All over the world, traditional tales tell of malicious preternatural beings which lurk in the wilderness, luring travelers to their doom, or to their other-dimensional realm, by inducing visual or auditory hallucinations. Legend has it that fairies haunt the moors and ancient woodlands of the British Isles, trapping human trespassers in their own shadowy abode by inducing visual hallucinations, or by offering them fairy food. Other Albionic predators are wills-o’-the-wisp or jacks-o’-the-lantern – mysterious phantom lights which appear in swamps and forests at night, leading unwary travellers off the beaten path into the darkness. Greek mythology is replete with tales of sirens – alluring feminine chimeras who appear to be half woman and half bird or fish, who draw sailors into dangerous waters with their irresistible voices. And on the northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, the Kwakwaka’wakw have stories about the Bukwus, or ‘wild man of the woods’ – a gaunt, long-haired phantom who preys on freshwater drowning victims, and who transforms travellers into creatures like himself by coercing them into eating ‘ghost food.’
In southeastern Alaska, southwestern Yukon, and northwestern British Columbia, this folkloric motif takes the form of the Kushtaka, or ‘land otter man’ – a kind of spirit variously described as a humanlike river otter or an otter-like man. This malevolent being preys on people who become lost in the wilderness, causing them to become crazy and wander about aimlessly. Some lure lost humans to their watery or subterranean dwellings, in which they imprison them forever.
The Kushtaka are most prominently associated with the folklore of the Tlingit, the historic sovereigns of the Alaskan Panhandle. Some traditional Tlingit Kushtaka stories were recorded in early 1900s by American anthropologist John Reed Swanton, whose collection was published in 1909 under the title “Tlingit Myths and Texts,” in Bulletin 39 of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethology.
Kaka’s Misadventure
One of the stories Swanton recorded, two versions of which appear in his book, features a Tlingit man of the Kiksadi clan called Kaka, who hailed from the village of Sitka, Alaska. One day, while on a fishing trip with his friends, Kaka became separated from his companions and found himself stranded on the southern tip of Baranof Island, Alaska. There, he was approached by Kushtaka, who masqueraded as his close relations, appearing to him as his mother and sister in a canoe, calling out that they had been looking for him for a long time. Through careful discernment, Kaka managed to peer through the Kushtaka’s preternatural disguises, glimpsing them momentarily in their true forms, as land otter men astride floating pieces of driftwood.
Eventually, despairing that his friends would never find him, Kaka gave himself up to the Kushtaka, who named him Qowulka, or ‘Halibut Fishhook,’ and looped the sinew from a Kushtaka’s tail through his ear, initiating his transformation into a land otter man. They then ushered him towards the ocean, to what appeared to Kaka to be a canoe. One of Swanton’s informants explained that the vessel was really a “skate,” or narrow piece of wood, which assumed the appearance of a canoe under the Kushtaka’s hypnotic influence.
The Kushtaka proceeded over the water with their human prisoner, propelling themselves through the waves by singing an incantation. “When they set out,” Swanton wrote, “they put him into the canoe, laid a woven mat over him, and said, “you must not look up again.” He did look up, however, after a time and found himself tangled among the kelp stems.”
During the voyage, which is implied to have taken two years, but to have seemed like a single night, Kaka made the acquaintance of an old land otter woman. The creature explained that she had once been a human like him, but had been saved from drowning by a pair of Kushtaka, whom she subsequently married. Recognizing that Kaka yearned to return to his village, the woman advised him to sit astride the first log he found when they arrived at their destination and to sit there for as long as he could.
The company paddled throughout the night, heading for an island the informant called “Telnu,” located about fifty miles from Sitka, which was supposed to be a regular stopping place for the Kushtaka. The informant stated that the land otter men seemed to dread the coming daybreak and hoped to reach the island before then, implying that the croaks of the ravens which occurred at that hour were fatal to them if they were still on the water.
When they reached land, the Kushtaka scattered, leaving Kaka to pull up the canoe himself. A statement made by one of Swanton’s informants implies that Kaka may have frightened his captors away by brandishing a dog skin at them. In hauling the vessel onto the shore, Kaka realized that the material of which it was composed was far rougher than it appeared, leading him to deduce its true nature. Remembering the words of the old land otter woman, Kaka abandoned the enterprise and clambered onto the first log he came across. As soon as he did so, he fell unconscious.
