Mannegishi

The man went down to his net before light, because for two mornings the net had come up empty and he had begun to suspect that the fish were not the problem. The river was flat and cold. He could hear it working at the stones. In the grey he made out a canoe sitting over his net, low in the water, and two figures in it, and when he came close they simply sat down and would not look at him. The canoe, he saw, was stone. One of the figures spoke to the other and told it to look up, and it did, and the man saw a flat face covered in hair and the eyes inside the hair, and then the canoe turned and the two of them paddled straight at a cliff and went into it. That is the story Edward Nemegus of Waskaganish told an anthropologist in 1938, and it is more or less the story his grandfather told him, and it ends with a line that is doing real work: and that is the reason we know the Memegwecios now, when they look like that.

They have been on the record for a very long time. Around 1680 a Jesuit compiling a Montagnais dictionary wrote them down as génies des rochers, qui sont à l’eau, the spirits of the rocks who are in the water, and in 1865 the Anglican missionary Edwin Watkins put nearly the same words into his Cree dictionary: a spirit dwelling in the water or on the rocks. The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary still carries the word, memegwesi, plural memegwesiwag, and defines it in six flat syllables that contain most of what anyone needs to know. A hairy-faced bank-dwelling dwarf spirit. Three centuries of independent observers, working in different languages across half a continent, and they all describe the same small thing living in the same crack in the same rock.

What they do not agree on is its face. Frank Speck collected a version at Essipit on the north shore of the St. Lawrence sometime between 1915 and 1921, and there they were called memekwe’zu, which his informants glossed as narrow face. Their faces, he was told, are very narrow, almost like a knife. They are seldom seen because they are afraid of people, and when they are seen it is usually towards dark, and they hang their heads as though ashamed of their curiously shaped faces. Further west, at Pukatawagan in northern Manitoba, elders described the mîmîkwîsiwak to a researcher in 2003 as having faces like a fish, with no noses, shiny, glistening the way a fish glistens. The James Bay accounts make them hairy. The Menominee say no nose. The Innu say a blade. Pick a river and you get a different face, and every version of the creature is embarrassed about the one it has.

The canoes are stone and this is not a metaphor. Speck’s informants watched a group of them meet Montagnais travellers on the water; when they caught sight of people, they drove their canoe directly into a high square ledge of rock and vanished into it, and then, from inside the rock, they threw their paddles back out at the Indians and could be heard laughing. That laugh is the whole character of the thing. They are not dangerous. They are not, in any serious sense, kind. They are a small nuisance with an excellent sense of humour and a door in a cliff.

They steal. In the Cree country the complaint is always the same and always about fish: nets emptied, nets fouled, catches gone. The Pukatawagan elders said flatly that the mîmîkwîsiwak move about on the water in tiny canoes, rob people’s fish nets, and live in the cracks of rocks by the water. Robert Brightman and Jennifer Brown recorded a man named Sam Moostos from Fort à la Corne who saw one standing in the water of the North Saskatchewan River and shouted with fright; it ducked under, and the ripples stayed. They are said to live in the caves near Nistowiak Falls, at the north end of Lac la Ronge where the water goes into the Churchill. Enough people have gone up there to look at them that the trip is practically an errand.

Against that, they are also craftsmen, and this is where they stop being merely comic. Eleanor Brass, writing down Cree tales, said the little people were the makers of arrowheads and flint knives and stone hammer heads, which they traded to the Cree for buffalo meat, hides and porcupine quills, things they needed and could not get for themselves. And they are the painters. Along the cliffs of the Canadian Shield, from Lake Mazinaw to the Manitoba border, there are red ochre figures on the rock, hundreds of years old, and the Anishinaabe and Cree explanation for a good many of them is that the maymaygwayshi put them there. Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth Kidd spent years canoeing to those sites and recording what was on them, and at one of them found two or three small figures sitting in a canoe, arms bent at the waist, painted on the stone. The Cree elder Albert Lightning put it better than any of the ethnographers: some say it was the task of the little people to record history, and that their writings can be seen on rocks in the wilderness, yet no one can read them anymore.

