Kee-wakw

The Passamaquoddy were camped at the foot of Grand Lake Stream, spearing salmon by torchlight the way they did every spring after the sugaring, when the noise started. It came from the direction of the swamp, an unearthly shrieking, and it was travelling fast. By sundown it was less than a mile off. The women, the children and the old people were put into the canoes. The men cut crosses into the bark of the trees that stood between the camp and the sound, and cut crosses into their bullets, and the dogs barked until midnight. In the morning the men walked out to the swamp and found nothing at all except tracks, and the tracks were human. Louis Mitchell, who told this story around 1900, gave it a flat ending that is somehow worse than any monster would have been. That, he said, was the only Kewagh that ever visited Passamaquoddy.

The creature he named is the kiwahq, the forest giant of the Wabanaki peoples of Maine and the Maritimes, a word the Penobscot say as kiwakwe and which reached English lists of Abenaki monsters in the hyphenated spelling Kee-wakw. The plural is kiwahqiyik, and the plural matters, because these are not one named monster but a kind, and every one of them used to be somebody.

The body is a problem for anyone who wants a tidy picture. The old accounts agree on scale rather than anatomy. Mitchell told the linguist Albert Gatschet that the kiwahqiyik were thought to be tree-high, and that they grew higher when they got angry. Both the males and the females smeared themselves with balsam fir pitch and then rolled on the ground, so that moss and dead leaves and small sticks stuck fast all over them, and hunters said they had often seen this. Whatever a kiwahq looked like underneath, what walked out of the spruce was a moving piece of the forest floor, sticky with resin, shedding needles, smelling of fir. The Penobscot storyteller Louisa Franceway told the collector Abby Alger in the 1890s that they left footprints three or four times the size of a man’s, and that they could make themselves much smaller than their natural size whenever they wanted to. A giant that can pass for a guest is a far more useful monster than one that cannot fit through the door.

Inside the chest there is no heart. There is ice, and the ice has a shape. The Passamaquoddy account Charles Leland printed in 1884 is precise about it: the piece of ice is like a little human figure, with hands, feet, head and every member perfect, and the strength of the giant depends on how big that piece is. Mitchell put the same thing more bluntly for a local historian in Grand Lake Stream. The more ice a Kewagh has, the more powerful and wicked he is. Warmth is therefore not a comfort to these creatures but a threat, which is why the ones people met were always heading north, into the country where it is winter most of the year. One kiwahq who walked up to two hunters at a lakeshore turned down their offer of food and explained that he had to keep going, because it was too warm here.

Nobody is born a kiwahq. The origin the Passamaquoddy gave is a professional one: when a great m’teoulin, a shaman, is beaten in a contest by other shamans, they may kill him or they may turn him into a kiwahq, and he goes on fighting from inside his new body. A captured victim can also be made into one. Leland closes his account with a Passamaquoddy or Maliseet man who was recognised by a hunting party after his change, wearing only strips of clothing, who told them that this country was too warm for him and that he was going to a colder one. The female kiwahq, both Mitchell and Leland insist, is stronger than the male.

The best-known story of one is a story of losing to Kuloskap. At Saco, in what is now Maine, there lived an old one-eyed man with two sons and a daughter, and all of them were great wizards and all of them were Kiwa’kws who ate people. Kuloskap came into the wigwam wearing the old man’s own face, and the family set about testing him. They brought in a whale’s jawbone, and the strongest of them could only bend it, and Kuloskap snapped it with his thumb like a pipe stem. They filled a great pipe with tobacco no ordinary man could smoke, and he burned it out in a single draw. They closed the wigwam and tried to smother him in smoke, and he sat there puffing as though he were on a mountaintop. Then they took him out to play ball by the bend of the river, and the ball was a living skull that snapped at his heels, and would have taken the foot off a lesser man. He laughed at that, went to a tree, broke off a bough and made from it a skull more hideous than theirs. The wizards ran from it the way rabbits run from a lynx. Kuloskap stamped, and the water came foaming down out of the mountains until the whole earth rang, and he sang the song that changes shape, and the ice-hearted family went into the flood as fish as long as men and out to the deep sea, where they are still.

What a kiwahq can do follows from what it is. Strength and height scale with the ice it carries, so a large one uproots trees and fights with them. It outruns any animal in the woods, swims broad water with a man on its back, and screams in a way that makes people who have never heard it before load their families into canoes without being told to. What it cannot do follows just as directly. The ice that gives it power also melts, and so it must keep to the cold, and it can be purged. In the Passamaquoddy story a woman gives her monstrous house-guest a medicine that makes him vomit, and she picks up the little man of ice from the floor and puts it into the fire, and he cries out that she is killing him, and he is very nearly cured. Courtesy works on them too, which is the strangest of their weaknesses. Call a kiwahq father and offer him a seat by the fire, and he may hunt moose and bear for you all winter and then die fighting a bigger one to keep you alive. That is what Franceway said happened to her parents. The giant told them to run, and gave his reason plainly enough: you have been good to me, and I wish to save you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Kee-wakw?

A Kee-wakw, known in the living Passamaquoddy and Maliseet language as a kiwahq, is a cannibal forest giant of Abenaki and wider Wabanaki tradition. It stands as tall as the trees, grows taller when angry, and carries a piece of ice in place of a heart. The plural is kiwahqiyik, because the kiwahq is a kind of being rather than a single named monster.

How does someone become a Kee-wakw?

Nobody is born one. The Passamaquoddy accounts say that a great shaman, a m’teoulin, who is defeated in a contest by other shamans can be turned into a kiwahq, and that a captured victim can be transformed as well. One nineteenth-century account describes a man recognised by hunters after his change, dressed in strips of clothing, who told them the country was too warm for him and that he was going north.

Why does the Kee-wakw have a heart of ice?

The ice is the source of the giant’s power. Passamaquoddy sources describe it as a lump shaped like a little human figure, complete with hands, feet and head, and they say the bigger the ice, the stronger and more wicked the giant. It is also the giant’s weakness, since warmth threatens to melt it, which is why a kiwahq is always travelling north into colder country.

How can a Kee-wakw be stopped?

Three ways appear in the stories. A medicine can be given that makes the giant vomit up its icy heart, which is then burned in the fire, curing or taming it. Hospitality also works, and families who called the monster father and fed it were spared. In the Passamaquoddy tale of Kuloskap and the Ice-Giants, the culture hero simply out-matches a whole family of them and turns them into fish.

Is the Kee-wakw the same as the Chenoo or the Wendigo?

They are closely related and often confused. Charles Leland recorded in 1884 that what the Mi’kmaq call a Chenoo is known to the Passamaquoddy as a Kewahqu’, and the ice-hearted cannibal giant belongs to a wider northern pattern that includes the Algonquian Wendigo. The details differ by community, and the kiwahq of the Wabanaki languages is specifically a forest giant, a walker in the woods.

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Chenoo, A-senee-ki-wakw, Gluskabe, Pamola, Tabaldak, Azeban, Aglebemu, Mateguas, Chibaiskweda, Wendigo, Atshen, Dzunukwa, Baykok