The folkloric traditions of nearly all First Nations across the Great White North keep a common menagerie populated by the same collection of legendary monsters. From the Naskapi of eastern Labrador to the Nootka of western Vancouver Island, native peoples across the continent tell traditional tales about a cannibal spirit which imbues in its human hosts an insatiable craving for human flesh. Wildman stories are nearly ubiquitous, as are tales of huge thunder-making raptors locked in perpetual enmity with equally-huge horned water snakes.
Another universal folktale once told around campfires across Canada, from the seal-oil lamps of the High Arctic to the buffalo chip lodge-fires of the Canadian prairies, tells of a race of tiny elusive people who make their homes in high mountains and cliffside caves. With astonishing similarities to the dwarfs, elves, fairies, and goblins of old European tradition, these little people were said to be endowed with preternatural power, which they used to either the benefit or detriment of mankind, depending on the manner in which they were treated by their human neighbours, or according to their own mischievous whimsies. Join me as I explore a few of the many native legends of little people in Canada.
Mikumwess of the Passamaquoddy
We owe our first story to the work of Charles Godfrey Leland, an American folklorist who travelled among the Wabanaki Indians of the Canadian Maritimes and the Northeastern United in the late 19th Century. As Leland explained in the Preface to his 1884 book Algonquin Legends, “When I began, in the summer of 1882, to collect among the Passamaquoddy Indians at Campobello, New Brunswick, their traditions and folk-lore, I expected to find very little indeed. These Indians, few in number, surrounded by white people, and thoroughly converted to Roman Catholicism, promised but scanty remains of heathenism. What was my amazement, however, at discovering, day by day, that there existed among them, entirely by oral tradition, a far grander mythology than that which has been made known to us by either the Chippewa or Iroquois Hiawatha Legends, and that this was illustrated by an incredible number of tales. I soon ascertained that these were very ancient.”
Leland’s first reference to a Wabanaki belief in little people is a brief passage at the beginning of a Passamaquoddy Creation story featuring Glooscap, a legendary hero and trickster figure. This story was related to him by an elderly Passamaquoddy woman named Molly Sepsis, who could speak no English, necessitating the interpretive services of a younger woman named Sarah.
“Glooskap came first of all into this country,” Leland wrote, “into Nova Scotia, Maine, Canada, into the land of the Wabanaki, next to sunrise. There were no Indians here then (only wild Indians very far to the west).”
The text goes on to explain how Glooskap created the various creatures of the country, liberating men and women from the bark of ash trees, and reducing monstrous animals, like a giant moose and a colossal squirrel, to their present sizes. Despite its brevity, a short passage indicates that the mysterious race of little people was supposed to be older than that of Man.
“First born,” Leland wrote, “were the Mikumwess, the Oonabgemesuk, the small Elves, little men, dwellers in rocks.”
The mention of these creature’s lithic abodes, incidentally, evokes the Icelandic legend of the huldufolk – elusive, elf-like creatures supposed to make their homes inside the volcanic rock which blankets the Land of Fire and Ice. This curious connection is rendered doubly intriguing by the known medieval interactions between Icelandic Vikings and the Maritime natives they called skraelingjar, documented in the Icelandic Sagas and verified by archaeological discoveries made at the northern tip of Newfoundland.
Leland elaborated on the Mi’kmaq version of this legend in a later passage, writing:
“It is well known unto all Indians who still keep the true faith of the olden time that there are wondrous dwellers in the lonely woods, such as elves and fairies, called by the Micmacs Mikumwessos, and by the Passamaquoddies Oonahgawessos. And these can work great wonders, and also sing so as to charm the wildest beasts. From them alone come the magic pipes or flutes, which sometimes pass into possession of noted sorcerers and great warriors; and when these are played upon, the woman who hears the melody is bewitched with love, and the moose and caribou follow the sound even to their death. And when the Megumawessos are pleased with a mortal they make him a fairy, even like themselves.”
The storyteller went on to relate a tale in which two young men came to Glooscap with supplications. One of the youths hoped to win the hand of a beautiful Indian princess whose suitors, at the behest of her father, were required to perform brutal exercises which had hitherto proved fatal in every case. The other young man wanted to become a Mikumwess, one of the legendary little people. Glooscap subjected the second youth to a humiliation ritual, after which he bestowed on him a string of hair and a magic pipe which gave him “all the power of the elfin-world.” With these new weapons, the Mikumwess initiate helped his friend complete all the trails imposed on him by his father-in-law-to-be, after which he went away to live with the elves.
