which has not survived, though a sort of recreation of it has been preserved in an unlikely source (see footnote).[30] Interestingly, the immediately following sentences describe the party encountering “dreadful” rapids “[w]hile conversing about these monsters,” so presumably still very close to the site. The Panthers were surely painted in that spot because of the presence of the rapids.
The same painting was also described by three other French explorers in the late 17th century, the last of whom noted it was already significantly faded. Though the painting seems to have disappeared rather soon afterward,[31] a great deal of modern-day folklore has grown up around it, and it’s been embraced by the community of Alton as a sort of mascot. The animal pictured has been called the “Piasa” /ˈpaɪ.ə.sɔ/ (“PIE-uh-saw”) since at least the late 1700s, which is evidently from the Miami-Illinois term páyiihsa (plural páyiihsaki), the name of twin dwarves/imps with counterparts in other Algonquian cultures (Costa 2005:297, 2022:xx-xxi, 512), even though the painting was clearly of Underwater Panthers and not of the páyiihsaki.[32] The confusion evidently stems from an association between páyiihsaki and other local landmarks which led to a nearby river being named for them; their living near or under the water; and Miami-Illinois traditions which feature them living in an Underwater Panther’s den (Esarey et al. 2015).
At any rate, the name “piasa” was fancifully claimed by the 19th-century writer John Russell to mean “The Bird That Devours Men,” with a concomitant fanciful backstory created for it by Russell, involving an invented tale—though possibly one loosely based on real Miami-Illinois mythology—of a monster birdlike creature that terrified and consumed the people of the neighboring area before being defeated by a brave hero, the chief “Outoga,” and complete with a separate claim by Russell to have personally discovered a nearby, virtually inaccessible cave overflowing with human bones. Some cryptozoologists have taken his stories at face value and taken an interest in the “Piasa Bird” (e.g., Taylor 1999). Bizarrely, but presumably due partly to Russell’s influence and partly because the later incarnation of the painting (see footnote 31 above) had or was thought to have wings (in fact, recall from footnote 31 that all renderings of the image with wings postdate Russell’s accounts!), the Piasa has been assumed by many later writers to have been a representation of Thunderers, rather than Underwater Panthers. You will of course not be surprised to learn that a rather hideous and inaccurate recreation was created near to the original site:
In any case, the term “Piasa” has been adopted by archaeologists and historians to refer to the Underwater Panther figure as it appears in Mississippian iconography. The Mississippian cultural complex (ca. 900-1600 AD, covering most of eastern North America and probably made up of Siouan, Algonquian, Iroquoian, Caddoan, and Muskogean speakers and speakers of other southeastern languages), like their predecessors the Hopewellians (ca. 1-500 AD) made frequent use of both the Underwater Panther/“Piasa” and Horned Serpent motifs in their artwork, on shell gorgets, copper engravings, ceramics, pipes, mica and stone carvings, etc., not to mention giant earthworks like the famous Great Serpent Mound.
Interestingly, the Mississippian Horned Serpent figure was almost always pictured with wings—as the Cherokee Horned Serpent, ᎤᎧᏖᎾ Ukteena, sometimes is—which has led some to posit a connection with the Mesoamerican (and to a lesser extent, American Southwest) Plumed Serpent figure, though Lankford (2007a:128-134) argues the wings are a “symbolic locative,” tied to an astronomical role for the Serpent, which he believes was identified with the constellation Scorpius. This would then explain the Serpent’s sometimes being described as having a jewel in the center of its forehead—and perhaps also partially explain stories like Kohl’s in which a man removes vermilion from between Mishibizhiw’s horns as well as perhaps the horns’ composition as copper themselves: at the “head” of the Serpent constellation/Scorpius is Antares, a noticeably red star. It is also, in Lankford’s view, related to the idea that the Serpent is absent in winter, since in North America, Scorpius is only visible during the summer, though this seems more tenuous to me, in part since the widespread belief among Algonquians (and I think a number of other Native people?) was that almost all manitous hibernate or are absent during the winter. It also seems to me another possible reason for representing the Horned Serpents as winged could be that this was a way of indicating their role as comets/meteors.
Horned Serpents and the more chimerical Underwater Panther-type horned underwater beings can of course also be compared to “dragon” myths more widely, which are found throughout the world, though best known from Europe and East Asia. Blust (2000:519) summarizes some of the cross-cultural traits often attributed to dragons: association “with waterfalls, pools, and caves”; “regarded as controllers of rain”; “typically portrayed as chimerical serpents sporting horns, hair, feathers, or other bodily attributes characteristic of warm-blooded animals in conjunction with the body of a snake”; often regarded as androgynous; “live in terrestrial water sources and yet take flight at the time of the rains”; are attacked by thunder or lightning; breathe fire; “often guard treasure, especially a hoard of gold.” Obviously not all of these traits apply to North American Horned Serpents or the Underwater Panther, but several do—though in my view many of the resemblances are more illusory than Blust’s summary would make it seem, and I find his paper in general to be weak.
Thunderer/Thunderbird beliefs are also extremely widespread throughout North America. I won’t bother with a partial listing of groups holding the belief this time, but suffice it to say there are plenty of them; Lenik (2012:181) reports that the belief is found “along the Northwest Coast and Columbia Plateau in the west, throughout the Great Plains, around the Great Lakes, in southeastern and maritime Canada, and in the northeastern United States.” As among the Anishinaabeg, they are primarily viewed as positive figures, to be greeted with gratefulness and respect. Illustrating this—and echoing the frequent Anishinaabe idea that only white people, who are ignorant and disrespectful of the Thunderers, are struck by lightning—one Meskwaki told Jones (1911:214):
The white man often gets . . . his houses blown away by the wind and struck with lightning. That he quite fears these things, is shown by the way he takes to a hole when such danger is in sight. He flies to it like a prairie-dog; it seems quite natural to him.
But with us it is different. When the sky is full of wind and shooting fire, out of the lodges we go and meet the manitous there; to them we make an offering of sacred tobacco, and they are pleased.
These ideas—that one must show respect to and placate Thunderers with tobacco, and that only white people are struck by lightning, never Indians (as long as they treat Thunderers with respect)—were very widespread. For instance, Walker (1999:368-369) quotes such concepts from Maliseets, Creeks, Cherokees, and Carolina Algonquians.
The idea of an antagonism or constant battle between these thunder-beings and serpents/underworld-beings is also very widespread. One Seneca story tells of a woman who marries a captivating man, whom she gradually realizes is a giant horned serpent in disguise and who is keeping her in his underwater home. She swims to the surface, where her husband pursues her, but he is killed by the thunder god’s bolt (Parker 1923:218-222). Gatschet (1899:259) also refers to the Mohawk Horned Serpent being “destroyed by thunderbolts, or compelled to retire into deep water.” The Algonquian Innu people held similar beliefs, though according to the Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune (JR 12:26-27), they believed that thunder was the sound of the Thunderers attempting to vomit up the serpents they had eaten, and lightning strikes were the vomited serpents themselves, striking the earth after being expelled. Other non-Algonquian/Iroquoian peoples with similar beliefs on the opposition between Thunderers and serpents/underworld beings include the Sioux, Assiniboines, Omahas, Poncas, Ho-Chunks, Arikaras, Pawnees, Wichitas, and many others.
Several Arikara texts relate to this theme. One, “The Mysterious Snake Seen by Short Bear” by Alfred Morsette, has a snake (nút) snatched up out of the ground by a Thunderer (waarúxti’) (cf. lines 28-30 [It looked like a string. The string was swinging. It quickly disappeared] with the Anishinaabe stories of serpents snatched twirling out of the water by Thunderers). Another, “The Young Man Who Became a Snake and the One Pitied By the Thunderbirds” by Dan Hopkins, is a modern version of two stories also given to G. Dorsey (1904:73-80). Thunderers take a young man up to their nest and ask for his help in defeating a nuutawáčeš (the Horned Serpent, translated “water monster” in the online text collection) which has been attacking their family but is covered in protective scales and impervious to their lightning. The young man shoots it in the mouth and kills it, and is given great powers by the Thunderers in return. At another time, a companion of the boy who defeated the water monster foolishly eats some of a giant underground or underwater snake, and gradually turns into a giant serpent himself. The hero must place him into the Missouri River.[33] The human-turned-serpent later captures his companion after the companion’s victory over the water monster and steals most of his thunder-related powers; the young hero only retains the power to shoot lightning from his eyes, and must keep them covered.
