Of all the legendary monsters to inhabit the folklore of Canada’s First Nations, the Thunderbird is perhaps the most ubiquitous. From the Mi’kmaq wigwams of the Maritimes to the Salish longhouses of the Pacific Northwest to the Inuit igloos of the High Arctic, native dwellings across the country have borne witness to traditional tales of colossal raptors endowed with the ability to create thunder and lightning – legendary predators with their own regional appellations, collectively referred to in anthropologia as Thunderbirds.
In previous pieces, we have explored several Thunderbird stories belonging to the Cree – Canada’s largest First Nation, comprised of vast divisions stretching from the prairies to the Canadian Shield. We delved into Plains Cree legends recorded by Canadian surveyor Henry Youle Hind and American geologist Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, and touched on the story of a Thunderbird wing supposedly recovered by Plains Cree Indians from Hobbema, Alberta. In this piece, we will investigate more Cree tales of Canada’s greatest winged monster.
Thunderbird Stories from Sandy Lake, Ontario
Ensconced within an endless wilderness of boreal forest and Precambrian rock, in the remote Canadian Shield of northwest Ontario, lies the Sandy Lake Indian Reserve, home to an independent Oji-Cree First Nation born from a union between the Northern Ojibwa and the Swampy Cree. Traditional tales of the Sandy Lake Oji-Cree were collected by anthropologist James R. Stevens, who published them in his 1995 book Sacred Legends.
Stevens’ native informants called the Thunderbird Binay-sih – or Binay-sih-wok in the plural – and regarded it as “the most powerful creature in the world.” In one of the tales which Stevens recorded, a certain Thunderbird preyed on giant beavers that were said to inhabit the shores and islands of Wunnumin Lake, Ontario, in ancient times, eventually hunting them to extinction. Legend has it that the vermillion-coloured clay which surrounds Wunnumin Lake, as well a slab of red rock which lies on the Pipestone River, owes its ruddy hue to the blood of a great beaver which was carried off by a Thunderbird long ago.
In another Sandy Lake story, a family of Thunderbirds lived on a mountain peak which was perpetually enshrouded by dark clouds. These creatures hunted snakes, frogs, and toads by shooting lightning bolts at their earthen homes, forcing them to come out into the open. They were friendly to a mortal man who had married one of their daughters – a beautiful woman who could assume human form – and allowed him to live with them for a time on the mountaintop, even giving him wings so that he could accompany them on their hunting trips. They finally banished their son-in-law from their home when he brought beaver into the nest to eat, beaver teeth posing a hazard to Thunderbird feathers.
In a third story which Stevens recorded, a female Thunderbird snatched up an Anishinaabe hunter and carried him to her nest on a high westerly mountain peak, intending to feed him to her chicks. Throughout the journey, the hunter repeatedly stabbed the Thunderbird with his spear, inflicting such damage that she finally fell dead shortly after arriving at the nest. Enraged, the Thunderbird’s white-headed mate demanded that the hunter take care of his chicks while he hunted on pain of death. The hunter agreed, but slaughtered the baby birds as soon as their father departed. The hunter proceeded to gut the mother Thunderbird, climb into her carcass, and use her body as a wingsuit, gliding down the mountainside and alighting softly on the forest floor below. That night, the sky turned black with evil-looking clouds and lightning bolts rent the forest as the male Thunderbird, having learned of the hunter’s treachery, vented his rage on the world below.
The Sandy Lake Oji-Cree seemed to distinguish the Thunderbird from another avian predator which they called the Bird of Night, which sometimes swooped down on lone hunters who failed to return to camp before sundown and carried them off into the darkness, never to be seen again.
In another of Stevens’ books, entitled Legends from the Forest, Sandy Lake elder Edward Rae told a story set near Island Lake, Manitoba, about sixty miles northwest of Sandy Lake. This tale accords with a strangely universal motif common to native folklore across the country which holds that Thunderbirds have a hatred for enormous man-eating serpents.
While hauling a load of freight to the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Island Lake, a group of native voyageurs headed up a portage trail that lay in the shadow of a terrestrial eminence known as Snake Hill – a place rumoured to be home to terrible serpents that were bigger than moose. During this gruelling operation – which involved the transportation of one of the HBC’s enormous York boats using ropes and rollers – one of the voyageurs, a young native with a reputation for daring, vanished into the woods. The leader of the party searched for signs of the missing man and found his tracks heading in the direction of the forbidden hill. Evidently, the young man hoped to lay eyes on the monstrous reptiles that were said to dwell there. Certain that the voyageur would be killed by the hill’s serpentine inmates, and concluding that a rescue operation was not worth the risk of losing more members of his brigade, the leader decided to abandon the young man to his fate.