Sometime later, a crew of Tlingit seal hunters from Sitka, while canoeing near the island, were drawn to Kaka’s location by the distant throb of a shaman’s drum. As they followed the sound, they saw a flurry of seabirds encircling some mysterious object in the ocean, which appeared to them as a formless shadow in the dawn twilight. Recognizing that the strange object was their lost friend metamorphosing into a Kushtaka, the travellers headed to shore and began singing a song intended to draw Kaka back to the land of the living. Through the efficacy of the singing, Kaka gradually began to regain physical form, appearing to the fishermen as a man lying prostrate on a floating piece of driftwood, with blood running from his nose and mouth, and seabirds picking at his flesh. “The real land otters had left him,” Swanton’s informant explained, “but they had come to him again as spirits.”
Finally, one of the fishermen, who was a friend of Kaka’s, fasted for two days in order to spiritually purify himself. That accomplished, he went out to the water, where he found Kaka lying on his back on the log, in as good a condition as he was when he had left Sitka. The friend then brought the castaway to shore. “He looked very weird and strange,” said one of Swanton’s informants. “He did not open his eyes, yet he seemed to know who had possession of him, and without having his lips stir, a voice far down in his chest said, ‘It is I, my masters.’” The informant explained that the voice was that of a Kushtaka shaman who was in possession of Kaka’s body.
The friend brought Kaka back to Sitka, where he, with the assistance of the villagers, was ritually purified in a small dwelling erected especially for the procedure. “But the land-otter spirits remained with him,” said one of Swanton’s informants, “and he became a great shaman.
“From Kaka,” the informant concluded, “the people learned that the land otters affect the minds of those who have been with them for a long time so as to turn them against their own friends. They also learned from him that there are shamans among the land otters, and that the land otters have a language of their own.”
The Land Otter Sister
Another tale from Swanton’s book, which also has two different versions, tells of another man from Sitka who set out with his wife and children one spring day to a certain camp to catch and dry halibut. While his wife and children dug for shellfish on the beach, he selected a large cedar log and began the laborious task of hewing out a dugout canoe with a stone adze.
“Many years before,” said one informant, “this man’s sister had been drowned, but so long a time had passed that he had forgotten her. She, however, had been taken by the land otters and was married among them, having many children. From around a neighbouring point she was watching him. Her children were all working to collect a quantity of food.” One of Swanton’s informants explained that the land otter sister and her family lived at a place called the “Transparent Village”.
One evening, at her husband’s prompting, the land otter sister gathered some halibut and seal and brought it to her brother as a gift, audibly laying her basket down near his shelter. When the brother emerged to investigate the sound, he found a strange-looking woman with stunted arms and a gaping mouth, whose upper lip was drawn up beneath her nose, revealing a row of sharp upper teeth. “It is I,” the creature said to the bewildered fisherman. “I am your sister who lives a short distance away round this point… Take the things out of the basket, for I have to return before the raven calls.”
The next evening, the land otter sister returned to her brother’s shelter with another basket of food, along with her three sons, who helped their uncle catch fish. “From their waist up,” said one of Swanton’s informants of the young men, “they looked like human beings; below they were otters, and they had tails.” Another of Swanton’s informants said that the only peculiar aspects of the young men were the long braids that fell down their backs, which, he explained, were actually their tails.
While the men worked, the land otter sister began playing with her brother’s children, singing a song which prompted them to grow tails. When the brother expressed alarm at this development, the land otter sister slapped her nieces and nephews on their behinds, causing their new tails to retreat into their bodies. In another version of the story, the uncle chopped off his children’s tails with his adze.
The land otter nephews continued to help their uncle with his fishing endeavours, catching a prodigious quantity of octopus for bait, and helping him drag his large dugout canoe to the water, all through the use of their powerful prehensile tails. With his nephews’ assistance, the uncle managed to collect far more food than was typically possible, which he shared with grateful friends and relatives upon his return to Sitka.
In one version of the story, the land otter sister took her brother and his family to her home on the outskirts of the Transparent Village, where they stayed for some time, receiving gifts of food from the settlements’ friendly inhabitants. Upon his departure, the man looked back to give one last farewell to his sister and her family. To his astonishment, the beach was deserted. The beautiful painted houses that had stood there before had disappeared. In their places were holes in the earth – apparently the entrances to underground burrows.