We can already note some similarities to Anishinaabe stories given above, beyond the antipathy between underworld serpents and thunder-beings: the fact that thunder-beings have families, lightning flashes are related to their eyes, and the underwater serpent is covered in special scales. The similarities don’t stop there, however; in the first of Dorsey’s stories, we learn that the human-turned-serpent “gave its powers to the people and gave them songs and the Medicine-men’s ceremony.” In the second of Dorsey’s stories, the human-turned-serpent says: “Whenever the people cross the Missouri River they must say, ‘My brother, let me step over you.’ They will then always cross over the river without any danger of drowning. If they do not say anything, there will be danger of their getting drowned. Let them also give me presents, throwing them into the river.”
Recall, as well, the Meskwaki story by Alfred Kiyana in which a boy accidentally accepted a blessing from an underwater manitou which later killed his parents and tried to kill him. In the story, immediately after accepting the underwater manitou’s blessing, an unidentified “winged manitou” (illustrated by Kiyana as a humanoid figure with angelic wings) appears and castigates the boy, and later intervenes to save the boy’s life from the underwater manitou. Although he is not described as a Thunderer, he is most likely is one, and in any case he is a beneficent manitou associated with the air standing in opposition to a malevolent manitou associated with the water. The Meskwakis certainly shared the belief that the Thunderers and underwater manitous were at war, and used many of the same motifs as the Anishinaabeg to illustrate their opposition. For example, both would often picture a Thunderer on one side of a woven bag and an underwater manitou on the other (see image below and cf. with the Ojibwe and Odawa woven bags shown earlier).
Other similarities with Anishinaabe beliefs that can be pointed out include the fact that vision quests should not take place in summer, and the fact that an underwater manitou that offers a “blessing” to someone normally demands a family member’s life or a similar terrible price in return. In this story the winged manitou accuses the underwater manitou of killing the boy’s parents and intending to kill the boy as payment for the blessing, since the boy has just completed the task which the underwater manitou set for him when he provided him with his powers. (“As for you, however, now it’s as if he paid his debt to you with them [his parents]. Just as he finished doing that which you blessed him to do, right then you gnawed the bones of his parents clean.”) Michelson (1925:550-553ff) gives another Meskwaki story in which a disguised evil manitou gives a boy a “blessing,” but his grandfather warns him that the manitou’s stated requests were a veiled symbolism for the deaths of the boy’s future children: “when he said to you, ‘you are to divide him [a dog for a feast for the manitou] into five parts,’ he did not really mean that he demanded . . . a dog from you: yonder in the future he indeed desires of you five of your children-to-be.” The manitou had also offered as part of his blessing the “power to kill the people when you use that medicine against them . . . . even from afar.” The grandfather rather obviously observes, “the good medicine of which he speaks to you so that you may kill people, it is not good at all.” (In his defense, the boy is just seven years old.) Just as with Mishibizhiw, malevolent Meskwaki manitous can offer unscrupulous (or naïve) people tremendous and deadly powers which they can use to murder their enemies, but the price will be the lives of those they love.
Interestingly, the belief in the thunder god’s opposition to or conquest of serpents, of sea monsters, or of the seas(/chaos) themselves (the “Chaoskampf” myth) are widespread beyond North America. For instance, many Indo-European cultures had myths involving the storm/thunder god’s defeat of a giant serpent or dragon, often one associated in some way with water: Zeus and Typhon, Indra and Vritra, Thor and Jörmungandr, etc.
The example that may be most familiar to many people (by name if nothing else), even though they may not realize it, is from the Ancient Near East. This is reflected for instance in Marduk’s triumph over Tiamat in the Enuma Elish. The West Semitic peoples had similar traditions. The discovered corpus of Ugaritic epic poetry has a significant cycle which deals with the storm god, Hadd (meaning “Thunderer”; but normally referred to by his title Ba‘al “Lord”) fighting and defeating the sea god Yamm (“Sea”) and, sometimes with the help of his sister ‘Anat, the serpentine/draconic sea monsters Tunnan and Litan (often referred to in English as “Lotan” or “Lōtan” or similar, but his Ugaritic name—only written using consonants, as ltn—was probably Lītānu [Emerton 1982]). The culmination of Ba‘al’s triumph over Yamm, and his mother Aṯirat’s exaltation of his power as the storm god, are found in the Ba‘al Cycle’s Tablet 2 (KTU 1.2) Column IV and Tablet 4 (KTU 1.4) Column V (Parker 1997:103-104, 129; translation slightly modified):
| ht ʾibk Bʿlm, ht ʾibk tmḫṣ, ht tṣm tṣrtk! |
“Now your enemy, O Ba‘al, now your enemy, smash, now your foe, vanquish!” . . . |
| wyrtḳṣ ṣmd bd Bʿl, | And the weapon leaps from Ba‘al’s hand, . . . |
| ylm ḳdḳd Zbl Ym, bn ʿnm Ṯpṭ Nhr. |
It strikes the head of Prince Yamm, between the eyes of Judge River. |
| yprsḥ Ym yḳl lʾarṣ, tġṣn pnth, wydlp tmnh. |
Yamm collapses, falls to the earth, his joints shake, and his form crumbles. |
| yḳṯ Bʿl wyšt Ym, ykly Ṯpṭ Nhr. |
Ba‘al drags and mutilates Yamm, destroys Judge River. |
| wnʾap ʿdn mṭrh Bʿl, | “And now may Ba‘al enrich with his rain, . . . |
| wtn ḳlh bʿrpt, šrh lʾarṣ brḳm! |
And may he give his voice in the clouds, may he flash to the earth lightning!” |
Although Ba‘al and especially his mother Aṯirat continued to be worshipped by the ordinary population of Ancient Israel and Judah, as Ba‘al and Asherah, as YHWH gradually overtook most of the functions of Ba‘al and the other West Semitic deities, he absorbed many aspects of this older layer of mythology. This included, e.g., some characteristic epithets like “Cloudrider” (rākibi ʿurpāti, commonly used for Ba‘al, and matching YHWH’s description as [h]ārōkēb bāʿărābōt “Him who rides on the clouds” in Psalm 68:5), as well as more general features. Psa. 18, for example (= 2 Sam. 22), describes YHWH as a storm god, his thunder (= voice) and lightning conquering enemies and driving away the waters (e.g., “YHWH thundered from on high. / Elyon [another of Ba‘al’s epithets!] sent forth His voice. // He let loose His arrows, and scattered them, / lightning bolts shot, and He panicked them. // The channels of water were exposed, / and the world’s foundations laid bare”: 2 Sam. 22:14-16, Psa. 18:14-16).
And in the poetry of Job and Psalms, and some scattered references elsewhere, there are a number of references to YHWH’s victory over the forces of chaos represented by the waters, and as personified by water monster-dragons, many of them directly attested in the old Ugaritic poetry. Thus, for instance the Ugaritic Tunnan appears as Tanin (Biblical Hebrew תַנִּין Tannîn), or the plural Taninim (Gen. 1:21, Psa. 91:13, Psa. 148:7, Job 7:12, Isa. 27:1, etc.), and YHWH’s victory over the sea is referenced repeatedly, as in the quote from Job 26:12-14 given above as an epigraph to the section on “The Thunderers,” or as in Psalm 89 (Atá moshél begeút hayám, / besó galáv, atá teshabkhém. // Atá dikíta khekhalál Ráhav, / bizróa uzkhá pizárta oyevékha “You rule over the tide of the sea, / when its waves lift up, it is You who subdue them. // It is You who crushed Rahav [another sea serpent/dragon] like a corpse— / with the arm of Your might You scattered Your enemies”: Psa. 89:10-11).
