Since at least Classical Antiquity, owls have enjoyed a place of special significance in various cultures throughout the world. To the Ancient Greeks, these kings of the forest canopy represented knowledge and discernment, the ‘little owl’ being a symbol of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The Ancient Hebrews associated the screech owl with the demon Lilith, a mysterious figure of Mesopotamian mythology. In Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the so-called “bird of night” portended the assassination of the Roman dictator around whom the play revolves, “hooting and shrieking” in the Forum Romanum in the middle of the day. And for over a century, the image of these haunting, head-turning predators has served some sort of esoteric function for members of America’s most influential clandestine organizations, appearing as a tiny embellishment on the Federal Reserve’s one dollar bill, as a huge stone statue in the Bohemian Club’s infamous Grove, and in the Central Intelligence Agency’s very first Instagram post.
The First Nations of Western Canada were not immune to the allure of these nocturnal birds of prey, featuring them heavily in their legends and folktales. One old story involving a monstrous owl appears in Canadian folklorist James R. Steven’s 1995 book Sacred Legends, a compilation of traditional Oji-Cree stories which Stevens learned from elders of the Sandy Lake First Nation, a remote community in northwestern Ontario. The protagonist of this story is Guy-an-way, whom the book’s glossary defines as “a mythical god, from another world, who came to the earth to destroy cannibalistic creatures.” Another story in the book elaborates on this character’s nature, describing him as “a strange man descended from another world… [who was] tall, light-skinned, and wore garments made of cloth that [the Indians] had never seen before.”
In this particular story, called ‘Guy-An-Way and the Cannibalistic Woman,’ the alien protagonist decided to investigate a succession of mysterious disappearances which plagued a certain Indian village. His investigation brought him to the strange abode of a young woman, which bore the appearance of a beaver lodge hidden among the tall pines. While spying on this house from his hiding place in the trees, Guy-an-way saw its young female inmate beguile a passing traveler into joining her for dinner. The traveler failed to emerge from the lodge, leading Way-an-way to suspect that his hostess had eaten him. He prayed and fasted, through which process he determined that the young woman was indeed a cannibal.
“Guy-an-way began to change,” Stevens wrote. “His arms became great wings and his ears grew feathers and his feet changed into talons. He looked like a great owl. Off he flew toward the beaver hutch.”
In his owl disguise, Guy-an-way managed to make his way unannounced into the cannibal woman’s home, fooling magic talking furs which hung from the walls which informed the woman of all comers and goers. He threw the woman to the ground, breaking her neck and paralyzing her, saying, “You will live the rest of your days in hunger and pain for the evil you have committed.”
West of Sandy Lake and the rocky forests of the Canadian Shield, beyond Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba and the Manitoba Parkland, on the prairies of what are now Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Plains Indians had their own owl stories. To the Blackfoot of southern Alberta, owl’s ghostly hoots were the cries of lost souls who had yet to find their way to Saskatchewan’s Great Sandhills, the land of the dead. The late Albertan historian Hugh Dempsey, the former Chief Curator of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and an honorary chief of the Blood Blackfoot Nation, alluded to this belief in his 2003 book The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories. In his retelling of ‘Heavy Collar and the Ghost Woman,’ a classic Blackfoot ghost story which we have explored in an earlier piece, Dempsey wrote, “the owl was the messenger of death, and ghosts sometimes used its cry as they wandered through the night.”
West of Blackfoot territory, along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, lies the traditional territory of the Stoney Indians, a collection of three bands whose storytellers still speak of a monstrous owl which legend says haunts the mountains. According to journalist Jordan Small in his Halloween 2021 article for the news site Rocky Mountain Outlook, this ghastly shape-shifting entity is called the Bah-tha, or “Howler,” and can sometime be heard shrieking at night in the woods beyond Chiniki Lake. Quoting filmmaker Jarret Two-Young-Men, a Bearspaw Stoney native from Morley, Alberta, Small wrote, “It’s something a lot of people are afraid to talk about, even Elders, and especially at night.”
