For most Westerners, the term ‘little people,’ when used in the context of folklore, might conjure up images of the leprechauns of Irish fable, the dwarves of Germanic legend, or the fairies of Celtic tradition. It might surprise some Canadians to learn that a wealth of forgotten tales eerily similar to these European legends can be found in nearly every corner of the Great White North, in both First Nations and settler tradition. The area with the highest concentration of such stories seems to be the province of Ontario – home of the Great Lakes, the Canadian Shield, and the southern shores of Hudson’s Bay. In previous pieces, we explored the Kashubian dwarf lore of the Madawaska Highlands east of Algonquin Provincial Park; Cornish-Canadian pixie legends from Ontario’s Oxford and Waterloo counties; historical Ojibwa tales of memegwesiwak, or cliff-dwelling water dwarfs, set in Ontario’s Lake Nipissing, Lake Temiskaming, and Oiseau Rock; and first-hand encounters with ‘little people’ in Toronto’s Scarborough district, Rouge National Urban Park, and the towns of Bancroft and Port Perry. In this piece, we will dig up more traditional native ‘little people’ legends from Canada’ Heartland Province.
The Ojijikoonsuk of Fort Albany
In his 1965 book Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway, celebrated Canadian Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau included a strange story told to him by Ojibwa elders from Ontario’s Lake Nipigon. This story describes a race of little people who once lived in the frozen forests and muskeg surrounding Fort Albany, a historic Hudson’s Bay Company trading post built where the Albany River meets James’ Bay. The artist made a distinction between the diminutive subjects of this tale and the aforementioned cliff-dwelling “maymaygwaysiwuk,” as he called them, regarding the latter as mermen.
“There was a tribe of Indians called Ojijakoonsuk,” Morrisseau wrote, “who were very troublesome, although they never hurt or killed anyone, but they had a habit of stealing whatever they got their hands on. Sometimes they would try to steal young women for wives. At times they succeeded…
“These Indians were short and heavy, about four and a half to five feet tall. In their tribe, they had a chief who was a troublemaker. This chief advised all his men to go among the Ojibway and steal and make trouble. The Ojibway finally laid down the law and made them stop these troublesome habits and showed them that the Ojibway word was to be obeyed, or they would kill all their tribe, sparing no one. From that day, no Ojijakoons ever bothered the Ojibway again, for the Ojibway were their masters, and the law of the Ojibway had to be respected.”
Absent of any references to otherworldly powers or inhuman qualities, this story seems to indicate that the Ojijakoonsuk were pygmies – unusually short but otherwise prosaic human beings – and not the mysterious, preternatural entities which populate the bulk of native dwarf legends. The distinction between these two different creatures is not always so clearly delineated. In their 1962 book Ojibwa Myths and Legends, folklorists Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich used the word ‘pygmy’ to denote “the little people of the water, thickets, woods and cliffs” – in other words, the memegwesiwak, whom Morrisseau regarded as mermen. Usually,” wrote the folklorists, “we heard that the home of these tiny people… was under the hills. One informant said that the little people were especially mischievous on stormy nights. They caused no end of trouble. They themselves could never be seen, but the next morning their footprints in the sand along the lake shore gave evidence that they had been there.”
The Me’megwe’si of Lake Temiskaming
A more thorough description of the legendary little people of Ontario appears in American anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck’s 1915 treaties on the myths and folklore of the Algonquin of Lake Timiskaming and the Ojibwa of Lake Temagami. According to Speck, the Ojibwa of Lake Temagami regarded the ‘me’megwe’si, as he called them, as “A species of creature which lives in the high remote ledges. They are small and have hair growing all over their bodies. The Indians think they are like monkeys, judging from specimens of the latter they have seen in the picture-books. These dwarf-like creatures have ugly faces and seek to hide them when they meet with people. A little narrative of a meeting with these creatures is told by some Timagami Indians who had been to Lake Timiskaming. The Indians were passing the high ledge of rock a few miles below Haileybury [almost certainly Devil’s Rock, the legends of which this author covered in a previous piece], where the water was very deep and where they had set their nets. They found that somebody had been stealing fish. They proceeded to watch the nets and soon saw three Me’megwe’si come out astride of an old log for a canoe, suing sticks for paddles. The Indians pursued them, the fairies meanwhile hiding their faces. Finally, the Indians caught one. Then one Indian said, ‘Look behind!’ When the fairy turned quickly they caught a glimpse of how ugly he was. The Indians then took a knife from this fairy and the rest disappeared, riding their log through the rock wall to the inside, where they could be heard crying, as this was where they lived. The Indians then threw the knife at the rock and it went right through to the inside to its owner.”