There is another story in Leland’s book which may merit mention here. Although it does not directly pertain to the subject of the Mikumwess, it has an element in common with Inuit elf lore. In this old Passamaquoddy fable, a native woman came into the possession of a special stick which killed any living being she pointed it at. A similar implement appears in an Inuit story related by Danish geologist Dr. Hinrich Rink in his 1866 book Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo. “The inuarutligkat,” Rink wrote, “are a kind of dwarf, possessing a shooting weapon, with which they are able to kill a creature by merely aiming or pointing at it.” He elaborated on this wand-like weapon in a later passage, claiming that it was shaped like a pistol, “not larger in size than a closed fist,” with a little black stone affixed to the end of it, atop which as placed a little red stone.
Little People of the Canadian Shield
West of the Maritimes, beyond the Laurentian Valley, lie the Great Lakes and the northerly wilderness which voyageurs once called the “Northwest”. This sprawling expanse of Canadian Shield, dominated by boreal forest and Precambrian rock, is the homeland of the Anishinaabe Nations, who traditionally contend that they share their territory with preternatural cliff-dwelling water sprites.
Canadian anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain shed some light on this fascinating element of Anishinaabe tradition in his article for the October – December 1900 issue of the Journal of American Folklore, entitled “Some Items of Algonkian Folk-Lore.” In this piece, Chamberlain cites translated passages from the Lexique de la Langue Algonquine, a Lake Nippissing Ojibwa dictionary written by French Sulpician missionary Jean-Andre Cuoq in 1886.
“Memegwesiwak,” Chamberlain wrote, “(plural of memegwesi), ‘a sort of sirens or water-nymphs, which, the Indians believe, live in the water and in hollow rocks’… They are said to steal very much and to speak with a nasal twang. There are many sayings about them. Cuoq tells us that ‘when, by mischance, when travelling by water, one has to let fall anything into the river or lake, it is the custom to say… ‘the memegwesi will have that,’ or ‘that is for the memegwesi’. Certain rocks or stones having some resemblances to parts of the human body are called memegwesiwabik = ‘memegwesi-rock;’ and, in passing by these, the canoe-men, even now, ‘either in jest or in superstition, toss at them a piece of tobacco,’ etc. Of these ‘nymphs’ the saying goes… ‘The memegwesi will rob the net; they are thieves the memegwesi.’ The ‘nasal twang’ of these creatures has furnished an expression of a figurative sort to the language in memegwesiko, ‘to speak with a nasal twang,’ literally ‘to imitate the memegwesi.’”
The practice of offering tobacco to the memegwesiwak is referenced in the 1686 journal of French Captain Pierre de Troyes, Chevalier de Troyes, who led a French commando assault on the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the spring of that year. On May 5th, 1686, after celebrating Mass, de Troyes and his soldiers proceeded up a portage route near the present town of Deep River, Ontario, about 85 miles east of Lake Nippissing, circumventing the Rapides-des-Joachims. “On the north side [of the river],” de Troyes wrote, “following the trail, we saw a high mountain whose rock is straight and very steep, the middle of which appears black. This is perhaps due to the fact that the savages make their sacrifices here by throwing arrows over it, at the end of which they tie a small piece of tobacco. Our French are accustomed to baptise those who have not yet passed through here. This rock is called l’oiseau – the bird – by the savages and some of our people, not wanting to lose the old custom, will throw themselves into the water.”
The Little People of Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba
West of the Great Lakes lies the province of Manitoba, the historic domain of the Cree, Saulteaux, Ojibwa, and Chipewyan Dene. All of these nations have traditional tales about little hairy people who dwelt atop the steep cliffs which fringe certain lakes and rivers.
The southern half of Manitoba is dominated by three great lakes. The largest of these is Lake Winnipeg, which runs up the longitudinal centre of the province. This freshwater sea is paralleled by the westerly Lakes Winnipegosis and Manitoba, the former lying to the north of the latter. In his 1860 chronicle of his surveying expeditions through what are now Ontario and the Prairie Provinces, English-Canadian geologist Henry Youle Hind described little people traditions native to these great bodies of water.
“There are many places on Lake Winnipeg and [Manitoba],” Hind wrote, “which the Indians who hunt and live on the shores of those inland seas dare not visit. There is scarcely a cave or headland which has not some legend attached to it, familiar to all the wanderers on these coasts.
“On the west side of Lake Winnipeg, in the long, dark, and gloomy chambers formed by fissures in the limestone, bad spirits are supposed to dwell, according to the belief of the Indians who hunt on the coast, and he would be a powerful charmer who could induce a heathen Indian to approach, much less enter, the abodes of these imaginary Manitous.
“Near Limestone cave Point, on Lake Winnipeg, are several of these supposed fairy dwellings. When an Indian approaches them in his canoe, he either lays an offering on the beach or gives them as wide a berth as possible.