Although the Howler is believed to have the ability to assume a variety of different forms, it most often appears to hapless witnesses as a large owl with the head of a man and the legs of a horse. “With nasty yellow eyes glowing with malevolence,” Small wrote, “the Bah-tha has been said to stalk and hide out in trees at a vantage point like a massive bird of prey waiting to swoop down on unsuspecting victims with razor sharp talons ready to shred flesh. If seen, the Bah-tha’s unnatural powers are said to cause paralysis.” Some Stoney storytellers believe that the Howler is the spirit of a Stoney Indian who became lost in the woods near Chiniki Lake, transformed into something terrifying and unnatural by the sinister power which some say pervades the area.
Two-Young-Men claimed to have had a run-in with the Howler himself while living alone in a house near Chiniki Lake. One night, after coming home from powwow practice, the filmmaker heard coyotes howling outside, and opened his window to let in the wild music. About ten minutes later, the coyotes abruptly stopped their yipping. “Suddenly it just went silent,” the filmmaker told Small. “I remember it being silent. So I peeked out my window and it was dead silent and then I heard the screaming. I live next door to my dad and I thought that someone was screaming or playing [around] and I started looking around at my dad’s house and then I heard the screaming coming toward my house.
“It was terrifying. It was a scream that I had never heard before, like a scream of an owl or something. It was the most terrifying screaming I had ever heard… like a hound from hell, man. I can’t describe it… So I got spooked. I shut the window and I grabbed my dog and just huddled under the window and just turned all the lights off, like, I do not want to see what that thing is at all. In my head I was imagining this woman with black eyes and screaming around everywhere.”
South of Stoney Territory is the ancestral homeland of the Kootenay Indians, a unique tribe whose members, in the old days, left their mountain homes once a year, heading out onto the easterly prairies to look for buffalo on the hunting grounds of the Blackfoot. One of the best written sources on Kootenay oral tradition is the 1918 book Kutenai Tales, written by the famous German-American anthropologist Franz Boas. In his book, Boas included four slightly different versions of a traditional Kootenay story involving a monstrous owl, all of which appear to be variations of the Dzunukwa or “Basket Ogress” legend of Vancouver Island legend. Instead of an old child-eating woman, the antagonist of this story is an old male owl.
According to three of the four versions of the story, there was once a huge man-eating owl which kidnapped crying children and carried them away in a birch-bark basket. This creature’s predations were so incessant that soon, a particular Kootenay village was entirely bereft of its children.
Coyote, the Trickster figure of Kootenay mythology, concocted a plan by which to rescue the kidnapped children. Like the little ones who had gone before him, he began to cry. His bawling attracted the attention of the owl monster, who swooped down on him, threw him into his basket, and carried him back to his tent.
Inside, Coyote found the missing children who had disappeared from the village. Using tree sap, he gummed Owl’s eyes shut, rendering him blind, before throwing him onto his own fire. The Trickster tended the fire until the monster was reduced to ashes, whereupon he restored the children to their grieving parents.
The fourth owl story in Boas’s book is nearly identical to an old Chilliwack Indian Sasquatch story from the North Cascade Mountains – a story evoking the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale of Western Europe, which we explored in an earlier piece. It revolves around a little girl named Chipmunk and her grandmother and housemate, Frog.
According to this story, Chipmunk had a proclivity to explore the woods, much to her grandmother’s consternation. One day, she scampered into a particular stretch of forest that her grandmother had forbidden her to enter – unbeknownst to her, the domain of a monstrous child-eating Owl. This area was thick with partridge berries and rose hips, which Chipmunk happily commenced to pick. As she foraged, she was approached by Owl, who attempted to fool her, telling her that he had been instructed to bring her home by various family members, all of whom had actually died years earlier. Chipmunk, cognizant of the stranger’s sinister intentions, turned the tables on her would-be abductor, tricking him into covering his large and frightening eyes, to which she took objection. When Owl’s eyes were closed, Chipmunk made a desperate break for home.
The youngster reached her grandmother’s tent and told Frog about her frightening experience. Knowing that Owl would follow her tracks, Frog hid her granddaughter in a pot of rotten soup.
Sure enough, Owl trailed Chipmunk to her grandmother’s tent and asked the old woman for something to eat. Left with no other choice, Frog invited the monster to partake in the rotten soup. Owl discovered Chipmunk hiding inside and ate her.