“Afterward,” concluded one informant, “he went back to the place where he had received assistance but saw nothing of those who had helped him. He hunted all about the place from which his sister used to come but found nothing except land-otter holes. He became discouraged and gave up searching.”
The Land Otter Son
Another tale which Swanton recorded is set on the shores of Redoubt Bay not far from present-day Anchorage, Alaska, where a husband and wife from Sitka decided to search for halibut during a particularly severe famine. One evening, after months of desperately poor fishing, the couple were surprised by a sound outside of their dwelling. When they went out to investigate, they rejoiced to find a pair of large octopi writhing in the sand, which could serve as much-needed bait. “Do you know who brought them here?” the wife asked her husband. “… I will tell you who brought them here. Don’t you remember that my son was drowned a year ago, and no one has seen anything of him since? It must be he, who has taken pity on us because he sees how poor we are.”
The following day, the husband used the new bait to catch two halibut. That evening, while boiling the fish in a cedar basket, the wife heard a whistle issuing from behind the shack. “We have longed for you, my dear son,” said the woman in reply. “Come in. Don’t whistle around us. We have been wishing for you for the last year, so do not be afraid. It is only your father and I. Come in.” In response, the mysterious figure whistled again, as if drawing in air through pursed lips.
The man then opened the door and said, “Come in, my son, I think you have come to help us because we very poorly off here. The door is open. Come right in.”
No sooner were these words uttered than the couple’s son materialized inside the shelter, sitting on the opposite side of the fire with his hands covering his face. “It is you, my son?” the parents asked, to which the figure whistled. After midnight, the figure spoke, affirming that he was indeed their lost son, and that he had brought them more bait, which he had placed outside the structure. The mother gave her son a pillow and two blankets, and invited him to sleep in his customary place on the other side of the fire.
The storyteller implies that the son had been saved from drowning by Kushtaka, and became a land otter man in consequence.
Early the next morning, when it was still dark, the land otter son roused his father and set out with him to fish for halibut. When they had paddled their canoe to a suitable location, the son baited a number of his father’s hooks with octopus tentacles and dropped the lines into the water. Then he handed his father a blanket and ordered him to cover himself with it. “Do not watch me,” he said.
Peering through a hole in the blanket, the man watched his son dive into the water without rocking the canoe. The Kushtaka proceeded to seize large halibut with his hands and impale them on his fathers’ hooks. When he returned to the canoe, the father pretended to wake up, and began to haul in his catch. Soon, the canoe was full of fish.
Upon returning to camp, the land otter son bolted for the forest, motioning to his father that he had to gone before daybreak, when the raven called. He reappeared in his parents’ shelter that night, after his mother had processed the days’ catch, and rapidly devoured the fish which was set before him, which he could only eat raw.
The land otter son assisted his parents for a week, always returning to the woods at night. At his parents’ insistence, the Kushtaka eventually began to sleep in their hut, which initiated his gradual reversion to human form. Despite this regression, the young man retained a round mouth and long hair that extended all the way down his back – apparently the marks of a Kushtaka.
When the parents had dried as much halibut as they could carry back to Sitka, they decided to return home, and convinced their son to come with them. “When they came to [Povorotni] Point,” Swanton’s informant said, “the woman saw the shadow of her son’s arms moving, his hands which held the paddle being invisible. She said to her husband, ‘What is the matter with my son? He does not seem to be paddling. I can see only his shadow now.’ So she moved forward to see whether he was asleep or had fallen into the water. Her son was not there. The blanket he had had around his knees was there, but he was gone.” Left with little alternative, the sorrowful parents returned to Sitka without their son.
“When they came to Sitka,” the informant concluded, “they reported all that had happened. The father said, ‘My son helped us. Just as we got around the point he disappeared out of the canoe.’ So his friends gave a feast for him. His father’s name was Saki, and the place where they fished for halibut is now called Saki-idi.”
The Land Otters’ Captive
A fourth and final Kushtaka tale which Swanton recorded tells of a man from Sitka named Kikasa’di, who went on a canoe journey with his friends. On the way, their canoe capsized, and everybody aboard drowned, save for Kikasa’di, who managed to swim to a nearby beach. While scanning the waves for any sign of his travelling companions, Kikasa’di was astonished to see his friends approaching in their canoe, apparently no worse for wear, urging him to join them and resume their journey. Unbeknownst to Kikasa’di, his ‘friends’ were really land otter men in disguise, and their ‘canoe’ a piece of driftwood.