“Steep Rock Point, on Lake Manitobah, is also a noted dwelling-place for the ‘Little Men’… [Manitoba] Lake, a body of water of very imposing dimensions, having an area of 1,900 square miles, derives its name from one of these superstitions. I stayed for three days on Manitobah Island [now Manitou Island], where a Manitou dwells, but although Indians passed and repassed, heard and answered our shots, yet they could not be persuaded to land. The only evidence of fairy presence which I met with, was the ‘fairy-like music’ of the waves of Lake [Manitobah], beating upon the hard limestone shingle on the beach, and produced a very beautiful and melancholy resemblance to distant church-bells. All night long this ringing musical sound was heard, and would no doubt, in the active imaginations of Indians, suggest the existence of those Manitou with which they people the air, the water, the forests, and the caves of the earth.”
The Mimikiwisiwak of Northern Manitoba
North of Lake Manitoba, between Lake Winnipeg and the Keewatin barren lands that fringe Hudson Bay and the Nunavut border, is a vast lake-ridden expanse of muskeg and boreal forest – the historic homeland of the Swampy Cree. One subsection of this tribe is the Rock Cree, who inhabit the Churchill River country in the northwestern corner of the province.
In his 1989 book Acaoohkiwina and Acimowina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians, American anthropologist Robert A. Brightman included several little people stories told to him by Rock Cree elders from the remote settlement of Granville Lake, Manitoba, nestled on the southern shores of the eponymous Granville Lake. The Rock Cree called their mysterious diminutive neighbours “mimikiwisiwak,” contending that they once lived in the caves which pockmark the face of High Rock, a cliff which overlooks the southwestern end of Granville Lake. Sometime in the not-so-distant past, the dwarves are believed to have relocated to nearby Manitou Island, a rocky, dome-shaped piece of land with a thick wood circumscribing its shore. According to environmental scientist Holly Cote in her 2011 Master’s thesis for Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University, there is a local taboo against pointing at Manitou Island, for which offence the mimikiwisiwak are said to conjure powerful winds.
Brightman described the mimikiwisiwak as “a small race of furtive hominid beings associated with water and /or riparian rocky cliffs… The mimikiwisiwak are about the size of a five year old boy, are covered with hair, and lack noses; the latter feature is particularly disgusting to some Crees.” Brightmen elaborated on the noses of the mimikiwisiwak in an article for the March 1990 issue of the journal Man, writing that they were described to him as simply holes in the face, which, to this author at least, evokes the image of skull-like nostrils absent of a nasal ridge.
“They live in families and eat fish,” Brightman continued. “Several people reported having seen them in peripheral vision, but the dwarves vanished before a better view could be had of them.
“Although the mimikwisiwak are said to be shy and harmless, some persons avoid Manitou Island because it is known that dwarves prefer to be left alone. It was thought that an overnight camper might disappear for a long time…”
One of the mimikwisiwak stories which Brightman recorded is a second-hand account of hunter Michel Dumas’ abduction by the dwarves sometime in the late 19th or early 20th Century, related by Dumas’ own granddaughter, elder Sarah Bighetty. Reminiscent of American writer Washington Irving’s famous 1819 short story, Rip Van Winkle, and English poet John Keats’ ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci, published that same year, this tale describes Dumas’ inadvertent intrusion into the realm of the hidden people, resulting in a long magic-induced slumber.
“My grandfather, [Michel Dumas],” Bighetty began, “paddled his canoe [to a point on Granville Lake] in autumn during a moose hunting trip. He made camp on the shore by the point and went to sleep. But he just continues to sleep. It gets to be winter and the snow covers him over but he’s still sleeping there. Then something woke him up. Those mimikwisiwak brought him inside the big rocks at the point. Everything was like glass in there. All the walls and all the things they had were made of glass. The mimikwisiwak told [Michel] to sleep in there until the end of the winter. So he slept more. And when he woke up they said, ‘There’s something that we’re going to tell you now that you’ve stayed in our house.’ They told him what was going to come in the future when the White man came into the Churchill River country. They said that the White man was dirty and made too much noise talking and with machines. They were going to harm everything, pollute the water and the land. ‘You won’t see us anymore,’ they said. ‘We’re going to leave here and go to Manitou Island where the Whites won’t bother us.’ [Michel] knew all that years before the Whites came around here.”
The Wihcikosisak of Northern Manitoba
Brightman’s Rock Cree informants also told him about another more dangerous variety of little person called the wihcikosisak. These small people were spear-wielding anthropophagites who lived in bands and ate both humans and each other. Despite their cannibalistic nature, the Cree made a distinction between them and the entity they called the “Wihtikow,” the evil man-eating spirit of the North.