Distraught by the sudden death of her granddaughter, Frog waited until Owl expelled the pellet containing Chipmunk’s bones. She collected her granddaughter’s pitiful remains and threw them into some water, which, through some mysterious process, allowed Chipmunk to come back to life.
West of the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia Mountains beyond lies British Columbia’s Interior Plateau. This arid land of grassy hills and ponderosa pine forests is the traditional homeland of the Interior Salish, a people composed of five major nations: the Shuswap, the Okanagan, the Nicola, the Thompson, and the Lillooet. Storytellers from each of these nations told tales about monstrous owls, one of which is clearly a variation of the aforementioned Kootenay story featuring Coyote and Owl.
Although every version of this story is a little different, most agree that Owl was an old monstrous predator which preyed on children. Depending on the storyteller, Owl could be either male or female. One day, Owl kidnapped a large bunch of children and carried them back to her camp, intending to eat them. She smeared pitch on their eyes in an effort to blindfold them, but the children, on the advice of the oldest and wisest among them- who, in some versions, is the Trickster Coyote – screwed their eyes shut tightly so that the tar wouldn’t be as effective. In preparation for her meal, Owl began to do the feast dance around her fire, working herself into a frenzy. Playing on her vanity, the oldest of the children praised her dancing and suggested that she dance closer to the fire so that the children could better see her. Owl did as suggested, whereupon the oldest children shoved her into the fire and held her there with sticks. As Owl burned to death, tiny objects – either fleas or lice which escaped from beneath her feathers, or sparks and ashes which issued from her smoldering corpse – flew into the air and became small animals, like mosquitoes, sandflies, or tiny birds.
Another owl story the Interior Salish share in common with the Kootenay is the tale of Owl and Chipmunk, which also has several different versions. In the Okanagan version of this story, Chipmunk hid from Owl in a clam shell, and was brought back to life when her grandmother replaced her heart, which Owl ripped out, with a half-ripe serviceberry.
In most Interior Salish iterations of this legend, Owl clawed at Chipmunk with her talons when the latter escaped her in the woods, tearing two strips off her back. As Okanagan storyteller Mourning Dove put it in her 1933 book Coyote Tales, “Owl-woman’s fingers clawed down Chipmunk’s back, ripping off long strips of the soft fur, but the little girl got away.” “This,” declared the prolific Scots-Canadian anthropologist James Teit, in his 1909 treatise on the Shuswap Indians, “is the reason the chipmunk at the present day has stripes extending along its back. These are the marks of the owl’s claws where it scratched it before the chipmunk made its escape.”
The Shuswap, the northernmost of the Interior Salish nations, believed that the hoots of an owl portend imminent death. Celebrated Canadian geologist Dr. George Mercer Dawson referred to this belief in his 1892 book, Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia, writing, “The owl is a bird somewhat dreaded, and is said to haunt camps where someone is dead, or in which are the relatives of someone who had died elsewhere, saying Too! Too! A-sum’-tshak’-is, ‘he is a long time dead.’ This is evidently a fancy based on the resemblance of the owl’s note to the words in question.” The Shuswap shared this superstition with the Lillooet far to the west, who, according to James Teit in his 1906 treatise on that nation, believed that “an owl to hoot night after night near a house or camp foretold the death of an inmate of the house or some relative of an inmate.”
The mythological explanation for this belief appears in James Teit’s 1909 treatise on the Shuswap, in the form of an owl legend unique to that people and their southwesterly Thompson neighbours, which shares some similarities with the basket-ogress-style owl tales above described.
“Owl,” Teit began in his retelling of this legend, “was a man possessed of mysterious powers, and a noted hunter. He lived by himself.” A long distance from Owl’s house was a Shuswap village, in which lived a woman and her young son. The boy cried constantly for no good reason, and so his mother left him in a dark corner of the house, telling him that Owl would come and take him away in his basket.
“After a time,” Teit wrote, “the people noticed that the boy had ceased crying, and thought he had fallen asleep. The mother went to look for him, but could not find him. Then the people took torches and searched for him, but in vain. He was not to be found. Owl had carried him away in his basket, the bottom of which was set with many awls, which were stuck in points up.”