The Memegwaysuck of Lake Nipissing
A nearly identical story appears in folklorist Wayne M. Couchie’s 2000 book Some Legends and Myths of the Nipissing Tribal Indians, set in the rocky forested wilderness south of present-day Sudbury, Ontario. This tale was related by Ernest Couchie, a Nipissing Ojibwa elder who died in 1986 at the age of 99.
“Many years ago,” Couchie said, “a band of Ojibways, who lived in the French River area, just south of Nipissing, made their living from net fishing. In one particular season, a rash of thefts occurred on their fishing nets. To stop this, the Ojibways decided to stay overnight near their nets, in order to catch the thieves.
“So, they did this. Then, as darkness settled upon them, they noticed some canoes approaching their nets. It was the thieves coming to rob the nets again! The Ojibway fishermen jumped into their canoes and headed out across the water to catch the culprits.
“But as they approached the thieves, they were quickly noticed. Immediately, the thieves turned their canoes and headed back in the direction from which they came. The Ojibway fishermen pursued them to a steep rock cliff on the south shores of Lake Nipissing called Cross Point.
The fleeing canoes began heading towards the huge cliff. Believing that they had the thieves cornered, the Ojibways pursued them with great confidence. Then, suddenly, the cliff opened up, and the mysterious thieves paddled into this opening. And as suddenly as it opened, the cliff closed, leaving the Ojibways [aghast]. The Ojibway fishermen had been chasing members of a legendary ghost tribe called Memegwaysuck!”
The Memegwesi of Parry Sound
A third story bearing remarkable resemblance to the previous two tales was recorded by the celebrated New Zealand-Canadian anthropologist Diamond Jenness, and published in a 1935 paper for the Canada Department of Mines. These tales derive from the Ojibwa of Parry Island, the latter being a large isle in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay abutting the eponymous Parry Sound.
Like Norval Morriseau, Jenness’s informants believed that more than one variety of little person haunted the rocks and streams of the Canadian Shield. One of these was the memegwesi, which Jenness called a “friendly manido,” or benevolent preternatural entity. “They may play pranks on the Indians,” Jenness wrote, “but never harm them. A Parry Island Indian on his way to Depot Harbour saw a Memegwesi going down a creek; it had the outline of a man, but only its face was visible, its body being concealed beneath a huge growth of whiskers.”
Jenness proceeded to relate a story told to him by a 70-year-old Ojibwa man named John Manatuwaba. “At the north end of Parry Sound,” the elder said, “in what white men call Split Rock channel, there is a crag known to the Indians as Memegwesi’s crag. Some natives once set night lines there, but their trout were always stolen. At last one of the men sat up all night to watch for the thief. At dawn, he saw a stone boat approaching, manned by two Memegwesi, one a woman, the other bearded like a monkey. The watcher awakened his companions, and they pursued the stone boat, which turned and made for the crag. Just as the thieves reached it, the woman turned around and called to the Indians, ‘Now you know who stole your trout. Whenever you want calmer weather, give us some tobacco, for this is our home.’ The boat and its occupants then entered the crag and disappeared; but the Indians still offer tobacco to these Memegwesi whenever they pass their home.”
This same folkloric motif, in which bereaved fishermen chase a canoe of little people into the rock of a cliff, also appears in the traditions of the Plains Cree, one iteration having been recorded by American anthropologist Alanson Buck Skinner in a 1916 article for The Journal of American Folk-Lore, which this author reproduced in a previous piece.
Curiously, the more general notion that mysterious ‘little people’ live inside rocks – an almost universal theme in Ojibwa and Cree tradition – is also present in Icelandic tales of the huldufolk, or ‘hidden people,’ whom legend says abide within the volcanic basalt that blankets the Land of Fire and Ice.
The Little Wild Indians
As mentioned, Diamond Jenness’s Parry Island informants believed that more than one type of ‘little person’ dwelled in the Ontario wilderness. In addition to the memegwesi, the Parry Island Ojibwa believed in the existence of diminutive entities called bagudzinishinabe, or ‘Little Wild Indians,” which share many elements in common with the fairies of Newfoundland folklore, and in a kindred spirit for which the natives did not have a name.