One of Brightman’s informants, an elder named Cornelius Colomb, related a traditional Cree story in which a wily Cree warrior tricked a band of wihcikosisak into impaling themselves on spike traps constructed on a frozen lake. Although there is Swampy Cree variation of this story in which the victims of the canny warrior are the ‘Hairy Hearts’ or ‘Hairy Breasts’, a primitive man-eating people who seem to be analogous with Neanderthals, Colomb was adamant that the wihcikosisak belonged to another sort of hominid tribe entirely.
The Dwarves of Northern Saskatchwan
West of Manitoba is the province of Saskatchewan, whose forested northern half is the historic domain of the Woodland Cree. Like their easterly kin, the Woodland Cree have a strong little people tradition. According to Brightman, they believed that the dwarves spoke their own unique language, unintelligible to all but powerful medicine men, and that some of them were conversant in the Cree tongue. They wore animal skins, and travelled in stone canoes which allowed them to pass through the solid faces of waterside cliffs.
On one occasion, a band of Woodland Cree explored a supposed former dwelling of the little people – a cave near Southend, Saskatchewan, at the southern end of Reindeer Lake in the northeastern corner of the province. The cave’s interior proved to be littered with fish scales and fish bones, with no evidence of any fires having been kindled there, leading the Cree to conclude that the dwarves at their fish raw.
The Memegweciwug of the Canadian Prairies
South of Saskatchewan’s boreal forest and east of the parkland beyond Lake Manitoba is the largest stretch of prairie in Canada – the traditional homeland of several First Nations, one of them being the Plains Cree. Despite its significant cultural and environmental deviations from its northern and eastern counterparts, the horse-riding, prairie-dwelling faction of the great Cree Nation has its own little people legends which bear remarkable resemblance to their sylvan cousins. American anthropologist Alanson Buck Skinner included one of these stories in his article on Plains Cree oral tradition for the July-September 1916 issue of The Journal of American Folk-Lore.
“A Cree once had an experience with the Memegweciwug, or dwarfs,” Skinner wrote. “His nets were constantly robbed of fish, and he thought that it must be done by the dwarfs. One day he and his companions caught them in a fog. They had a little canoe and paddles, and were stealing fish. They talked through their noses; but the Cree could understand them, and asked them not to take any more fish. The Indians gave them some meat and let them go. The Memegweciwug pointed their canoe right at a cut bank on the river, and paddled into it. Presently they threw back the meat, and were heard to laugh; but they never stole any more fish.”
Another Plains Cree little people legend appears in Reverend Edward Ahenakew’s posthumous 1973 book Voices of the Plains Cree. Ahenakew was an Anglican priest of Cree heritage who collected the stories which comprise this work in 1923, while recovering from an illness on the Thunderchild Reserve near Turtleford, Saskatchewan, not far from Lloydminster, North Battleford, and Turtle Lake. Like most of the stories in his book, this particular tale was related by the elderly Chief Thunderchild, a Plains Cree leader of considerable renown.
Similar to the mimikwisiwak of the boreal forest and the Canadian Shield, who dwelled in waterside cliffs, the little people described by Thunderchild made their abode in the dirt and sandstone cutbanks which often form the banks of prairie rivers. One dwarfish residence unique to Plains Cree legend is the subterra beneath sand hills – mysterious sand dunes which dot southwest Saskatchewan, which seem better suited to the Sahara or Gobi deserts than to the prairies of the Great White North. Incidentally, the Plains Cree’s westerly enemies, the nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, believed that a large collection of these formations known as the Great Sandhills, were haunted by the ghosts of native warriors, who took up residence there after death.
“It is hard to shake the beliefs or the superstitions that one learned in childhood,” Ahenakew wrote, quoting Thunderchild. “Let me tell you my grandmother’s story about Ma-ma-kwa-se-suk. She said they were U-pes-chi-yi-ne-suk (little people or pygmies). Now my grandmother was not a foolish woman. She was No-to-kwa-wi-ku-mik (Old Woman’s Lodge), the sister of Chief Poundmaker, and she said that she had known people who had seen the little people.
“It seems that these Ma-ma-kwa-se-suk live beneath the ground in the sand hills or on river banks. They are very small, no taller than a two-year-old child. The people who saw them, my grandmother said, were startled. So were the little people, for they are sensitive and very shy. With their arms bent, they tried to hide their faces, strange little faces, with protruding foreheads and sharply tilted chins that enclosed the other features as in a hollow.”