Owl took the boy to his home. Instead of eating him, he decided to raise him as his son. “Every day,” Teit wrote, “he washed him in streams, and rubbed his body with fir-branches, so that the boy grew very fast and became wise. Owl gave him a bow and arrows, and taught him to shoot mice, the skins of which he stretched and dressed, leaving them in their drying-frames when they changed their camp on the following morning.”
At each successive camp the pair stopped at, Owl trained the boy to shoot ever larger game, graduating from mice to chipmunks to rabbits to deer, and finally to big game like caribou and bear.
While Owl was training his young protégé, the boy’s relatives were scouring the wilderness in search of him. They came upon Owl’s first camp, and correctly deduced that the mice skins drying in the frames were the work of their boy. “Thus they followed from one camp to another,” Teit wrote, “until they at last reached the place where the youth lived with Owl.”
Through some sort of precognition, both Owl and his adopted son learned of the relatives’ presence. The boy, who yearned to be reunited with his family, devised a clever plot by which he fooled the old bird of prey and returned to his people. When Owl caught up with the fleeing natives, the boy, having become more powerful than his master, transformed the magic monster into an ordinary owl, saying, “You shall only be a little wiser than the others, and able to give warning when people are about to die.”
Like the Thompson, the Shuswap have an old story in which Coyote, the trickster and transformer, while travelling aimlessly throughout the country, happened upon a cannibal. According to James Teit in his 1898 collection of Thompson Indian stories, the Shuswap sometimes identified this man-eater as a monstrous owl. Bedecked with a necklace of human fingernails and toenails, the monster went about loudly proclaiming his dietary inclinations to all he met. Eager to avoid a duel with the ghoul, Coyote attempted to intimidate him, expressing doubt as to his self-professed gastronomic proclivities and declaring that he himself was the only man-eater in that country. Outraged, the cannibal proposed that the two of them disgorge the contents of their stomachs to prove to each other that they were both consumers of human flesh. Coyote agreed to the proposal on the condition that they both keep their eyes closed while they vomited. The two travelers proceeded to vomit with their eyes closed. During this process, Coyote inconspicuously swapped some of his own vomit with that of his opponent, tricking the cannibal into believing that he was the greater man-eater.
South of Shuswap Territory is the fertile, wooded land of the Okanagan Indians. According to folklorists Nancy Perkins Wynecoop and N. Wynecloop Clark in their 1985 book In the Stream: An Indian Story, the Okanagan believed that an owl-like monster very much resembling the Howler of Stoney legend once haunted the forests of southern British Columbia. This creature was said to be half as tall as a trees, and to emit a horrible screech when agitated. Its head and neck resembled that of an owl. Its shoulders and arms were vaguely humanlike, and grotesque in their appearance. “The body,” the folklorists wrote, “resembled a bear while the legs, feet and hands were the shape of an eagle’s claw. The whole creature was covered with wool, scales, feathers and hair with a great mane of bristles that he raised and dropped as he chose.” Like other owl monsters of First Nations legend, this creature was said to carry a woven basket for the purpose of hauling children, deer, and other “tender meats of the land.”
West of the Interior Plateau, among the forested mountains, valleys, and inlets of southwestern British Columbia, lies the ancestral homeland of the Central Coast Salish, a collection of small tribes united by a common language. Like their Interior Salish cousins to the east, these people told stories about monstrous owls which carry off human beings. In his 1904 report on the traditions of the Chehalis and Scowlitz, two Coast Salish nations native to British Columbia’s Agassiz-Harrison Valley, British-American folklorist Charles Hill-Tout included a story about just such a creature, told to him by a Chehalis elder named Mary Anne.
According to this story, there was once a discontented little girl who constantly cried to have her own way. One night, during one of her crying sessions, a monstrous owl swooped down and her and carried her off to his nest in a tall tree. Mary Anne called this creature a “Slalakum owl,” Slalakum being a Halkomelem word denoting a strange creature with preternatural abilities. The owl kept the girl until she was grown, whereupon he took her to wife.
The girl often pined for her home from her treetop prison, and resolved to try to return there. One day, she prevailed upon her owl husband to allow her to climb to the bottom of the tree so that she could urinate. When Owl was not looking, she took off through the forest. In time, she reached her family’s village, and hid herself in the rafters of her father’s longhouse.