When the boy’s father learned of his son’s disappearance, he resolved to bring an end to the slithering menace that lurked at Snake Hill. Accompanied by his wife, he travelled up the Island Lake portage trail to the spot at which his son was last seen and pitched his tent, driving the stakes deep into the earth for protection from the wind. He proceeded to smoke his pipe and pray, asking the Thunderbirds to avenge his son.
“Just as the sun was going down that evening,” Rae said, “thunder clouds moved in and lightning flashed – the lightning moved toward where they were camped. When night came, the thunderbirds reached them overhead and everything turned quiet.
“When the clouds came over Snake hill, lightning started again and it thundered all night long. The mother said, ‘During the night the ground shook so much from lightning hitting the snake hill and it almost raised me off the ground.’
“In sun-up, all the clouds started to clear and float away. The father and mother took down their tent and went home.”
Sometime later, the father travelled to Snake Hill alone to inspect the damage wrought by the Thunderbirds. To his astonishment, the hill itself ceased to exist, having been reduced to a charred smoking ruin bereft of trees. As he picked his way through this wasteland, which reeked of decaying flesh and blood, the father came across fragments of enormous snakes which appeared to have been blown to pieces by lightning.
“The father went home,” Rae concluded. “His wish had been realized, no-one would ever die there again.”
Thunderbird Maidens of Rock Cree Legend
Northwest of the Canadian Shield, in the boreal forest of northern Manitoba, lies the historic domain of the Woodland Cree, who also tell Thunderbird tales. One division of the Woodland Cree is the Rock Cree, whose traditional homeland lies in 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 Thunderbird 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. One story, told to him in Cree by Henry and Angelique Linklater, appears to be a Woodland Cree variation of the Sandy Lake tale of an Anishinaabe hunter who married a ‘Thunderbird maiden’ and went to live with her relations on a mountaintop.
In this story, two brothers discovered that, while they were out hunting, mysterious visitors snuck into their camp to perform domestic chores. These visitors proved to be Thunderbird maidens, whom the brothers eventually took as their wives.
The younger brother regarded the older brother’s wife as prettier than his own, and resolved to kill her out of jealousy. One day, the younger brother shot his sister-in-law in the ribs with an arrow when she was chopping wood, prompting both her and his own wife to flee into the woods.
When the older brother returned home from hunting and learned what the younger brother had done, he scolded him and set out in search of his missing wife. With the help of an old woman, who gave him directions and necessary tools, the older brother tracked his wounded wife and her sister to a peak in the Rocky Mountains where the Thunderbirds lived, where he prevailed upon them to return with him to their former camp.
Plains Cree Thunderbird Stories
Further to the west, on the prairies of central Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Thunderbird legend endures in the campfire stories of the Plains Cree. American photographer and ethnographer Edward S. Curtis included one such tale in his posthumously-published 1970 book The North American Indian. In this traditional tale, a man who desired his brother’s wife lured him onto a mountain slope on the pretext of hunting eagles, directing his attention to a hole in the rock before pushing him into it. When his body came to rest, the unfortunate Indian found himself sharing an enormous nest with a fledgeling Thunderbird. The young raptor took a liking to the man, and convinced his parents, who were notorious man-eaters, not to harm him. After spending four years with the Thunderbirds – which, to them, seemed like four days – the man returned to his people and taught them the songs of his feathered hosts.
Another ethnologist to put Plains Cree Thunderbird tales to pen was Reverend Edward Ahenakew, an Anglican priest of Plains Cree extraction. In his posthumous 1973 book Voices of the Plains Cree, he included an old Thunderbird tale related to him by Chief Thunderchild at the reserve near Turtleford, Saskatchewan.
“… Pe-ya-siw,” Thunderbird began, “[is] the name we give to Great Birds that are usually invisible, enormous in size, the rulers of the universe, from whose eyes comes the flashes of lighting, and from whose throats the thunder that rumbles or tears the firmament. The deep-toned ones are the old birds; those with piercing peals, the young. Sometimes in their anger with a mortal, they slay him with the fire of their eyes; but that is only in the summer, for they migrate south in wintertime, like birds of lesser worth.
“Long ago, I was told the story of a great struggle between Pe-ya-siw and a huge serpent. A band of Indians witnessed it as they travelled on the prairies to the south. At first they saw what seemed to be only a small cloud above a lake, but then a flash of lightning came from the cloud down into the water, and they saw a wriggling giant serpent being lifted towards the sky. It went up and then down again while they watched, and they knew that they were witnessing a struggle between a snake and a Pe-ya-siw.