Most famously, however, the sea monster Litan reappears as Leviathan (Liwyātān, modern Livyatan). In the Bible, Leviathan is occasionally mentioned as a sea monster defeated by YHWH (e.g., alongside the Taninim, in Psa. 74:13-14: Atá forárta veazekhá Yam, / Shibárta rashéy Taniním al hamáim, // Atá ritsátsta rashéy Livyatán . . . “You shattered Yam with Your strength, / You smashed the Taninim’s heads on the waters. // You crushed Leviathan’s heads . . .”), but most notably is described at the conclusion of God’s Voice from the Whirlwind in Job as the ultimate example of the glory and mystery and sometimes terror of God’s creation, and of humanity’s ultimate insignificance and powerlessness in the face of such inscrutable majesties (Job 40-41):
| Timshókh Livyatán bekhaká, uvekhével tashkía leshonó? |
Could you draw Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord press down his tongue? |
| Hatasím agmón beapó, uvekhóakh tikóv lekheyó? |
Could you put a line in his nose, and with a fishhook pierce his cheek? |
| Hayarbé elékha takhanuním, im yedabér elékha rakót? |
Would he urgently entreat you, would he speak to you gentle words? |
| Hayikhrót brit imákh, tikakhénu leéved olám? |
Would he seal a pact with you, that you take him as lifelong slave? |
| Hatesakhék bo katsipór, vetiksherénu lenaarotékha? … |
Could you play with him like a bird, and leash him for your young women? … |
| Mi gilá pney levushó, bekhéfel ⸢shiryonó⸣ mi yavó? |
Who can uncover his outer garb, come into his double mail? |
| Daltéy fanáv mi fitéakh? Svivót shináv eymá. |
Who can pry open the doors of his face? All around his teeth is terror. |
| ⸢Gevá⸣ afikéy maginím, sagúr khotám tsar. |
His back is rows of shields, closed with the tightest seal. |
| Ekhád beekhád yigáshu, verúakh lo yavó veyneyhém. |
One touches against the next, and no breath can come between them. |
| Ish beakhíkhu yedubáku, yitlakdú veló yitparádu. |
Each sticks fast to the next, locked together, they will not part. |
| Atishotáv tahél or, veeynáv keaf’apéy shákhar. |
His sneezes shoot out light, and his eyes are like the eyelids of dawn. |
| Mipív lapidím yahalókhu, kidodéy esh yitmalátu. |
Firebrands leap from his mouth, sparks of fire fly in the air. |
| Minkhiráv yetsé ashán, kedúd nafúakh veagmón. … |
From his nostrils smoke comes out, like a boiling vat on brushwood. … |
| Betsavaró yalín oz, ulefanáv tadúts deavá. … |
Strength abides in his neck, and before him power dances. … |
| Misetó yagúru elím, mishvarím yitkhatáu. |
When he rears up, the gods are frightened, when he crashes down, they cringe. |
| Masigéhu khérev bli takúm, khanít, masá, veshiryá. |
Who overtakes him with sword, it will not avail, nor spear nor dart nor lance. |
| Yakhshóv letéven barzél, leéts rikavón nekhushá. … |
Iron he deems as straw, and bronze as rotten wood. … |
| Yartíakh kasír metsulá, yam yasím kamerkakhá. |
He makes the deep boil like a pot, turns sea to an ointment pan. |
| Akharáv yaír natív, yakhshóv tehóm leseyvá. |
Behind him glistens a wake, he makes the deep seem hoary. |
| Eyn al afár moshló, heasú livlí khat. |
He has no match on earth, made as he is without fear. |
| Et kol gavóa yir’é. Hu mélekh al kol bney shákhats. |
All that is lofty he can see. He is king over all proud beasts.[34] |
Such a passage doesn’t just describe a creature vaguely reminiscent of Mishibizhiw (a dangerous, dragon-like being with tightly packed scales, an abode in the water, making the waters around him seethe, and so on), but describes a position of humans in relation to the awe-inspiring and all-powerful forces of the universe that the Anishinaabeg would immediately recognize. Sometimes all you can do is marvel at the beauty, power, and terror of something much, much greater than yourself, pay it the respect it is due, and hope that you are not swallowed by it.
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- Weeks, William Rex, Jr. (2009). Antiquity of the Midewiwin: An Examination of Early Documents, Origin Stories, Archaeological Remains, and Rock Paintings from the Northern Woodlands of North America. Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University.
- Wheeler-Voegelin, Erminie (1949). “Creation.” In Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. Vol. 1, ed. Maria Leach. New York: Funk and Wagnall’s Company. Not seen personally, cited in Köngäs (1960).
- Whipple, Dorothy Dora (2015). Chi-Mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake, eds. Wendy Makoons Geniusz and Brendan Fairbanks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- A few notes on this post are in order here. It owes a fair amount to the book The Island of the Anishnaabeg by Theresa Smith (Smith 2012), which is for the most part an excellent overview and analysis of Mishibizhiw, the Thunderers, their conflict, and the Anishinaabe origin myths. Though I don’t agree with Smith on all counts and am unsure whether her book truly reflects the full range of opinions of Manitoulin Island’s people even at the time she was writing, some of the organization of the post and a decent amount of the analysis still follows her work. (I would caution that she sometimes misquotes or misrepresents sources, though.) Other particularly useful secondary sources on various points are George Lankford’s paper “The Great Serpent in Eastern North America” (Lankford 2007a), and, though it’s much shorter, Alan Corbiere’s and Crystal Migwans’s book chapter on Mishibizhiw and the Thunderers (Corbiere and Migwans 2013).
The beliefs covered in this post are largely shared by all Ojibwe-speaking peoples as well as the Potawatomies, so throughout the post my use of “Anishinaabe” is intended to include all of them. But it must also be kept in mind that Anishinaabe religious beliefs are not monolithic (even ignoring the continuum between Christianity and ““traditional”” Anishinaabe religion discussed below)—there is a great deal of variation, and I can’t hope to cover all of the traditions associated with these manitous or mythic traditions here. Most statements of the “Anishinaabeg believe X” type should be interpreted as “many (or some) Anishinaabeg do believe X [but others believe Y and others believe Z].” To take just one example, not all communities practice, or seem to have ever practiced, the Midewiwin.
Some modern-day Anishinaabeg are Christians who no longer believe in any of the non-Christian religious myths or customs. Others are Christians but still find meaning or sources of pride in aspects of non-Christian Anishinaabe religion as well, and may believe at least some of the myths and/or carry out at least some of the traditional practices. Some are nominally Christian but are significantly involved in older Anishinaabe religion. And some are not Christian at all and continue to practice the old religion and believe the traditional myths. My sense is that most Anishinaabeg fall into one of the latter three groups. (A small number are also members of the Native American Church.) Since plenty of Anishinaabe people continue to believe in Mishibizhiw and the Thunderers’ existence, in the proper ceremonies used to interact with them, and in the origin myths, I use the present tense throughout the post to avoid excluding them or making it seem as though Anishinaabe religion is confined to the past, even if aspects of it have changed over the centuries. I use the past tense in certain cases that are explicitly tied to the past in some way, such as relaying the report of a missionary from the 1600s, or when describing beliefs few or no people hold or ceremonies that no one carries out anymore, like the ritual sacrifice of dogs.
I also use the past tense in discussing the Midewiwin religious society, since although the Midewiwin is still practiced in some places, there have been some changes from the versions described in historical records, and in any case virtually all of those historical descriptions were made by individuals who were not members and who are unlikely to have fully grasped all aspects of its teachings and role in Anishinaabe society, as they themselves sometimes admitted;* some also seem to have consulted consultants who knew less than they let on, or who perhaps intentionally deceived the researcher. The remaining descriptions were made by ex-members who had converted to Christianity and become actively hostile to the Midewiwin. To attribute older observations and claims to the modern practice would thus be improper.
*Actually, at least two white writers, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Walter Hoffman, did claim to have been admitted into the Midewiwin. No one takes Schoolcraft’s claim seriously—the part-Ojibwe historian William Warren as early as 1852 generously called it “hard to believe” (Warren 2009:34-35)—but it’s possible Hoffman may genuinely have been made a member. However, his Western bias strongly shows through in more than a few cases, in addition to some clear instances of omission, confusion, or factual errors, so his descriptions still should not be accepted as fully representative of all aspects of the Midewiwin.
Additionally, I use the past tense in discussing the beliefs and practices of Native groups other than the Anishinaabeg, simply because I don’t know enough about the modern-day situation to say whether descriptions from a hundred years ago still apply; my usage here should emphatically not be taken as an affirmative claim that these other groups no longer exhibit the beliefs and practices described, merely as a claim of my own ignorance. Please don’t hesitate to correct me/provide additional information!