Kikasa’di got into the canoe and, at his companions’ insistence, covered himself with a blanket – really a mat made of kelp. The accursed company then proceeded south, past the Queen Charlotte Islands or Haida Gwaii. Every time they came to land, they took on a land otter woman.
One of the female Kushtaka who joined the company happened to be Kikasa’di’s aunt, who was saved from drowning by two land otter men some years earlier and had become their wife. The aunt urged Kikasa’di to come to her that night so that her husbands could bring him back to Sitka, but Kikasa’di, who had grown fond of his new companions, opted to stay with them.
That night, the aunt’s husbands, at their wife’s urging, kidnapped Kikasa’di and bundled him into their canoe, which was really a piece of driftwood. The trio travelled steadily throughout the day, only stopping to camp at midnight. In order to prevent their prisoner from escaping, the land otter men overturned their canoe on top of Kikasa’di and kept him there while they slept.
On their wife’s orders, the Kushtaka left Kikasa’di at a point outside Sitka and began their return journey. Crazed as the result of his time among the land otter men, Kikasa’di wandered aimlessly along the outskirts of Sitka at night, frightening the settlement’s inhabitants with his ghastly cries. His nocturnal visitations so disturbed the villagers that they resolved to capture him, which one of their number managed to accomplish with a rope studded with dog bones, canine ossicles being “the greatest enemies of the land otters.”
“Late that night,” Swanton wrote, “the land-otter-man tore his hands so with these bones that he sat down and began to scream, and while he was doing this, they got the rope around him and captured him. When they got him home he was at first very wild, but they restored his reason by cutting his head with dog bones. He was probably not so far gone as most victims. Then they learned what had happened to him.”
The informant went on to relate how Kikasa’di went the rest of his life eating raw meat and fish. One day, while fishing for halibut with a crew from Sitka, his companions urged him to try some cooked fish. “For a long time,” the informant said, “the man refused to take any, but at last consented and the food killed him.”
Tahltan Tales
Although the Kushtaka are most prominently associated with Tlingit folklore, they also appear in the legends of the Tahltan Indians, whose traditional homeland lies in northwestern British Columbia and south-central Yukon. One excellent source on these stories is the article “Tahltan Tales” by Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit, which was published in the October-December 1921 issue of the Journal of American Folklore.
According to one of the Tahltan tales which Teit recorded, a Tlingit man once quarreled with his wife one morning, and stalked off into the wilderness in an attempt to cool his head. In his anger, he forgot to bring his basket along with him, and decided to make another from cedar bark in the forest.
While stripping bark from the tree, the man began to hallucinate. In this dissociated state, he was approached by a mysterious figure whom he initially mistook for his wife, who proceeded to guide him away from the tree into a strange dwelling which he mistakenly believed to be his own home. Inside, he met his long-lost aunt, who had disappeared in the woods many years before. “Wake up, and try to go home!” his aunt implored him. “This is the house of the Kustaka. I am your aunt, and was lost in the woods a long time ago. I cannot go back now, and live here. Do not stay here; for these people are bad, and make people think what is not true.”
Fortunately, his aunt’s exhortations forced the man to come to his senses, whereupon he discovered that he was trapped in a hole beneath the roots of a tree. With difficulty, he escaped from this sylvan prison and ran desperately for home, drifting in and out of lucidity.
When he finally arrived at his village, the man relapsed into insanity, throwing sticks and stones at the camp, as the Kushtaka were said to do, and bolting like a deer into the woods whenever a fellow tribesman emerged from his tent to investigate. He repeated this performance several nights in succession.
One day, the men of the village went out in force to apprehend their mysterious tormenter, and found the lost man adrift at sea, lying on a log which floated a short distance offshore, stark naked and sound asleep. They approached the log silently in their canoes, seized the naked man, and bound him hand and foot, struggling to subdue him as he resisted their efforts with mindless violence. They took him back to camp and attempted to purify him by smoking him in a fire fed with dog’s hair and stale urine. Finally, the man regained his sanity and told his fellow tribesmen about his strange adventure and his possession by the Kushtaka.