Owl tracked his wife back to her home and asked her family if she was hiding there. The family, who wanted nothing to do with the young woman on account of her incessant crying, gave her up to the monster, who took her back to his nest. There, the woman gave birth to the owl’s child, which tragically burned to death shortly thereafter in a fire set by the woman’s brother.
Native superstitions regarding owls can be found even further to the west, on Vancouver Island. According to anthropologist Barbara Lane in her 1953 study of native Northwest Coast religion, the Cowichan Indians who inhabited the southern end of the island believed that all owls, both large and small, were ghosts, and held the killing of them taboo. “If you killed one,” one of her informants explained, “you’d die very soon.” The Cowichan also believe that owls had the ability to speak human words, and sometimes said the following to natives, in the Cowichan tongue: “Not very long you’re going to cry.” It was believed that anyone who heard these words from an owl would soon lose a family member.
The Kwakiutl, or Kwakwaka’wakw, who once dominated Vancouver Island’s northeastern shores, had their own ideas about owls which echoes that of other Western Canadian tribes. In his 1932 essay on the beliefs of the Kwakiutl, the aforementioned anthropologist Franz Boas wrote, “The owl, go gogo, is believed to attack young children; therefore when parents carrying their children see or hear one of them, they will shout, ‘This child is getting gray on the side, my dear!’ The owls are children, and it is believed that these words will deceive them, so that they will believe that the children are old people… The screech owl is believed to be the soul of a deceased person. The Indians catch them, paint them red, and let them free, asking for long life.”
Far to the north, on the border of British Columbia and Canada’s Yukon Territory, lies the domain of the Kaska Indians, a Dene or Athabascan people. In a 1917 article on Kaska folklore, James Teit included a traditional Kaska story outlining the origin of the Owl Woman, a creature said to haunt the northern forests.
According to this disturbing tale, there was once a woman who married two brothers at the same time. The woman’s mother was an evil sorceress who coveted her sons-in-law. One day, the old woman convinced her daughter to climb a tall tree to secure some owl feathers for her. As she did so, the young woman began to grow feathers, and gradually transformed into a huge owl – the result of her mother’s black magic.
Her spell complete, the old mother proceeded to dress herself in her daughter’s clothes and, through application of the black arts, assumed the likeness of her daughter. Although she looked like a young woman, the imposter could not hide her frailty, which aroused the suspicions of her sons-in-law. The two brothers eventually uncovered the old woman’s wicked deed and promptly put an end to her existence.
The brothers then found their wife in a tree and begged her to return to them. “No,” she answered. “You have killed my mother, so I shall remain an owl.” Ever since, the Owl Woman has glided silently through the boreal forests, joining the timber wolves in their nightly laments with her mournful hoots, lamenting the mother and husbands she lost.
Believe it or not, tales of giant owls in the Canadian wilderness are not restricted to the campfire stories of First Nations legend. Readers of my 2020 book Mysteries of Canada: Volume II may recall the story of Kelly Chamandy, Canada’s last bear oil salesman – the son of a Syrian peddler who became known for the bear oil pomade he sold from his trading post in the Ontario wilderness. Mr. Chamandy was brought to my attention by my friend and fellow researcher, Kevin Gulh, who came across an article in the April 17th, 1951 issue of the Pittsburgh Press proclaiming that Mr. Chamandy had put up a $100 reward for anyone who could bring him the carcass of a giant bird of prey that had been harassing livestock in the wilderness of northern Ontario. Chamandy had a museum attached to his story, and apparently thought that the monster would make a nice addition to it. Farmers Ted Lind and Howard McDonald, who claimed to have seen the bird about 50 miles east of Timmins, Ontario, not far from the village of Ramore, described it as an avian colossus with huge talons, a hooked beak, jet black feathers, and the likeness of an owl. With a wing span of about 9 feet, this monster had snatched up fish and meat which the farmers had had strung up beyond the reach of wolves, leaving behind the tattered remains of the rope from which they had depended. Chamandy himself, apparently having interviewed other witnesses who preferred to remain anonymous, claimed that the bird had yellow eyes “the size of silver dollars” and was “large enough to carry off a small cow.”
A few days after publishing his offer, Kelly Chamandy upped the bounty to $150 on the condition that the giant owl be captured alive, fearing that his initial overture would prompt locals to “commit wholesale slaughter of the birds, shooting first and examining them afterwards.” To the best of this author’s knowledge, the fate of this monstrous owl remains a mystery.