As a final warning, the reader will note that I frequently draw on older sources written by cultural outsiders. This is because, unfortunately, we have very few older written sources from Anishinaabe people themselves, and so because it is clear that some beliefs and practices have adapted over time, it is necessary to include reference to these sources when reconstructing belief patterns of centuries ago, in spite of the blinders and biases of their authors. I have tried my best to draw as well on more modern works by Anishinaabe people, and to note some of the changes in custom and belief which can be observed over time, but three caveats on these points are in order. First, while a number of Anishinaabeg are now speaking and writing on these and other aspects of traditional religion, most of the transmission of these teachings remains oral; I am not an Anishinaabe and I have not had the opportunity to discuss them with modern-day elders or other knowledgeable community members. Second, when an older description of something by an outsider doesn’t match modern Anishinaabe belief/practice, this could be due to mistakes or incomplete access to knowledge by the outsider rather than any actual significant change over time. (Generally speaking, though, I think it’s not terribly difficult to identify when an old description is based on insufficient knowledge versus when it is part of a documentation of change.)
Third and VERY importantly, while I identify various instances of Anishinaabe cultural/religious adaptation and change over time, this should by no means be interpreted as indicating any sort of “loss”/“abandonment” of “authentic” traditions. All it indicates is . . . cultural and religious adaptation and change over time, which occurs in every human society. (There is, of course, continuity as well.) Beliefs, ceremonies, etc. involving Mishibizhiw or whatever else which incorporate Christian elements, for example, are no less “traditional” for that—they are just today’s tradition for the people involved. As Tracy Vanek (quoted in Darnell et al. 1995:70) puts it, “Native people see themselves as creating new traditions all the time; these are ‘traditional’ because they are consistent with established values.” Rhodes (1984:373-374; with sentences reordered) similarly cautions: “We [white scholars] too easily write off various individuals as ‘assimilated’ using our own criteria. The truth about the Indian way of life is found in what the old men and women [i.e. the elders of the community] do and think, rather than in what was written by long dead white men.”
Lastly, a few language notes. Throughout the post, I’ve converted older, inconsistent, and/or pre-phonemic spelling of Ojibwe to the modern practical orthography, and modified or re-translated some translations, particularly those of William Jones. While I’ve basically used the English translations of Thwaites’s editions of the Jesuit Relations, I’ve modified them in one significant respect: translating “sauvage” as “native” rather than “savage,” since the word did not necessarily have highly negative connotations in 17th-century French, and the Jesuits used it ubiquitously in what are clearly neutral contexts. I’ve also made a couple other minor changes to the English translations.
Note also that I normally use masculine pronouns to refer to Mishibizhiw, since my impression is he seems to generally be conceived of as a masculine manitou (although Ojibwe does not have gendered pronouns or inflections). Nonetheless, there are female Mishibizhiwag, or at least, some Anishinaabeg consider there to be some. ↑
- Mishibizhiw/mishibizhii is also the ordinary Ojibwe term for cougars, aka mountain lions, pumas, or panthers (Puma concolor, which once lived in Anishinaabe country although they have long since been extirpated), and it has also later come to be applied to all the big cats such as lions and tigers—but panthers as normal animals are certainly distinguished from Mishibizhiw as a manitou.
Note also that “the underworld” does not mean the land where the souls of the dead dwell—that is located far to the west (or south). The term “underworld” is used here literally: the area underneath the ground we walk on. The traditional Anishinaabe conception of the world is one with multiple layers: the earth itself is a flat disk or island floating on the waters formed during the ancient Deluge, with four layers above the earth, the domain of the Creator and of other manitous we shall meet later in the post, and four layers under the earth, the domain of Mishibizhiw.
Finally, note that Mishibizhiw is not the only underwater manitou; there are many others as well, mainly serpents (including in some cases Mishiginebig: see further in the post), as well as other reptiles, frogs and toads, fish, leeches, and some other beings such as mermen/mermaids and underwater bears, though they are all subservient to Mishibizhiw. ↑
- The Indian Agent and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft reported that according to the famous Sault and Garden River chief Zhingwaak(oons), the Mishibizhiw image and others around it were made by a medicine man and warrior, “Myeengun” (Ma’iingan “Wolf”), to commemorate a successful war party expedition which took place “years ago,” from the reference point of the early to mid 1800s (Schoolcraft 1851:406-407).
However, there is an alternative interpretation in which Zhingwaakoons himself was actually the artist of some of the images which Schoolcraft—semi-ambiguously and supposedly in Zhingwaakoons’s name—attributes to Ma’iingan, including the one of Mizhibizhiw. In this interpretation, the Mishibizhiw image was painted immediately prior to the Mica Bay Incident of 1849, a revolt led by Zhingwaakoons and others against white copper miners illegally operating in the area. (Mishibizhiw, as we will see, is the guardian of copper.) This is the version of events that has been relayed by Zhingwaakoons’s descendants, specifically a grandson and great-grandson, Dan Pine and Fred Pine, and briefly mentioned in a book by Thor Conway (Conway 2010:94, 96), though it would seem Conway had to fill in some of the blanks. But there are, unfortunately, serious problems with the Pines’ accounts which it’s not worth getting into in detail, as well as with Schoolcraft’s statements surrounding the paintings (well, and basically everything else Schoolcraft wrote). So while the attribution to Zhingwaakoons is plausible on various grounds, it’s not certain. ↑
- “Ils diſent . . . que les petites pieres de cuiure, qu’ils trouuent au fonds de l’eau . . . ſont les richeſſes des dieux, qui habitent dans le fond de la terre” (JR 50:288-289) and “L’on trouue ſouuent au fond de l’eau, des pieces de cuiure toute formé . . . . ils les gardent . . . comme des preſents que les dieux qui ſont au fond de l’eau, leur on fait, pour eſtre la cauſe de leur bonheur: C’est pour cela, qu’ils conſeruent ces morceaux de cuiure . . . parmi leurs meubles les plus pretieux; il y en a qui . . . les ont dans leurs familles de temps immemorial” (JR 50:264-267).
In the first quote, Allouez does not make explicit which Indian group he is referring to, and the compiler of the Jesuit Relations for 1666-1667, François le Mercier, merely speaks of the “Outaoüacs, & autres peuples” (“Odawas and other peoples” [JR 50:284]). The surrounding reports in the Relations concern Allouez’s mission among the Odawas then living at Chequamegon, Wisconsin and elsewhere along the southern shore of Lake Superior, so it’s reasonable to assume he was describing Odawa beliefs and practices, but this is not certain, since Allouez mentions other groups he encountered during his mission as well, and because the Jesuits at the time often used the name “Outaoua” to refer to any Great Lakes Algonquians. ↑
- “Pendant les orages & les tempeſtes, ils immolent vn chien, qu’ils iettent dans le Lac: voila pour t’apaiſer luy diſent-ils, demeure en repos. Dans les endroits perilleux des Riuieres, ils ſe rendent fauorables les boüillons & les ſaults, par quelques preſens qu’ils leur font” (JR 50:286-287). Dogs, as the most useful animal/item for humans, were considered the greatest sacrifice one could make. The other “presents” Allouez mentions were presumably offerings of tobacco and perhaps food, copper, blankets, or other valuables. ↑
- “Ils ont en veneration toute particuliere, vne certaine beſte chymerique . . . ils l’apellent Miſſibizi; ils la reconnoiſſent pour vn grande genie, auquel ils font des ſacrifices, pour obtenir bonne peſche d’eſturgeon” (JR 50:288-289).