Thunderchild went on to explain how the Ma-ma-kwa-se-suk spoke the Cree language, and left their tiny footprints in the sand of the dunes beneath which they lived. Every once in a while, people brave enough to venture into their haunted territory found the tiny arrows of the little people, and heard the sounds of their flint knapping emanating from the sandy ground.
Another Plains Cree dwarf story, told by elder Coming-Day, appears in American anthropologist David Goodman Mandelbaum’s 1979 book The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical, and Comparative Study. The setting of this tale is a small sand hill about a mile south of a body of water known today as Muddy Lake, the latter lying about seven miles south of the town of Unity, Saskatchewan.
One cold day in the late 1800s, the story goes, a Plains Cree hunter named Well-Dressed Man pitched his teepee south of Muddy Lake, at a place known as the Little Round Valley. While hunting for buffalo, the Cree spotted a white Great Plains wolf. Recalling a dream he had in which his “spirit helper”, or personal daemon, informed him that wearing a white wolfskin would make him impervious to bullets, Well-Dressed Man shot the animal and skinned it on the spot. Tying a thong through the wolf’s nose, the hunter proceeded to drag the pelt over the ground so that the snow might wash it clean.
“As he went by the sand hills,” Coming-Day told Mandelbaum, “he heard something. He saw a little man standing a short distance off. It smiled at him. He saw that. The sand hill was like a house and the little man was standing at the door. The door opened and another came out and leaned against the door post. He looked so hard… at the little men that he didn’t look inside. They were dressed like white children, wearing boots and dark clothes, hats with a visor; they had curly hair. Their eyes were hollow and their mouths came out like snouts.”
One of the little men approached Well-Dressed Man and asked him to give him the wolf pelt. When the hunter refused, the tiny solicitor offered to wrestle him for it. After challenging the hunter four times, Well-Dressed Man consented, laying down his rifle and removing his coat.
The pair proceeded to grapple while the dwarf at the door looked on, laughing at the spectacle. The little man’s arms, though short, felt to the Indian like bands of iron. After a ferocious contest which saw many close calls, Well-Dressed Man tripped the dwarf with his leg and sent him sprawling on his back. After recovering their wind, the contenders had a rematch, the dwarf protesting that tripping was unfair. After another grueling bout, Well-Dressed Man, thoroughly spent, tripped his diminutive opponent a second time, unable to best him the conventional way.
Despite his questionable style, the dwarf acknowledged the hunter’s victory and handed him an arrow-shaped stone called a pekpekaha, which he withdrew from his pocket, telling him that it could be used to cure sick friends and family members, and would make him invincible in battle. Without further ado, the dwarf put on his cap and withdrew into to his home, and the sandy entrance closed behind him.
The Little People of the Rocky Mountains
West of the Canadian prairies are the majestic Rocky Mountains, which run along the border of Alberta and British Columbia. These snow-capped ranges are the traditional hunting grounds of several First Nations whose folkloric traditions include tales about mountain-dwelling dwarves. One such nation is the Stoney or Nakoda, a Siouan tribe which branched off the prairie-dwelling Assiniboine; whose historic domain stretched from Banff to Jasper.
One exposition on the Stoney conception of little people, referred to by these Rocky Mountain Indians as the macoyah debe, appears in Sebastian Chumak’s 1983 book The Stonies of Alberta: An Illustrated Heritage of Genesis, Myths, Legends, Folklore, and Wisdom of the Yahey Wichastabi. This explanation was given by Stoney elder Jonas Dixon, or ‘One Boy,’ collected by Thomas T. Williams and translated by Alfred T. Dixon Jr.
Dixon explained the macoyah debe were associated with the west wind, and were said to be the descendants of bears who metamorphosed into their current form as divine punishment for their mischievous antics. They were supposed to be especially numerous in the Selkirk Mountains, a range of the neighbouring Columbia Mountains which runs through traditional Kootenay Indian territory southwest of Stoney country.
“The Little People,” Dixon said, “are very small persons. No bigger than badger, these underground persons live deep within the earth where it is always the spring moon. These have their own underground country. They weave braided flowers and know very little sorrow. Their singing is like the prairie burning and flowering.”
Another variation of the Stoney little people legend was collected by journalist Jordan Small of Barrie, Ontario, in an interview with Morley resident Daxter Amos. Small’s article on this and other elements of Stoney tradition was published in the Halloween 2021 issue of the Rocky Mountain Outlook.