The Land Otter Woman
According to another story in Teit’s article, a Tlingit woman who lived Wrangell Island, about thirty miles from the site of present-day Wrangell, Alaska, was left alone with her children while her husband was away on a hunting trip. It was early May, a time when enemy raiding parties prowled the Alaskan Panhandle in war canoes, on the lookout for women and children to enslave. In an effort to protect her family from such marauders, the women took her children deep into the woods.
When the time came to set up camp, the woman realized that she had left some necessary item back on the beach. She left her children at the foot of a large tree, told them to wait for her there, and left to retrieve the item.
Sometime later, the woman’s husband returned from his hunting trip and saw that his family had abandoned their beachside camp. He followed their tracks into the woods and discovered his children huddled together at the foot of the tree where their mother had left them. His wife was nowhere to be seen. His children told him that, shortly after leaving on her errand, from which she had failed to return, they heard a strange noise in the woods. Try as he might, the husband was unable to find any sign of his wife’s tracks. Left with little alternative, he took his children back to their camp near Wrangell.
That summer, several months later, a neighbouring Tlingit band moved its camp onto the banks of a nearby river where salmon were abundant. One day, while fishing upriver, two young band members spied a naked woman crouched by the side of the river, eating a salmon raw. When she caught sight of the newcomers, the woman ran into the woods and crawled into a hole beneath the roots of a tree. Recognizing the wild woman as the wife of the bereaved father from Wrangell, the two men coaxed her out of her burrow, one of them giving her his shirt to wear. The woman put on the garment and accompanied the men in their canoe to her husband’s camp.
When they approached the husband’s house, the men called out that they had recovered his wife. The bereaved father, however, would not believe them until he saw his wife emerge from the canoe. That night, the husband hosted a great potlatch, or feast, in honour of his wife’s return, and showered the two young men with gifts out of gratitude for their service.
Restored to sanity, the woman told her family that she had been kidnapped by a Kushtaka that spring day on her way back to the beach. The land otter man kept her for two months before tiring of her and abandoning her in the sub-arboreal hole in which she was found. Half-crazed, she subsisted on raw fish which she caught with her bare hands, living without clothing or fire, until her rescue by the young men.
The third Tahltan Kushtaka tale which Teit related involves a young Tlingit man who did not believe in the land otter man, and was not afraid to venture into the wilderness by himself. One night, while camped alone, this man heard noises in the darkness. Suspecting his nocturnal visitors to be wild animals, he built a roaring fire and loaded his musket. Just as he was drifting off to sleep, he spotted a strange figure watching him at the edge of the firelight. He raised his musket and made to shoot the creature, but found that he could not pull the trigger. At that moment, the young man lost consciousness.
For some time, the young Tlingit flitted between lucidity and oblivion. In fragmented bouts of consciousness, he saw the strange creature throw snow onto his fire, as if in an attempt to smother it. The mysterious visitor was soon joined by a similar-looking companion, which assisted the former with its task. The young man struggled for control of his senses and succeeded in leveling his musket at his unwanted visitors several times, but was always incapable of pulling the trigger.
When dawn came, the man woke up beside the ashes of his campfire and found that his gun was missing. Aside from the absence of his firearm, there were no visible signs of the mysterious events of the night. Shaken, the young man picked himself up and started for his village. The trail he took wound through a narrow defile between two hills. At the entrance of this defile, he found his gun leaning against a stump. “After that,” Teit concluded, “the young man believed in Kustaka, and was afraid of them.”
The Otter Spirit
An exposition on a traditional Tahltan belief echoing the legend of the land otter man appears in American ethnographer George T. Emmons’ 1911 treatise on the Tahltan Indians, published in Volume IV, No. 1 of the University of Pennsylvania’s Anthropological Publications.
“The Tahltan,” Emmons wrote, “have a strange belief in a spirit that they call Kus-su-nar yar-za, Young Otter. Almost every woman has one, two, or even three of these; the more one has the greater the dignity. If possessed of none, she commands little respect, therefore few if any women are willing to acknowledge this lack. The spirit generally acts for the good of the owner, but sometimes it may kill her. Living within her, just above the stomach, it makes itself known by a peculiar sound, and sometimes it rises to her lips, but is never seen, although some say that it has been seen when drawn out as a small black object. The possessor of a young otter spirit is always conscious of its existence. At death it escapes and seeks an abode in another human being.