Elsewhere—as he does slightly indirectly in his mention of dog sacrifices—Allouez describes the local Indians treating Lake Superior as a “Divinity” and offering it sacrifices, a misunderstanding of offerings to Mishibizhiw and the other manitous of the water: “The natives revere this Lake as a Divinity, & offer it sacrifices, whether on account of its size . . . or because of its goodness in furnishing fish for the sustenance of all these peoples . . .” (“Les Sauuages reſpectent ce Lac comme vne Diuinité, & luy font des ſacrifices, ſoit a cauſe de ſa grandeur . . . ſoit accauſe de ſa bonté, fourniſſant du poiſſon, qui nourrit tous ces peuples . . .” [JR 50:264-265]). ↑
- Barnouw interprets this as a tale proscribing “intellectual curiosity,” since the foolish girl had earlier wondered “why the lake was called Leech Lake,” but the story clearly seems to be about the importance of propitiating the water manitous with offerings before entering their domain. ↑
- Interestingly, in the modern versions of this story I have found (Alice King in King and Rogers 1988:74-75; Benny Rogers [Zhingwewegaabaw] in GLIFWC 2013:126-129; also cf. Webkamigad 2015:98-109), there is a significant difference from most of the older versions as recorded. Most of the older versions mention the parents or villagers consulting one or more Shaking Tent shamans (jiisakiiwininiwag) or Midewiwin practitioners for help locating the child, but this is more or less given as incidental information. In the two modern versions, by contrast, the jiisakiiwinini’s impressive use of his powers to successfully find the child and defeat Mishibizhiw is the very topic of the story, and particular focus is paid to the jiisakiiwinini’s careful attention to proper ritual conduct (offering tobacco, the precise construction of the Tent, who is permitted nearby, etc.) as well as to the validity and efficacy of the ritual and the shaman’s powers. One suspects that this has always been at least a significant element to these stories, but that it was toned down and backgrounded in older published versions. The only one of the older writers/recorders to devote significant space and emphasis to describing the Shaking Tent ceremony and the role of jiisakiiwininiwag in finding the child is, probably not coincidentally, Andrew Blackbird, who was himself an Odawa. ↑
- According to other Manitoulin residents, the inhabitant of Quanja Lake is not Mishibizhiw but Mishinamegwe, the Great Sturgeon, best known in Anishinaabe mythology as a figure who swallows the culture hero Nanabush, who is forced to break his way out—though their description of him is still of a serpentine creature, rather than the giant fish-like creature Mishinamegwe normally seems to be (Francis 2018). It’s possible that Mishinamegwe’s name has since been re-applied to water serpents for some Manitoulin people, though I have my doubts. I’ve also found some other references online, in addition to Francis’s 2018 film, indicating that at least some local residents routinely visit Quanja Lake, so either Smith’s information—collected during fieldwork in the late 80s-early 90s—is no longer accurate, or she did not speak with a truly representative sample of the local people. ↑
- Humans simply could not exist without the help of countless manitous. For example, they cannot successfully hunt unless the protector manitou of each species of animal chooses to provide a supply of the animal to the hunter, and the protector will only do so if the hunter treats the animals he kills with the proper respect, and gives proper thanks to the protector manitou. Without this gift even the greatest hunter would never be able to find another animal to kill. ↑
- Andrew Medler, born near Saginaw, MI and later of Walpole Island, ON, reports in Bloomfield (1958:204-205), “aanind gwetaamgoznijin Mshibzhiin maage, maage Mshignebgoon, waya go naa ninda gchi-wesiin gwetaamgoznijin . . . wgii-daapnaawaan sa ji-zhwenmigwaad” “some would accept the blessing of a frightful Great Lynx [Mishibizhii], and some of a Great Serpent [Mishiginebig], and some of some other frightful great creature.”
Densmore (1979:80-82) also gives examples of people (mostly from Minnesota, in the early 20th century) whose bawaagan was “the Spirit of the Water,” or somehow connected to water, in which the person in question took this as a positive rather than negative sign, allowing them to heal the sick (snakes are associated with healing gifts and the Midewiwin) or to safely cross bodies of water secure in the knowledge that Mishibizhiw would not harm them. And John Henry of Kettle Point, ON in Radin (1914:51-53) tells of a boy who was blessed by a “serpent” during his fast, giving him the power “to know what was going to happen three days in advance,” as well as other powers (such as managing to become invisible while fighting a large Mohawk war party), though he gives the enigmatic and ominous statement that “[t]he young man was helped by this blessing until he became a very old man, and then the serpent deserted him.”
Nonetheless, in general, such visions were viewed as extremely unwelcome. Waasaagoneshkang or possibly Midaasoganzh (the narrator is unknown) of Bois Forte, MN in Jones (1919:550-551) has Nanabush tell the Thunderers, “Giishpin aw anishinaabe iniwedi bawaanaad anaamakamig . . . gaa-izhi-dabazi’imeg, mii sa iw ji-migoshkaadizid gaa-wanimigod iniw maji-manidoon” “If a person dreams of one of those you have forced to flee underground [i.e., an underwater/underworld manitou], then they will live in misfortune, having been deceived by that bad manitou.” ↑
- A very similar story in some respects, also lacking the actual Rolling Head episode, is told by Joe Cosh in Laidlaw (1927:68-69); here, the mother confesses to the husband that she has been seeing a serpent that lives in a lake and asks him to kill it. He disguises himself in her clothes to get close to it, and succeeds in killing it, and the family then lives happily ever after. The similarities include the fact that we start with a family with two children, the husband does all the work while the wife neglects her domestic and child-rearing duties, she has adultery with a serpent, and suspicion is aroused by her dressing up in her nicest clothes. ↑
- Somewhat similar, though abbreviated, stories can be found in Barnouw (1977:134-135). In one, told by Pete Martin to Robert Ritzenthaler at Lac Courte Oreilles, WI in 1942, “an old fellow who knew some bad medicine” called up Mishibizhiw by drumming on the water, and the manitou again appeared out of a whirlpool in his form as a giant horned serpent. He provided the medicine man with material from his horns/body, likely copper, and the sorcerer “used [the substance] as bad medicine” and “caused many people to die just by wishing they would die, no matter how far away they were. He would just think that the person should die, and he would.” However, there’s no mention of negative consequences for the evil sorcerer, and this is in fact true of several stories about pacts made with Mishibizhiw, though for the most part there is an explicit statement that the person entering into the pact paid a price for doing so. ↑
- This applied to other people in the community with tremendous spiritual power as well, not just high-ranking mideg. In one story from Jones’s collection, told by Waasaagoneshkang or possibly Midaasoganzh and dealing with the creation of the Midewiwin, “the great manitou that dwells on the opposite side of the earth [i.e., the underworld]” (dibishkookamig ebid gichi-manidoo, who describes himself as gichi-maji-izhiwebiz[i] “greatly evil”) is told, “Aaniish giin idash, mii owidi nitam ge-izhi-ganoonik anishinaabe i’iw waa-midewijin i’iwe gaye waa-jiisakiijin gaye igi wii-nanaandawi’iwed” “And now you too, here in turn, will be called on by that person who wishes to be a mide, and the one who wishes to perform the Shaking Tent ceremony, and those wishing to doctor people” (Jones 1919:576-577). Note that other roles for individuals with spiritual power—Shaking Tent shamans and traditional curing doctors in addition to mideg—are mentioned.
Fears that mideg and other individuals with great spiritual power were evil sorcerers seem to have become more common over time as Anishinaabe communities underwent tremendous stresses, especially during the reserve/reservation period. Christian missionaries as well were not infrequently accused of sorcery, for example being blamed for having “used their ‘evil powers’ to cause the pulmonary disease that had resulted in a great number of deaths at Red Lake” (Angel 2002:130) and to send a cow which attacked Makwawayaan, a young man at Fond du Lac, in 1839, resulting in a mysterious and unidentified illness he then suffered (Kugel 1994).
As Kugel observes, missionaries tended to be both people identified as spiritually powerful—they claimed access to higher spiritual powers; were part of a culture which possessed highly advanced and seemingly miraculous technology as well as mysterious animals; and spent much time attempting to heal the sick, in the Anishinaabe world the domain of curers blessed with powers from a manitou—and yet contemptuously rejected many aspects of the traditional Anishinaabe societal order, especially traditional religious practices, in a manner which made them appear strongly antisocial, precisely the type of people who would be most suspected of resorting to evil sorcery. “Any person [with spiritual power] who rejected conventional spirituality must, by definition, be engaging spiritual forces for malevolent purposes” (Kugel 1994:234).