“Standing at a mere one-foot tall and dressed in traditional Indigenous regalia,” Small wrote of the mountain elves, whom Amos called the wicha sta juthin min, “the Little People are the mighty protectors of the land long before the first Indigenous peoples of the area arrived. To this day, sightings of the elusive and benevolent wicha sta juthin min are seen across the Nation, especially in the Morley townsite near the schools…
“Stories of The Little People have popped up throughout Amos’ life, including from custodians at the high school who swear during after hours they catch glimpses of very tiny people running across the hallway before disappearing. Amos’ mother would also tell tales of finding miniature ladders in the woods while she was berry-picking, but would be gone upon returning with others. She strongly believes it could have been a tool of The Little People.”
One Stoney man who claimed to have seen the mountain dwarves was a hunter named Hector Crawler, a resident of Morley, Alberta, who spent much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries traipsing the Albertan Rockies in search of game. Banff-based entrepreneur Norman Luxton – a colourful character who sailed across the Pacific Ocean in a Nootka dugout canoe and played a crucial role in saving the Plains bison from extinction – related some of Crawler’s adventures to celebrated Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau. Barbeau, in turn, published these stories in his 1960 book Indian Days on the Western Prairies.
“A certain time when he was in the mountains,” Luxton told Barbeau, “when alone, he saw what he called the little black men, describing them to me as elfish (not fairy) forms. He described them to me as elfs, wearing little plug hats and cut-away coats. And while he could not carry on a conversation with the elf, he was sure that it was out of the ordinary to have a vision of that kind. It was a rare novelty.”
Luxton went on to describe how, following his encounter with the elf, Crawler delved into the mysteries of his tribe, becoming a great medicine man and healer. He spent much of his time in seclusion, hunting alone in the mountains, particularly in the Kootenay Plains west of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta – incidentally, an area near which some of the Canadian Rockies’ most famous wildman sightings would later take place. Crawler’s newfound healing abilities and desire for seclusion in the wake of his extraordinary experience mirrors the fairy lore of Newfoundland, in which individuals who encounter the so-called ‘Good People’ said to populate the Rock’s bogs, berry patches, and barrens often change in profound ways, apparently as a consequence of their exposure to the fairies’ powerful magic.
Dwarfs in Shuswap Tradition
West of Stoney Territory is British Columbia’s Interior Plateau, whose native Interior Salish also have legends involving little people. Celebrated Canadian geologist and surveyor Dr. George Mercer Dawson touched on the Shuswap version of this legend in his 1892 book Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia.
“Little men called… Tsu-in-i-tem,” Dawson wrote, “are reported to exist in several places. The most noted locality is Big Horn Mountain [i.e. perhaps present-day Pincushion Mountain, north of Peachland], situated twenty miles down Okanagan Lake, on the west side. They hunt with bows and arrows, and while represented as being only two feet high, yet they are able to carry a deer easily. In contrast to this, when a squirrel is killed they skin it and take only a part, as the whole is [too] heavy for them. The Indians are very much afraid of them.”
Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit elaborated on the Shuswap conception of the dwarves in an ethnological treatise for the 1909 issue of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History. “The Indians believe in a race of dwarfs which were at one time very numerous in many parts of the country,” he wrote, “but are said to be seldom seen now. They are about two feet tall, and gifted with great magic. Their women dress their hair in a knot at each ear, like pubescent girls; and the men tie theirs in a knot at the back of the head, in the manner of pubescent lads. They do not harm people, and are as wild as game.”
Teit later reproduced an old Shuswap story in which a young man became lost while hunting in the wilderness. Despairing that he would never again see his family or friends, the young man began to weep. Suddenly, the hunter found himself face-to-face with two tiny women who had their hair done-up like young girls, who inquired into the cause of his lamentations. When the hunter explained that he was lost, the dwarves laughed and assured him that his village was not far away. The little women directed his attention to a nearby hill and informed him that he would be able to see his people’s camp from its heights. They warned the hunter not to tell any of his fellow band members that they had helped him, or else evil would befall him.
The man did as instructed and arrived home in an impossibly short time. “The dwarfs had contracted the distance,” Teit explained, “so that it was only a short walk; but in reality the man had been a long distance from home. For a long time he told no one; but one day, describing his adventures at the time when he was lost, he said, ‘I never should have reached home had it not been for two dwarf women who showed me the way.’ Shortly after saying this, he died.”
The dwarfish ability to contract walking distances for human travellers is another element which native Canadian folklore has in common with the Anglo-Celtic fairy lore of Newfoundland.
The Dwarfs of Thompson Tradition
The Shuswap’s westerly neighbours, the Nlaka’pamux, or Thompson Indians, have their own dwarf stories, some of which Teit reproduced in an ethnological treatise for the April 1900 issue of the American Museum of Natural History. The ‘Upper Thompsons’ whom Teit refers to traditionally inhabited British Columbia’s Stein River Valley and the Thompson Canyon, while the southerly ‘Lower Thompsons’ abode in the Fraser Canyon and the northern Cascade Mountains.