The nameless manidos used red foxes as their hunting dogs, and imprints of their tiny feet can sometimes be found on rocks, impressed into the hard surface in the prehistoric past.
“The ‘Little Wild Indians,’ Jenness wrote, “are dwarfs that do no harm, but play innumerable pranks on human beings. Though small, no larger in fact than a little child, they are immensely strong. Sometimes they shake the poles of a wigwam, or throw pebbles on its roof; or they steal a knife from a man’s side and hide it in his lodge, so that later he wonders how it came there. Often an Indian will eat and eat and still feel unsatisfied; he wonders how he can eat so much and still be hungry, for the dwarfs, unseen, are stealing the food from his dish. Occasionally, you hear the reports of their guns, but cannot see either the dwarfs or their tracks. Yet Pegahmagabow once saw their tracks, like those of a tiny baby, on a muddy road on Parry Island. Certain dwarfs haunt a crevasse in a rock on French River, where they sometimes make themselves visible; if you throw them some food, they disappear.
“The ‘Little Wild Indians are the Brownies of Parry Island mythology, except that the adults believe in their existence no less than the children.”
Nim-Mah-Kie
Another Ontario ‘little people’ story appears in the writings of Colonel George E. Laidlaw, a Canadian Army cavalry officer and amateur archaeologist who fought in the Northwest Rebellion and the Boer War; not to be confused with his father, an accomplished Scots-Canadian railwayman of the same name. In his 1915 book Ojibwa Myths and Tales, Laidlaw included an old Ojibwa story about diminutive beings called Nim-mah-kie.
“Once, a long time ago,” he wrote, “before the white man came to Canada, an Indian struck out through the bush to hunt. It came on a storm and he took a line for camp, which was by a little lake away up north. It came on worse, and the Indian crawled under a projecting pine tree. He saw the lighting strike several trees, and looking very closely at one tree that was struck, he saw a little man (about two feet high), standing by one side of the tree, and looking again at the tree he saw another little man standing at the other side of the struck tree. Both these men were fine little fellows, all black and shining, and are called Nim-Mah-Kie (Thunder). They climbed up in the air like they were climbing ladders, and disappeared. After they went up more lightning came down. These little men set the lighting at the trees and make the thunder…”
Interestingly, Laidlaw’s description of the Nim-Mah-Kie having black complexions evokes the testimony of a Stoney hunter and medicine man named Hector Crawler, who claimed to have encountered ‘little people’ while hunting in the Rocky Mountains sometime in the late 1800s. According to Banff-based entrepreneur Norman Luxton, whose words were recorded by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau in his 1960 book Indian Days on the Western Prairies, “a certain time when he was in the mountains, when alone, [Crawler] 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.”
The Little People of Doghead Mountain
Our last Ontario story is taken from a 2023 article for the North Ontario Travel website, written by a student named Josie Cormier. Josie is a member of the Red Rock Indian Band, located on Nipigon Bay at the northern end of Lake Superior. According to Josie’s grandmother, Doghead Mountain, located across the bay from the reserve, was traditionally called Memegwesiwijiw, or ‘Mountain of the Little People.’
According to Josie’s grandmother, Doghead’s stunted inhabitants lived in the roots of the mountain, and delighted in playing tricks on those who trespassed on their haunts. “When I asked her about what kind of tricks they play,” Josie wrote, “she said they love to do things like tip your water over if you leave it out on the ground open and unattended. Then she told me about someone she knew who had a trap line over there, and whenever they trapped something, the little people would let it go!”
Sources
Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway (1965), by Norval Morrisseau
Ojibwa Myths and Legends (1962), by Sister Bernard Coleman, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich
Ojibwa Myths and Tales (1915), by Colonel George E. Laidlaw
Indian Days on the Western Prairies (1960), by Marius Barbeau
Some Legends and Myths of the Nipissing Tribal Indians (Summer 2000), by Wayne M. Couchie, Introduction and Computer Type Up by Daniel M. Stevens
“Plains Cree Tales,” by Alanson Skinner in the July-September 1916 issue of The Journal of American Folk-Lore
“Myths and Folk-lore of the Timiskaming Algonquin and Timagami Ojibwa,” by F.G. Speck in Memoir 71 of the Canada Department of Mines Geological Survey (1915)
“The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life,” by Diamond Jenness in Bulletin No. 78 of the Canada Department of Mines (1935)
https://northernontario.travel/superior-country/anishinaabe-legends-northern-ontario-indigenous-lore
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