Although witchcraft fears unquestionably did and in some places still do exist, some of the historical descriptions of witchcraft hysteria among Anishinaabeg may have been exaggerated. In particular, Ruth Landes’s accounts of the communities of Cass Lake, MN and Manitou Rapids, ON should be considered highly suspect, as subsequent investigation has revealed her lazy, careless, and unethical research practices, a glee for collecting the most salacious stories possible, her strong biases, and the fact that she attempted to fit data to a predetermined thesis, among other problems (Lovisek, Holzkamm, and Waisberg 1996, 1997). ↑
- All Biblical Hebrew translations in this post are based on those of Robert Alter, though sometimes I’ve made minor amendations. In this particular passage I’ve made somewhat more substantial amendations to the final line. Although I’m quoting biblical passages, I normally use a modern Israeli Hebrew romanization, which I think is less distracting and can better show the cadence of the poetry than a faithful representation of the late Biblical Hebrew pronunciation. ↑
- Andrew Blackbird (Makade-Binesi) was an Odawa from L’Arbre Croche (Harbor Springs), MI, who as noted was a Christian convert. This quote occurs in the context of a series of “Twenty-one Precepts or Moral Commandments of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, by Which They Were Governed in Their Primitive State, Before They Came in Contact with the White Races in Their Country” (Blackbird 1887:103-105). The list is very clearly modeled on the Ten Commandments (cf., e.g., “1st. Thou shalt fear the Great Creator, who is over ruler of all things”) and clearly at least in part intended to reassure a white American audience that Indians were not the demon-worshipping savages described in many white Christian accounts, but instead closely followed Christian precepts even in their own native religion. Certainly pre-contact Odawas and other Anishinaabeg did not actually have any codified set of “commandments” such as these. Thus, while Blackbird’s basic point about the importance of the Thunderers is reasonably accurate, his precise framing of it and of the role and motives of the “evil monsters that are under the earth” reflects more than a little Christian interference. ↑
- This is a rather loose translation of the Ojibwe original, adding a number of new details. However, since Whipple was involved in the process of translating the stories into English, and approved the final version, this is her preferred English version and should be retained. A more literal rendering of her original Ojibwe performance would be something like:
And it was a perfectly clear day, with no clouds. And then it’s said they saw a very small cloud, moving real fast. It came right above the leech. Then the cloud was there in the middle of the lake. And they [the Thunderers] went there making loud thunderclaps, and they must have killed the leech. And then it got really foggy and rained. That’s when they took the leech up.
The Ojibwe is (Whipple 2015:2): Mii-sa iw wenda-awibaa nage gegoo onji aanakwad. Gaa-izhi-waabandamowaad giiwenh enda-agaasaa aanakwad. Wenda-gizhiibide. Obaazhizikaagon. Azhigwa omaa naawayi’ii imaa, gii-ayaa ge aanakwad. Miinawaa giiwenh chi-baa-baashkikwa’amowaad idi, gii-nisaawaagwen iniw ozagaskwaajimen. Mii gaa-izhi-gichi-awang gii-kimiwang. Mii gii-ombinaawaad iniw ozagaskwaajimen. ↑
- Though it will be recalled that in the story given previously where one Ojibwe village essentially, if unintentionally, impersonated Mishibizhiw by digging a passageway between two bodies of water, they were killed by Thunderers; there is a limit to what people can get away with before being perceived by the Thunderers as potentially dangerous, or as potential prey. There are also several stories in which Indians so egregiously transgress proper ethical or other boundaries that they are killed by Thunderers. ↑
- This is reminiscent of an anonymous Meskwaki’s statement to W. Jones (1911:213-214):
The Thunderers are kept busy with watching over us. . . . They grow angry at the sight of wrong done to us. With great effort they restrain themselves when they behold the people driven to an extremity, when they behold the people enduring wrongs beyond all endurance. Naturally there must be an end of this thing; it will be on a day yet to come. The Thunder manitous will no longer withhold their patience. In that day they will crack open this earth and blow it to pieces. Where the white man will be hurled, no one knows, and no one cares. After this, the manitou will then create this world anew, and put the people back into it to live again. In that day they will no longer be pestered with the white man.
Note that the language is quite similar, but there is no mention of affronts to Meskwaki religion (the Meskwakis at the time Jones was collecting information did not have an equivalent to the Midewiwin, although their close relatives the Sauks did); rather, the Thunderers’ destructive act is simply a result of the general transgressions of Euro-Americans against the Meskwakis. ↑
- Christian teachings influenced aboriginal Anishinaabe religious beliefs in a number of ways, not all of them recoverable, and of course to different degrees in different communities. However, the upper/lower = good/evil dualism does seem to be a reasonably clear case of this. Building off the original conception of “generally helpful upper-world manitous battle generally harmful underwater manitous,” two new conceptions arose. The first was the one just noted, where Thunderers = good and Mishibizhiw/underwater manitous = evil.
(Note, by the way, that in the earliest descriptions of Anishinaabe religion by Jesuits and other French explorers that were quoted above—and in others that I haven’t quoted—Mishibizhiw was not described as evil, simply as a god of the waters to whom people made sacrifices in order to ensure safe passage and good fishing, and from whom they obtained copper. Obviously the 17th-century French did not understand the intricacies of Anishinaabe religion, but this is still good evidence that at the time Mishibizhiw was not seen by Anishinaabe people as “evil” so much as potentially dangerous. Lahontan [1728:137] actually lists “Michibichi” among the “good Spirits” [“Genie[s] ou Eſprit[s] . . . . bons”] to which Indians ascribe the causes of worldy events, rather than the “bad”/“wicked” [“mauvais” or “méchant[s]”] spirits! Though this could be a mistake.)
In the second conception, a supreme creator deity, Gichi-Manidoo (“Great Manitou,” traditionally translated as “the Great Spirit” though nowadays normally referred to in English by Anishinaabe people as “the Creator” or sometimes “the Spirit”) rules the upper layer of the world, and represents all goodness, although he was usually said by Anishinaabeg not to be involved in the day-to-day affairs of the world or of human beings, leaving that to subordinate beneficent manitous. In this second conception, Gichi-Manidoo is opposed by Maji-Manidoo (“Bad” or “Evil Manitou”) who rules the lowest layer of the world and is the equivalent of the Devil. Gichi-Manidoo on balance seems most likely to be a postcontact development, though it’s possible he was precontact and that some aspects of his nature came to change under Christian influence; his name itself, at least as a proper name rather than a description or epithet, is almost certainly postcontact. Maji-Manidoo is, in my view, even more securely a post-contact development; earlier writers make it clear that maji-manidoo was simply a descriptive term that could be applied to any manitou whom someone considered potentially harmful (windigos, Mishibizhiw, etc.). An early example of this claim is provided by Lahontan (1728:137-139; translation based on Lahontan 1905:446-448), writing in 1703, even though his understanding of Anishinaabe religion was somewhat tenuous, and his description necessarily biased. Arguing against the many Christians who accused Indians of being devil-worshippers, Lahontan insisted (bolding here is italics in the original):
[L]es Sauvages appellent Génie ou Eſprit, tout ce qui ſurpaſſe la capacité de leur entendement, & dont ils ne peuvent comprendre la cauſe. Ils en croyent de bons & de mauvais . . . . Voilà ce qu’ils appellent Matchi Manitous . . . . [O]n prétend que les Sauvages ont la connoiſſance [du Diable]; j’ai lû cent folies ſur ce ſujet, écrites par des gens d’Egliſe, qui ſoûtiennent que ces Peuples ont des conférences avec lui, qu’ils le conſultent & qu’ils lui rendent quelque ſorte d’hommage. Toutes ces ſuppoſitions ſont ridicules . . . . Je me ſuis informé d’une infinité de Sauvages, s’il étoit vrai qu’on l’eût jamais vû ſous quelque figure d’homme ou d’animal; & j’ai conſulté ſur cela tans d’habiles Jongleurs . . . . Ainſi après avoir fait tout ce que j’ai pû pour en être parfeitement éclairci, j’ai jugé que ces Eccleſiaſtiques n’entendoient pas ce grand mot de Matchi Manito, qui veut dire mechánt Eſprit, . . . à moins que par le mot de Diable, on n’entende les choſes qui leur ſont nuiſibles, ce qui ſelon le tour de nôtre Langue peut ſe rapporter aux termes de Fatalité, de Mauvais Deſtin, & d’infortune, &c. & non pas [le Diable chrétien].
The natives call Spirit all that which surpasses their understanding, and whose cause they cannot trace. Some of these they take to be good, and some bad. . . . These [bad ones] they call Matchi Manitous . . . . [I]t is alleged that the natives are acquainted with [the Devil]; I have read a hundred pieces of nonsense on this subject, written by men of the Church, who maintain that these Peoples have conferences with him, that they consult him and pay him some manner of homage. All these conjectures are ridiculous. . . . I have enquired of an infinity of natives, if it was true whether he was ever seen amongst them in the form of man or beast; and I have widely consulted in this regard many shrewd Jugglers [= jiisakiiwininiwag, and perhaps mideg and/or other people with great spiritual power] . . . . In fine, after having used all possible means to obtain perfect clarity [on this], I have concluded that these Ecclesiastics did not understand this great word Matchi Manitou, which signifies Evil Spirit, . . . for by the word Devil they understand such things as are hurtful to them—which in our Language comes close to the signification of the terms Unhappy Fate, misfortune, etc.—and not [the Christian Devil].