“The Upper Thompsons believe in a race of dwarfs,” Teit wrote, “who inhabit steep cliffs and forests. They are just like men; but their skins are pale, and their bodies very gaunt. They are only about two feet tall. They wander around the mountains, sometimes shouting, groaning, or weeping. Their eyes are sunk very deep in their heads. They run away from hunters, and go into inaccessible places…
“They all wear clothes similar to those formerly worn by the Indians, but have never been seen with bows and arrows. They inhabit low, dense forests, or live in dense woods in the mountains. It is said that they never kill, steal, or chase people… They are rather fond of joking, and playing tricks on people.”
Teit went on to explain how some Thompson believed that dwarfs were the spirits of cedar trees. Perhaps on account of this arboreal heritage, some dwarf men were paradoxically said to grow taller than the tallest Indian – a peculiar attribute which they share with the elves of Inuit tradition. The Thompson told Teit that the dwarfs seemed to have vanished from the Spences Bridge area on the Thompson River sometime in the late 1800s, but were once quite numerous in easterly Okanagan Country.
The Dwarfs of Carrier Tradition
North of Interior Salish territory, beyond the woods and grasslands of Cariboo Country, lies an endless tract of ancient mountains carpeted with boreal forest – the age-old haunt of the Carrier Dene. These people, too, have a rich tradition of little people stories.
In his 1895 book Three Carrier Myths, French Oblate missionary Adrien Gabriel Maurice made a cursory reference to the Carrier belief in dwarfs. In one of the three mythical Carrier sagas which Maurice relates, the protagonist travelled to a land populated with dwarves, whom he learned had murdered and flayed his younger brother. As retribution for this crime, the story’s protagonist stole upon the dwarves in their sleep and slit their throats with his stone knife.
“Dwarfs,” Maurice wrote in a footnote, “in their mythology, generally play a malefic, noxious role.”
Ethnographer Marius Barbeau also made mention of the Carrier dwarf tradition in his 1923 book Indian Days in the Canadian Rockies. The first chapter in this book tells the tale of Beeny (also spelled “Bini”), a 19th Century Carrier prophet who is said to have foretold the coming of the white man. Barbeau learned Beeny’s story while conducting fieldwork in northwest British Columbia in the early 1920s. For some reason which this author cannot explain, Barbeau went to great lengths to portray this piece of northwest British Columbian history as a product of the easterly Rocky Mountains, placing it at Trout Lake, British Columbia, in the heart of Kootenay Indian territory, and punctuating it with illustrations of Kootenay and Stoney Indians. Despite this disturbing and unaccountable duplicity, Barbeau peppered his piece with what appear to be genuine articles of Carrier folklore, one of which is the belief in “Kannawdzets,” or little people.
In Barbeau’s story, Beeny’s shamanic rival, Gustlee, proclaims that his spirit left his body one night while he dreamed and travelled across the country, eventually alighting upon village of little people. The camp of these tiny men and women was pitched high in the mountains, atop a lonely crag far from any human settlement. Although human beings cannot typically perceive spirit travellers as anything more than a tiny globe light, the little people were fully aware of Gustlee’s presence and proceeded to assault him, singing strange songs as they tugged at his hair and robe. Despite that eye contact with a dwarf, according to Carrier tradition, was supposed to be fatal, Gustlee did not die because, as he put it, “it was [his] mind that contemplated their faces, not [his] eyes.”
The Tson-Te-Rotana of the Yukon River
One Dene tribe whose little people traditions eerily parallel the huldufolk legends of Iceland and the fairy lore of the British Isles are the Koyukon, who inhabited the valley of Alaska’s Yukon River. In his 1911 article “On the Superstitions of the Ten’a Indians,” published in the 1911 issue of Anthropos, French Jesuit missionary Father Julius Jette described a goblin of Koyukon mythology called the Tson-te-rotana, or “People of the Rocks.” Like their ostensible European cousins, these elusive, agile wildmen had a penchant for thievery and kidnapping.
“About 1800,” Jette wrote, “whilst playing with other children near the mouth of the Koyukuk River, a little girl suddenly disappeared, and was never heard of thereafter. Evidently she was carried away by the tson-te-rotana.” Jette went on to relate another incident which took place in September 1904, in which an elderly woman inexplicably strayed into the bush. Her band assumed that she had been taken by the tson-te-rotana and, after a thorough search, gave her up for lost. Four days later, the old woman was found plodding down a game trail. Although Jette explained the strange scenario by stating that the woman, being prone to epileptic fits, had suffered a seizure and slipped into a four-day coma, her discombobulation and implicit memory loss in the bush strongly evoke the little people abduction stories which intersperse the folklore of Northern Europe.