“It is exceptional for a man to harbor this spirit, and it is not for his good. When he becomes possessed of it he seeks a woman doctor who can suck it from him through his lips, but only a woman having one already can remove it, and not all of these have the power. They do not like to speak of this to a stranger. It is not etiquette to refer to it, for it may offend the spirit and cause harm. Again, it is said that only the shaman can treat this condition, and that once an otter not larger than one’s hand was taken from a man. The ordinary treatment is believed to result in making the otter a good friend of the possessor.”
Emmons proceeded to explain how a missionary and physician named Dr. Frederick Ingles, who worked among the Tahltan, believed that his patient’s belief in the land otter spirit was their attempt to explain the neurological disorder epilepsy.
Tanana and Koyukon Beliefs
The Tahltan are not the only Dene people to attribute preternatural powers to the river otter. According to American anthropologist Robert A. McKennan, the Tanana of east-central Alaska hold the otter in particular awe. “Formerly, they were never killed,” he wrote in his 1959 treatise on the Tanana. “As a result of the growth of the fur trade, the natives now kill the animal, but the act is regarded as being fraught with danger. If the animal is shot, the Indian immediately purifies his gun by firing it through a woman’s dress; otherwise the gun could never kill any more game. The knife with which the animal is skinned is always thrown away for if anyone should use it again he would die. Whenever possible, the natives bring the animals to the trader unskinned. So powerful is the spirit of the otter that even today a man with a large family will not kill one lest it result in the death of one of his children. W.H. Newton, a former trader, said that whenever an Upper Tanana Indian drowned, his fellows always made a strenuous effort to recover the body, for otherwise the spirit of the dead man would have to live under water among the otter people.”
According to anthropologists Frederica de Laguna and Norman Reynolds in their 1935 book Tales from the Dena, the Tanana’s neighbours, the Koyukon and Ingalik of north-central Alaska, believe that “monsters may live in or under cutbanks… One has the shape of an otter. It lives with the beaver in an unusual house built only of mud and moss. One man who attacked such a beaver house was killed by the water monster.
Gwich’in Beliefs
Another northern Dene tribe with a traditional belief in otter-like monsters is the Gwich’in or Kutchin, also known as the Loucheaux, whose ancestral homeland lies in northwestern Yukon and northeastern Alaska, south of the Arctic Circle. In his 1886 French-language book Indian Traditions of Northwest Canada, French Oblate missionary Father Emile Petitot included a traditional Gwich’in story in which a canoe-maker named Etpoetchokpen met a demonic man-eating otter during his travels. After offered him dried and pulverized human flesh, the otter warned the canoeist not to drink the water from the river down which he was travelled, but to only imbibe certain stream downriver. He proceeded to follow the canoeist from the shore as he paddled downstream, continually telling him that the promised brook was ever further downstream.
“Etpoetchokpen continued on his way,” Petitot wrote, “but soon all he found in the river were vile corpses, skulls, bones, the floating dead. There were so many of them that they looked like islands above the water.”
The canoeist tricked the otter-devil into clearing a path for him through the maze of corpses, in which the latter had intended to trap him, and continued on his journey.
Other passages in Petitot’s book indicate that the Gwich’in believed in the existence of dangerous giant lake-dwelling otters, and in land otter men. They abhorred regular otters, and had a prohibition against eating them. “For them,” the missionary wrote, “it is the personification of the evil spirit.”
Blackfoot Conception of the Otter
Interestingly, the Tlingit and the northern Dene tribes are not the only First Nations to impute extraordinary powers to the river otter. Far to the south, on the prairies and foothills of what is now southern Alberta, the Blackfoot told campfire stories featuring the fantastic exploits of these semiaquatic weasels. American ethnologist Dr. Claude Everett Schaeffer
In his 1926 book Signposts of Adventure, American frontiersman James Willard Schultz included a brief description of the traditional South Piegan Blackfeet conception of the river otter, writing: “The otter is believed, by the Blackfeet, to be the most sacred of all the water animals, the most desired by the Sun. Their name for it, amunis, is literally ‘wind hair.’ Thin strips of its fur were used for winding and fastening the ends of men’s long braids of hair, and the beautiful pelts were in large numbers given to the Sun, hung to the center post of the great lodge that was annually build in his honor.”