The conversion of this term, for some people, into a proper name for a single, purely malevolent being opposed to the will of Gichi-Manidoo and both metaphorically and physically opposite him, is a development of the last few centuries inspired by Christian ideology.
Maji-Manidoo in this role, incidentally, came to partially usurp Mishibizhiw’s place in the Anishinaabe universe as ruler of the underworld, or led to his partially merging in conception with Mishibizhiw. Mishibizhiw is in fact identified or confused with Maji-Manidoo, for instance, by Kohl (1985:422-425). ↑
- First let me say that both stories, in part due to their provenance, have numerous issues and should be treated with a lot of healthy skepticism.
The first (Settee 2015) is a Midewiwin and death origin story in which serpents feature very prominently; it was related by James Settee, Jr., the Métis son of an Anglican priest, in the Selkirk Record in 1887 (and later plagiarized by an editor of the paper, James Stewart: Stewart 1905:95-97; see Angel 2002:165-166, 288 nn. 137-140; and Weeks 2009:211). “Two powerful snakes,” Rattlesnake and “Natawa” (naadawe, normally referring to the massasauga rattlesnake, Sistrurus catenatus, but in this case, given the location, evidently representing a different species) make a wager over who is more deadly. They each bite a young man; the man Naadawe bites dies immediately—the first death in the world—but the man Rattlesnake bites manages to recover. While the father of the dead man is grieving by his son’s grave, he is visited by “an enormous snake, striped with various colors like a rainbow, ascending out of the earth,” who tells him that in three days he will be visited by another serpent at the same spot, and instructs him in the ceremony to perform with the serpent to come. After three days the man returns, and as promised, another “enormous serpent appeared before him,” this one “having two horns.” The man follows the first snake’s instructions and, at which point this second serpent transforms into an old man holding a Midewiwin medicine bag containing a miigis, which he gives to the man. The serpent teaches him the Midewiwin, blesses him, and disappears. The man, now consoled, teaches the rest of the people the Midewiwin.
The other story was taken down by Homer Kidder from Jacques LePique from near Marquette, MI in 1893-1895 and published in Bourgeois (1994:52-54). A mistreated girl who is running away from home is told to cross a nearby lake in a canoe to see an old woman who lives beyond it. The “canoe” turns out to be a “monstrous serpent” with “antlers,” named as a mishiginebig. On the other side the girl finds a midewigaan lodge and the old woman, called “the Old Vermilion Grandmother,” who teaches her the Midewiwin, which she later teaches to the rest of her people. Her trip back home across the lake is also on the back of the mishiginebig. ↑
- The other common Anishinaabe death origin story, not relevant for our purposes, involves Nanabush killing one of his brothers, which results in death entering the world. The brother is sometimes appointed as lord of the Land of the Dead in recompense, and is sometimes identified with the wolf brother, both having the name Jiibayaabooz “Ghost Rabbit.” ↑
- In a little moment of black comedy, Nanabush and his brother next create white people separately from Indians, who were the first man and woman, and Nanabush says to the whites: “Maagizhaa awegwen gegidimaagizigwen, adaandiyeg i’iw aki” “No matter who or how poor one may be, you’ll be buying land from each other” (Jones 1919:534-535). ↑
- I’m unclear what precisely is meant by the “vermilion Midewiwin.” Vermilion (a name which can refer either to red ocher, or to real vermilion, acquired as a trade item) was certainly held to be spiritually powerful and significant, however, and was used in a number of contexts in the Midewiwin as well as other religious and decorative contexts. In LePique’s Midewiwin origin narrative from Kidder mentioned in footnote 21 above, the instructor of the Midewiwin to the first human was the Old Vermilion Grandmother, whose body, like Zhoongepaanh’s and Makadezhigwan’s (as we’ll see) is made of vermilion; she instructs the girl to cut into her head to retrieve vermilion and to paint herself with it whenever she performs Midewiwin ceremonies. Vermilion also had an important role in both hunting and love medicines. For instance, Hoffman (1891:258) mentions a love potion which fourth-degree mideg could sell to clients; his description of it is an amusing example of the old timey practice of scholars writing ~~scandalous~~ things in Latin so no lay people would be accidentally exposed to them: “This love powder is held in high esteem . . . . It consists of the following ingredients: Vermilion; powdered snakeroot (Polygala senega, L.); exiguam particulam sanguinis a puella effusi, quum in primis menstruis esset [a small bit of the blood discharged by a girl during her menarche]; and a piece of ginseng cut from the bifurcation of the root, and powdered.” ↑
- Howard (1977:113-114; underlining his) explicitly states that for the Plains Ojibwes, Mishibizhiwag “are the chief [manitous] or deities of the Midéwiwɩ̀n society” and “possess great knowledge of Indian medicine, since the herbs used spring from the depths of the earth,” and mentions one of his consultants “worship[ing] the Thunderbirds in the Sun dance . . . in the Grass dance, and in the . . . Clown dance” while simultaneously “pay[ing] homage to [Mishibizhiw] in the Midéwiwɩ̀n.”
Even in those origin myths which seem to omit Mishibizhiw, little hints of his role in creating the Midewiwin can often be discerned, such as in that relayed by William Warren (2009:36, 43-46), which is otherwise a version of the “manitou messenger” story, but in which during the plague visiting the people which necessitates the manitous’ intervention, “a spirit in the shape of a serpent” appears and shows the people a root which helps alleviate the plague. Likewise, in some of the other stories the messenger manitou is associated with the underworld in some way, such as Otter being described as coming up from the first layer below the earth, or the messenger needing to break through all four Below layers to reach the earth or needing to travel along the sea floor underwater to reach North America. ↑
- This dialog is from a Bulgarian translation of one version of a 16th-century Russian apocrypha known by several names, most commonly О Тивериадском Море “About the Tiberian Sea,” which contains a Slavic version of the “Earth-Diver” story, as will be discussed below. The original English translation, which I’ve modified slightly, reads: “God said again: ‘Whence art thou?’ The bird answered, ‘Ego ex infimis.’ And the Lord said, ‘And whence am I?’ The bird answered, ‘De superis.’ And the Lord said, ‘Da mihi ex infimis.’ And the bird dived into the sea . . .” The original Bulgarian text is from Dragomanov (1894:11). As far as I can tell, it should really be translated as something like: “And God said: ‘Whence are you?’ And the bird said: ‘I am from below.’ And God said: ‘Whence am I?’ And the bird said: ‘From above.’ And God said: ‘Give me, then, from below.’ And the bird dived into the sea.” Try as I might, I have been unable to find the text of the original Russian apocrypha which Dragomanov was quoting (I’ve found the text of another manuscript version of the same apocrypha which has some differences from the version Dragomanov cites here), and have chosen to use that ignorance as an excuse to retain the more archaic/poetic elements of the English translation of the Bulgarian version, including the use of Latin. (The English translator does say in a footnote, “Latinization of the Russian ours” [Earl W. Count in Dragomanov 1961:91, n. 12], though archaizing language still seems appropriate for translating a centuries-old apocrypha . . . ) ↑
- Some recent retellings of the Anishinaabe origin myth cycle in fact differ from older versions by attributing the source of the flood to a need to cleanse the earth from discord or wickedness, as in the biblical narrative. For instance, in a book directed primarily at children (both Anishinaabe and non-Anishinaabe), the modern mide teacher Edward Benton-Banai (1988:29) writes: “It greatly saddened the Creator, Gitchie Manito, to see the Earth’s people turn to evil ways. . . . For a long time Gitchie Manito waited hoping that the evil ways would cease and that brotherhood, sisterhood, and respect for all things would again come to rule over the people. When it seemed that there was no hope left, Gitchie Manito decided to purify the earth. He would do this with water.”