The Elves of Vancouver Island
Southwest of Carrier territory, and west of the Interior Plateau, beyond the Coast Mountains and the Salish Sea, is Vancouver Island, whose southern end is the historic domain of the Island Halkomelem, themselves a branch of the Central Coast Salish. One division of the Island Halkomelem is the Cowichan, whose historic stomping grounds were Cowichan Lake and the valley of the Cowichan River.
The Cowichan believed that the mountains which dominate the interior of Vancouver Island were inhabited by mysterious elflike beings whom humans would do well to avoid. In her 1901 book History and Folklore of the Cowichan Indians, Victoria-based storyteller and artist Martha Douglas Harris called these elusive beings “Stetalht.”
“The Stetalht,” Harris wrote, “are a strange people, who can make themselves invisible. They are almost like spirits, and only appear at night. Their signs are scarcely known, but their whistling is heard all over the forest. They are supposed to live in caves. When the Indians hear these whistlings they take their guns and shoot at where the sounds come from… These Stetalht are supposed to steal children, and the Indians are very much afraid of them.”
Harris proceeded to tell the story of a Cowichan chief named Stellowalth, who was accosted by a Stetalht one evening while strolling along the Cowichan River. As punishment for shooting at his people while they whistled in the night, the elf bewitched the chief and proceeded to torture him. First, he commanded to him to divest himself of his articles of office, with which humiliating injunction the chief was compelled to comply. Next, he riddled the old warrior with arrows. Then he forced the wounded chief to dance, laughing as the thrall of his sorcery cavorted on the riverbank like some grotesque gory porcupine. Finally, after permitting his prisoner to apologize for his transgression and promise to forbid his warriors from shooting at whistles in the woods, the elf released the chief from his spell.
Harris included another elf story set on the Cowichan River. “Two Indians who had gone down to see if their salmon net was full,” she wrote, “began to pull it into their canoe. No fish came, but at the bottom of the net lay a beautiful wild woman, dressed in fine furs, and over her face she held a large piece of white moss. They were so alarmed at seeing her that they almost dropped the net. She made signs not to be afraid. Then they took her out, and, in spite of being in the water, her clothes were not wet.”
The fishermen took the wild woman, whom they assumed must be a Stetalht, to their village, where their curious kinsmen crowded around her, offering her fish and meat to eat. Through signs, the elf woman indicated that she would like to stay in the village, and her request was readily granted. As long as the woman resided with the Indians, fish and game were plentiful, and the grateful villagers, attributing their good fortune to their guest’s presence, always left gifts of salmon and venison at the door of her lodge. One day, after thanking her hosts for their kindness, the wild woman slipped away into the woods, never to return.
Harris included a third elf story set in the village of Snohqualmith, just east of Seattle, Washington. In this story, an elderly man captured a Stetalht in the act of stealing his fish. At that time, the rest of the band was congregated in a longhouse to celebrate a successful fish-catching enterprise. The old man brought the wildman to the chief to see what ought to be done with him. The chief turned to the prisoner and asked him if he had any special skills. In response, the Stetalht raised his hand and put a spell on the chief, rendering him speechless and immobile. He then bewitched the rest of the village and stole what fish he wanted before slinking away into the woods.
The Cowichan’s neighbours, the Nootka, who held sway over Vancouver Island’s northwestern shores, have their own legends about a race of little men who lived in the mountains in the interior. American anthropologist Philip Drucker touched on these tales in his 1951 book The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes, writing, “There were also dwarves, who had houses inside of mountains, where they enticed the unwary to dance with them around and around a great wooden drum. Sooner or later he stumbled against the drum, and became afflicted with a peculiar disease called ‘earthquake foot’ – every time he took a step the ground shook. No one with this malady lived long.”
There are many more little people stories endemic to Canada, some of which I hope to explore in future pieces. If you’d like to hear traditional little people tales from Northern Canada, told by the Dene and the Inuit, please check out my videos ‘Elves from the North Pole: More than a Fairytale?’ or ‘Little People of the High Arctic’. If you’re interested in Old World tales of the small folk which took root in the Great White North, please check out my video, ‘Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, and Goblins in Canadian Settler Folklore.’ You can find these videos by clicking the end screen cards, or the links in the description.
Sources
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Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1866), by Dr. Hinrich Rink
Acaoohkiwina and Acimowina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians (1989), by Robert A. Brightman
Living Landscapes of Granville Lake, Manitoba: Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of Lakehead University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of Environmental Studies: Northern Environments and Cultures (December 2011), by Holly Cote
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