The giant owl of Timmins, Ontario, eerily evokes an owlish monster said to haunt the Ozark Mountains of the American states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, which appears in cryptozoologist Mark A. Hall’s 2004 classic Thunderbirds: America’s Living Legends of Giant Birds. Drawing from American folklorist Vance Randolph’s 1951 book We Always Lie to Strangers, Hall quoted, “In many wild, isolated places one hears of enormous booger-owls with a wingspread of 10 or 12 feet, so bold as to carry off lambs, calves, dogs, even children.”
Hall dubbed this creature “Bighoot,” writing that it “appears to be a capable predator, active largely at night, and able to fit into the modern environment by a means of camouflage known for owls. There is a record of such a creature in American Indian folklore. It has a predecessor in the fossil record of birds, and there are hints that it is not unique to North America. This owl probably remains little known by being both rare and active almost exclusively at night.”
Hall went on to propose that Bighoot might be a surviving Ornimegalonyx oteroi, also known as the Cuban giant owl, a huge predator believed to be the largest owl that ever existed, supposed to have gone extinct about 8,000 years ago.
These giant man-eating owls vaguely evoke the Piasa Bird – a legendary monster of Cahokia Indian folklore. This creature appears in the journal of Father Joseph Marquette, a Catholic priest and missionary who, in the company of coureurs-des-bois, or independent French fur traders, under the command of Louis Jolliet, became the first white man to paddle the upper Mississippi River in 1672. On the course of their journey, the travellers stayed at a number of native villages, whose inhabitants all insisted on feeding them morsels of food by hand – a curious article of native Mississippi hospitality. Shortly thereafter, they came across a startling riverside pictograph overlooking the upper Mississippi depicting a bearded, horned, scaly, winged monster of native mythology, which appeared to mark the territory of the Cahokia Illinois Indians.
“While skirting some rocks,” Marquette wrote in French, “by which their height and length inspired awe, we came upon one of the two painted monsters which at first made us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not long rest their eyes. They are as large as a calf; they have horns on their heads like those of a deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a fish’s tail. Green, red, and black are the three colours composing the picture. Moreover, these two monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is their author; for good paints in France would find it difficult to paint so well, and, besides, they are so high up on the rock that it is difficult to reach that place conveniently to paint them.”
Guy-An-Way and the Cannibalistic Woman
Sacred Legends (1995), by James R. Stevens and Carl Ray
Owl Hoots as Ghostly Cries
The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories (2003), by Hugh Dempsey
The Howler
“Stoney Nakoda Legends: A Vile Demon, Mighty Protectors and Lingering Ghosts,” by Jordan Small in the October 31st, 2021 issue of RMOToday.com
Kootenay Legends
Kutenai Tales (1918), by Franz Boas
Legends of the Interior Salish
Coyote Tales (1933), by Mourning Dove
“The Shuswap,” by James Teit in Volume II, Part VII of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History (1909)
Shuswap Legends
Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia (1892), by Dr. George Mercer Dawson
“The Lillooet Indians,” by James Teit in Volume II, Part V of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History (1906)
“Traditions of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia” (1898), by James Teit in Volume VI of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society
“Mythology of the Thompson Indians,” by James Teit in Volume VIII, Part II of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History (1912)
“The Shuswap,” by James Teit in Volume II, Part VII of the Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History (1909)
Owl Monster of Okanagan Country
In the Stream: An Indian Story (1885), by Nancy Perkins Wynecoop and N. Wynecloop Clark
The Owl Husband
“Ethnological Report on the Steelis and Skcdot Aulits Tribes of the Halokmelem Division of the Salish of British Columbia,” by Charles Hill-Tout in Volume 34 (July-December 1904) of The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Vancouver Island Legends
A Compilation and Analytic Study of Some Aspects of Northwest Coast Religion, (1953), by Barbara Lane
“Current Beliefs of the Kwakiutl Indians,” by Franz Boas in Volume 45 (April-June 1932) of the Journal of American Folk-Lore
The Owl Woman of Kaska Legend
“Kaska Tales,” by James Teit, in Volume 30 (October-December 1917) of the Journal of American Folklore