Similarly, in the Cote First Nation Saulteaux elder Andrew (Bruce) Keewatin’s narrative of the Deluge and Earth-Diver stories, Gichi-Manidoo becomes disturbed when “the people and animals began to argue and fight with one another” (anishinaabeg zhigwa awesiwag gii-ani-giikaandiwag zhigwa gii-ani-miigaadiwag), and warns Nanabush that “I shall take away everything from the people and from your animal brothers, I shall cleanse this Earth” (“Gakina gegoo niga-odaabinamowaag anishinaabeg zhigwa gijiimensag awesiwag, niga-gizhiinaan owe aki”), which he does not through a great flood but through torrents of rain (“For a very long time it rained hard,” Wiinge giniwens gii-gichi-gimiwan). (Cote 2011:24-25, respelled from SRO to Southwestern orthography and translations slightly modified.) ↑
- Wikipedia being Wikipedia, Schoolcraft’s statements have been horrifically butchered there; for details, see this section of my post on how Wikipedia sucks. (For real though, Wikipedia is really bad. Please don’t trust it or use it for anything beyond finding references to better sources you can follow up on, or for, like, movie plot summaries or the locations of random small Croatian villages.) ↑
- The Waabanoowiwin “Dawn Society” was a highly secretive society of healers and sorcerers which flourished in the 19th century but later mostly died out. While its members (waabanoog “dawnmen,” often anglicized “wabenos”) could also be mideg, the two societies were distinct, and often in conflict. Waabanoog conducted their ceremonies almost exclusively at night, complete with flashy displays of their power involving fire and invulnerability to harm; and, according to some, they tended to have greater communion with malevolent manitous than other spiritually powerful individuals. They seem to have been distrusted and feared by many or most members of their communities, although it’s not always easy to accurately judge this from outsiders’ reports, given how incredibly negatively most Euro-Americans and Canadians viewed them. Since many waabanoog were also mideg, they might make use of both Waabanoowiwin and Midewiwin teachings, and the scroll being analyzed by Schoolcraft supposedly combines references to both traditions. ↑
- In 1678 the French royal cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis de Franquelin made a “Carte Gnlle [Générale] de la France [sic] Septentrionnalle, contennant la découuerte du pays des Ilinois Faite par le Sieur Jolliet” (“General Map of Northern France [error for ‘North America’ or perhaps ‘New France’], containing the discovery of the country of the Illinois Made by Sieur Jolliet”) currently held at the Bibliothèque du Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes (cartes et plans, recueil 66, no. 19; code-barres SHD000251026000011). The section covering the Mississippi River basin was based, as the title suggests, on information supplied by Jolliet, partly by memory but mostly derived from Marquette’s narrative and a map he had made. Here’s the Franquelin-Jolliet map (cropped a bit):
Click to expand. (From the Harvard Map Collection, Karpinski series F 26-2-1.) As with many maps from the time, it’s embellished with illustrations of plants and animals from the area and . . . uh . . . hmm . . . what is that along one of the branches of the Mississippi? Computer, enhance!
Click to expand. Now this is interesting . . . Enhance again!
(From here.) An image of the Panther figure, in the location where Marquette and Jolliet encountered it! Since Marquette’s original sketch is lost to us and Franquelin was collaborating with Jolliet himself, this is most likely the closest we’re ever going to come to knowing what the painting actually looked like. ↑
- In the 1800s, white visitors made a number of references to the painting, including some illustrations of it. While these illustrations share some of the features described by Marquette and seen on the Franquelin-Jolliet map, they also have traits of a Western dragon or griffin, including dragon- or griffin-like wings and aquiline talons. Given that the figures were already described as “now almost effaced” (“maintenant preſque effacéés”) by Jean-François Buisson de Saint-Cosme in 1699 (Saint-Cosme 1861:34; Shea 1902:66), possibly some non-Indian repainted the images in the intervening period—presumably painting over the faded remnants of the originals—based on what they imagined the figures should have looked like. Note in this regard the very different description of a writer over a century later, in 1812, who said the image “remain[s] in a good state of preservation” (Stoddard 1973:17). The other possibility is that, as argued by Goddard (1985:55), the 19th-century observers projected wings and other dragon-like features onto what was at that point a barely visible painting (which was then reflected in their illustrations of it), again because that’s how they expected it to look. It is notable that “[e]very known” rendering of the Piasa image(s) with wings “post-dates” a fanciful “1836 publication” of a man named John Russell, who described the creatures pictured as enormous birds (see further in the post) (Esaray et al. 2015). In any case, the 19th-century version, whether original or not, was destroyed when the rock it was painted on was quarried away in the late 1840s. ↑
- The name páyiihsa is clearly cognate with Eastern Ojibwe and Odawa paayens (older *apaayens) and pahiins (older apahiins) (Rhodes 1985:329; NOD); Potawatomi pa’is (FCPD:107; cf. Costa 2005:300, n. 6); and Meskwaki Apayâshîhaki (plural).
Both Ojibwe names at least primarily refer to the so-called “little people” who live deep in the forest or in cracks in the cliffs, and who cause various minor acts of mischief when people aren’t looking, like stealing fishing nets, though they can also be helpful. The Potawatomi name appears to refer to the same beings. Johnston (1978:24; 2001:151, 245; quote from former) says the Ojibwe name refers to “[l]ittle beings residing near shorelines, [who] emerge in evenings to play among the shadows” and “try to negate the influence of” sirens/mermen (which are dangerous). The Meskwaki name (translated by William Jones as “Little Creatures of Caprice” [Bloomfield 1994:33]) is that of the hero brothers Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away in the “Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away” hero cycle which is very widely found in North America (Reichard 1921:272-274; Thomason 2003:205ff). The singular, Apayâshîha is the name of Thrown-Away, the younger of the brothers, who grows up in the woods as a feral child with some manitou powers. The Lodge-Boy and Thrown-Away cycle is not widely found among Anishinaabe people, but part of it is told by William Trudeau of Wikwemikong, ON (OCF 2011:83ff), who, significantly, calls Thrown-Away a pahiins. ↑
- This is essentially the same as a common Anishinaabe story of a man who foolishly eats a “bad” fish, subsequently becomes overcome with thirst and turns into a fish, and must be put into the water by his companion or family (e.g., Radin 1924:524; Skinner 1928:160). Very similar stories, in which as with the Arikaras the man turns into a snake rather than a fish, also exist among other groups such as the Creeks (e.g., Gouge 2004:45-48) and even the Mayangna people of Nicaragua and Honduras (Rands 1954). ↑
- Especially given Mishibizhiw’s feline elements, given his identification with meteors/comets, and as the word mishibizhiw/mishibizhii now also means “lion” and “tiger,” it’s perhaps not out of place to note William Blake’s famous poem “The Tyger,” which was significantly influenced by the book of Job, including especially the descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Mii Dash Geget 
Thank you for this beautifully researched piece on subjects I dearly love.
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Giin gigichi-miigwechiwi’in gii-agindaman i’iw! I’m a little shell-shocked that actual linguists and experts on these subjects have found this place and appreciate it — and certainly you! (The spine of my copy of the Nishnaabemwin grammar recently broke from overuse, joining Nichols & Nyholm in that illustrious category … though it was easier to fix the dictionary with tape… :) )
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This was such a fascinating and enjoyable read! Thanks so much for the effort. I was trying to find information about Mishipeshu and stumbled upon your essay. Should be published, a book!
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Wow! This is unbelievably well-researched. By far the most comprehensive piece on this subject I’ve ever come across. Well done, sir! (or ma’am, or miss). I definitely plan to draw from this sometime. To whom should I give attribution?
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Thank you so much! You can just cite the blogpost (and my username of “Ozaawaabineshiinh” if needed) I guess?
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Will do! How do you pruh-NOUNSE that, and the name of the website?
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The vowels have the values of Spanish or Italian (so “a” is “ah”, “i” is “ee”, “o” is “oh”, etc.), and vowels that are written doubled are pronounced about twice as long as the others — so, “oo” is an elongated “ohhh” and “o” is a shorter “oh”. The exception is that the vowel written “e” is always a long “ehhh” (it’s not written doubled because there’s no short equivalent, so there’s no need to write it twice to distinguish it from anything else, and this way you save a little bit of space). That said, the short vowels usually are pronounced “laxer” than the long ones, like in English, so “i” is pronounced like English “i” in “bit” vs. “ii” which is pronounced like “ea” in “bead”, etc. The consonants are pronounced approximately as in English. An “nh” after a vowel indicates that the preceding vowel is nasalized, as in French.
So Ozaawaabineshiinh is approximately: “oh-zahhh-WAHHH-bin-ehhh-SHEEE”, with the last vowel nasalized. The name of the blog is really a phrase, mii dash geget (taken from an old text, where in context it meant “and it was so” or “and it was true”), pronounced “meee duhsh gehh-GEHHT (with a “hard g”).
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Wow! Thank you for the detailed explanation. It’s much appreciated.
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I enjoyed this and learned a lot. Thanks.
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Thank you!
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sounds good legit
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