Their own song survives, which is more than most spirits manage. In 1927 a man named W. McLeod sang it to John Cooper at Moose Factory, and it is three lines long. My stone dwelling. That which touches the sky. I am covering it. It is a song about roofing a house, sung by a creature whose house is a cliff.

Their powers are exactly the powers of a thing that belongs to rock and water and to neither the way a person does. They go through stone. They go under water. They are effectively unseeable unless they choose otherwise, and in some Ojibwe accounts they can only be seen by children and by medicine people at all. They know the river bottom better than any fisherman and they help fishermen who ask properly, with tobacco left on the bank, and hinder those who do not, blowing canoes astray and taking gear. Their weakness is one weakness and it runs through every account: they cannot stand being looked at. They flee towards dark. They hide their faces in their hands, or under hair, or by hanging their heads, or by lying down flat in the bottom of a stone canoe. A creature that can walk through a granite ledge is defeated, every single time, by eye contact.

Now the awkward part. Search the name Mannegishi in English and what comes back is not any of this. What comes back is a three-to-four-foot hairless humanoid with grey rubbery skin, six fingers on each hand, a huge head, no nose and no mouth, enormous eyes that glow in the dark, no lungs or gills because it absorbs oxygen through its skin, telepathic communication, and a favourite pastime of crawling out of the rapids to capsize canoes and drown the people in them. Every element of that description is a modern accretion. None of it appears in Silvy, Watkins, Speck, Cooper, Flannery, Brass, Brightman, Dewdney or the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary. It traces to an unsourced English Wikipedia stub which Wikipedia’s own editors flagged for lacking citations and for questionable notability, and which sits in a web of links to the Dover Demon and the Flatwoods Monster. It is a grey alien wearing a Cree word, and it has been copied onto several hundred websites, and it is now more famous than the creature it replaced. The mêmêkwêsiw of the record does not drown anyone. It steals your fish, refuses to show you its face, paddles a rock into a rock, and laughs at you from inside the cliff.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Mannegishi?

Mannegishi is one English spelling of the Cree word mêmêkwêsiw, a small rock-and-water spirit found across Cree, Innu, Ojibwe, Algonquin, Menominee and Métis tradition. They are child-sized beings who live in the cracks of cliffs along rivers, travel in canoes made of stone, and can pass through solid rock. They are best known for robbing fish nets and for painting the red ochre pictographs found on the rock faces of the Canadian Shield.

Do Mannegishi really have six fingers and no mouth?

No. The widely circulated description of the Mannegishi as a grey, hairless, six-fingered humanoid with no nose or mouth, glowing eyes and telepathy does not appear in any ethnographic source. It comes from an unsourced Wikipedia stub, flagged by Wikipedia’s own editors for lacking citations, and has since been copied across hundreds of websites. The actual sources, going back to a Jesuit dictionary of about 1680, describe a child-sized, often hairy being that hides its face.

What do Mannegishi do to humans?

They steal fish from nets, blow canoes off course, and take small objects, but they are not killers. Cree and Métis accounts describe them as harmless and friendly to people who treat them with respect, and offerings of tobacco are left for them at the rocks where they are known to live. Some accounts say they traded finely made arrowheads and flint knives to people in exchange for meat and hides.

Where do Mannegishi live?

They live inside rock, in the cracks and caves of cliffs along rivers and lakeshores. Specific places are named for them, including the caves near Nistowiak Falls at the north end of Lac la Ronge in Saskatchewan. When pursued, they paddle their stone canoes straight into a rock face and disappear through it.

Did the Mannegishi make the rock paintings?

That is the traditional explanation for many of the red ochre pictographs along the waterways of the Canadian Shield. Cree, Anishinaabe and Métis accounts credit the little people with making them, and the Cree elder Albert Lightning described it as their task to record history, adding that no one can read those writings anymore. Some pictograph sites recorded by Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth Kidd depict small figures sitting in a canoe.

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