“The bird’s thunder-cry was piercing, not deep-toned, and they realized that Pe-ya-siw was young and was beginning to tire. The struggle went on, but it was lower and lower to the water, until the snake was returned partly to its own element. Then the water was hurled in a great spout upwards, and both combatants were submerged. The snake had pulled Pe-ya-siw quite below the surface. Ever since then, the waters of that lake have rumbled, for the struggle still goes on; that is why the lake is called ‘the waters that rumble.’
“My great-grandmother once saw a Pe-ya-siw. ‘It was beautiful,’ she told her grandchildren. ‘Its eyes flashed, and the low rumbling of thunder came from its throat; its plumage was like the rainbow, the colours so bright that they cast their reflection on all the land about.”
Curiously, the description of the Thunderbird’s plumage having rainbow hues evokes a brief passage from one of the letters of George Nelson, a fur trader who managed a succession of trading posts throughout what is now northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the early 1800s. Nelson wrote that his Woodland Cree clients claimed that the spirit of the Thunderbird, which sometimes visited fortunate Indians in their sleep, appeared in the form of a beautiful peacock.
Ahenakew included another Plains Cree Thunderbird story in a 1929 article for The Journal of American Folklore featuring Wesakaychak, a legendary Cree hero and trickster.
“Wesakaychak was happy with his beautiful wife,” Ahenakew began, “but life is not all happiness. It was now springtime and Wesakaychak noticed that something was troubling his wife. She still loved him, he knew, but she seemed nervous and her appetite had failed her. He was very anxious, and at last made up his mind to ask her if there was anything on her mind. This he did one day. She replied to his question, ‘I am afraid, not so much for myself but because I love you so well and your life is in great danger. Very soon now, one who has loved me since I was a little girl will be here. He is terrible and will kill you.’
“Wesakaychak felt elation rather than dismay at this reply. He knew now that his wife’s love for him was real, and he was ready to meet any danger that might come his way.
“‘What happens when he approaches?’ he asked her.
“‘A black cloud comes from the west. There is a great wind, and lightning pierces through the clouds in all directions. Then a low, rumbling noise.’ At this moment, she paused; for they both heard the noise, distant and ominous. Her face was pale as death and her hand shook. ‘It is he!’ she gasped faintly.”
Reassuring his wife that everything would be alright, Wesakaychak asked her to tell her father, the chief, to advise his people to secure their wigwams. While his wife went about her errand, the trickster sat down and awaited the Thunderbird’s arrival.
“With startling suddenness,” Ahenakew wrote, “the storm struck the camp. Peyasiw, the Thunder Bird, arrived. He threw the door flap of Wesakaychak’s tent open rudely as he strode in. ‘Go out!’ he yelled to Wesakaychak in thunderous tones, while his eyes flashed forked lightning.”
Wesakaychak proposed that the two of them settle their business outside, and followed Peyasiw into the open, bringing a buffalo robe with him. On the pretext of unfurling the robe so that they could sit on it, the trickster shook the buffalo hide in imitation of the flapping of a crow’s wing, generating a cooling wind. He shook the robe a second time, blanketing the area with frost. When he shook the robe a third time, the frozen trees began to crackle.
“Peyasiw, the Thunder Bird, began to shiver with the cold,” Ahenakew wrote. “His one weakness was his inability to live except in warm atmosphere. ‘You have beaten me,’ said he. ‘I love her, but she is yours. Whatever power I may have is yours, only save my life.’”
With a fourth flap of his buffalo robe, Wesakaychak brought warmth back to the country. He then bade his rival farewell, imploring him to always remember that he had been defeated by the power of the crow.
“In subsequent years,” Ahenakew concluded, “the [Indians] threw crow weed on the fire whenever there was much lightning and thunder, and all through the camp could be heard people crying, ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ in order to ward off the danger of being struck by lightning.”
Later in his piece, Ahenakew made a distinction between the Thunderbird and a colossal man-eating raptor called the Crimson Eagle, said to have inhabited the country in the ancient past before Wesakaychak put an end to its existence.
There are other Cree Thunderbird stories buried in forgotten Canadian ethnologies, and doubtless many more filed away in the mnemonic shelves of Cree elders across the Great White North, which I hope will become the subjects of future pieces.
Sources
Sacred Legends (1995), by James R. Stevens
Wunnumin.com/Legend-Of-Wunnumin/
Legends from the Forest: Told by Chief Thomas Fiddler (1985), edited by James R. Stevens, translated by Edtrip Fiddler
“Cree Trickster Tales,” By Edward Ahenakew, in the October-December 1929 issue of The Journal of American Folklore
The North American Indian: Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska (1970), by Edward S. Curtis
Voices of the Plains Cree (1973), by Reverend Edward Ahenakew
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