American ethnologist Dr. Claude Everett Schaeffer elaborated on these traditions in his mid-20th Century field notes on Blackfoot belief, now housed in Calgary, Alberta’s Glenbow Archives. He wrote that otter and mink were not eaten by the Blackfoot, and that otter pelts often comprised the outer covering of medicine bundles. His Blackfoot informant, Yellow Kidney, told him that the traditional song attributed to the spirit of the otter is sung to the words, “The waves are my home. Under the water is my home. It is holy.”
American ethnologists Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall included several Blackfoot otter stories in their 1908 book Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians, most of which portray the creature as a malicious deceiver and man-eater, who often disagreed with his more compassionate brother, the beaver.
One of the many legendary explanations for the naming of the city of Medicine Hat, Alberta, told by Blood Blackfoot elder Dan Weasel Moccasin and published on a didactic sign at Medicine Hat’s iconic Saamis Teepee, tells of a preternatural man-eating otter which once dwelled in the South Saskatchewan River. According to this tale, a Blackfoot named Eagle Birth once ran off with another man’s wife. Together, the elopers came to what is present day Medicine Hat.
One day, Eagle Birth’s paramour saw a the plumes of an enormous headdress protruding from ne of the cutbanks that fringed the river. Each of the hat’s feathers were as long as a man. The woman showed Eagle Birth the headdress, but upon closer inspection they discovered that it was only a huge piece of sagebrush.
That night, Eagle Birth dreamed that a merman spoke to him, offering to make him a better hunter in exchange for a human to eat. Upon awakening, Eagle Birth resolved to accept the merman’s offer. He didn’t want to sacrifice his lover, however, and so he killed his dog, dismembered it, and threw its body into the river. The dog’s carcass had hardly touched the water before it was flung out onto the shore. The merman, apparently, was displeased with the substitute.
The next day, after being visited again by the disappointed merman in his dreams, Eagle Birth set out to find a solution. As he was contemplating, he happened upon a starving stranger wearing a lynx hat. After conversing with the stranger via sign language, Eagle Birth discovered that he was a member of the Snake tribe, and therefore an enemy of his people. Desperate to appease the merman, Eagle Birth invited the Snake to eat with him in his teepee. Along the way, the Snake stopped for a drink by the river. As he stooped down, Eagle Birth grabbed a large stone and clubbed the native to death. Eagle Birth then grabbed hold of the body and dove into the river, where he discovered a large teepee beneath the water. Inside the lodge, he saw the merman from his dreams. Eagle Birth entered the teepee and presented the Snake’s body to the merman. True to his word, the merman bestowed Eagle birth with special hunting powers.
Before he could leave the underwater teepee, however, Eagle Birth was approached by an otter. After a brief conversation with the otter and the merman, Eagle Birth discovered that this otter was regularly drowning his fellow Blackfoot upriver near present day Lethbridge. Eagle Birth took the lynx hat off the dead Snake and presented it to the otter as a gift. The otter was so pleased that he gave Eagle Birth permission to draw the waves of the river on his teepee.
With his new powers, Eagle Birth killed many animals and eagles. His lover tanned the hides and selected the finest eagle tail feathers, working them into a headdress that resembled the sagebrush headdress they had seen on the cliff. Eagle Birth instructed his wife to present the feathers and hides to her husband as a gift. The husband accepted the gifts and made peace with Eagle Birth, who then built a teepee and painted it with the waves of the river. From that point on, the site of Eagle Birth’s adventure was known as Eagle Tail Feather Headdress, or Medicine Hat.
Sources
“Tlingit Myths and Texts,” by John R. Swanton, in Bulletin 39 of the Smithsonian’s Institution’s Bureau of American Ethology (1909)
“Taltan Tales,” by James Teit, in the October-December 1921 issue of the Journal of American Folklore
“The Tahltan Indians,” by George T. Emmons in Volume IV, No. 1 of the University of Pennsylvania’s Anthropological Publications (1911)
The Upper Tanana Indians (1959), by Robert A. McKennan
Tales from the Dene: Indian Stories from the Tanana, Koyukon, & Yukon Rivers (1935), by Frederica de Laguna and Norman Reynolds
Indian Traditions of Northwest Canada (1886), by Father Emile Petitot
Signposts of Adventure : Glacier National Park as the Indians Know It (1926), by James Willard Schultz
Glenbow Archive, Claude E. Schaeffer Fonds
Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians (1908), by Clark Wissler and D.C. Duvall
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