Mishibizhiw

The water of Lake Superior can turn from glass to grey chaos in the space of a few breaths, and the oldest Anishinaabe answer for that violence had a name, a shape, and a temper. Down where the light gives out and the copper sleeps in the rock, something with the face of a lynx and the tail of a serpent shifts its weight, and the surface answers. A calm crossing becomes a wall of standing waves. A canoe that was riding easy is suddenly gone. The people of the Great Lakes did not think of this as bad luck. They thought of it as attention.

Mishibizhiw is the Great Lynx, the underwater panther, master of everything that swims and everything that lives in the cold beneath the lakes. The name in Ojibwe carries the sense of a great cat, and the being wears that shape only in part. It has the head and forepaws of a mountain lion, but the resemblance ends at the shoulders. Its back is armored in scales, ridged with a row of upright spines like the teeth of a saw, and this crest runs the length of a tail so long it can be looped around a struggling swimmer or slapped flat against the water to raise a storm. That tail, in many accounts, is copper, and the metal is the whole point. In others the creature carries horns, curved like a stag’s or a bison’s, adding a fourth animal to a body already stitched from cat, snake, and fish.

It keeps its lair, the stories agree, off Michipicoten Island in Lake Superior, and it guards the copper of that water as a jealous owner guards a vault. This was never an idle belief. The Lake Superior basin held some of the purest native copper on the continent, and the metal was sacred, a substance of power and medicine rather than of trade. To take it lightly was to steal from the panther. By the time European missionaries arrived, lifting copper from the region, and above all from the island, had become deeply taboo. A Jesuit named Claude Dablon recorded the consequence around 1670. A party of Ojibwe men landed on the island, gathered slabs of copper to carry home and heat their water, and pushed off again. As they paddled, a voice came up out of the lake behind them, huge and furious, the voice of the being whose treasure they had in the canoe. It told them they were carrying off the playthings of its children. One by one, the tellings say, the thieves sickened and died, and the last of them barely lived to pass on the warning.

Dablon was not the first to write it down. Three years earlier, at the mission on Chequamegon Bay in 1667, the Jesuit Claude Allouez recorded that the Ojibwe held Lake Superior itself in reverence, venerated a being whose name he set down as Missibizi, and treated the copper they found in the shallows as a gift from the powers living beneath the water. Two centuries after that, in 1855, the German traveller Johann Georg Kohl was shown a small piece of that copper by a leader at Fond du Lac, who kept it in his medicine bag. It was a hair from the mishibizhiw, Kohl was told, and it was the most powerful thing the man owned.

That warning shaped how people moved on the water for generations. Crossing the big lake, a traveler would set tobacco adrift on the surface, a small offering to the master below, in exchange for a smooth passage and a whole hull at the far shore. The gesture was not superstition tacked onto practical seamanship. It was the practical seamanship. The lake was a person, and you paid your respects to a person before asking it for anything. As late as the 1950s the Prairie Band Potawatomi were still holding ceremonies meant to keep the underwater panther content and the balance with the sky powers intact.

The clearest surviving portrait of the creature is not written at all. On a sheer rock face at Agawa, on the eastern shore of Lake Superior, the figure stands in red ochre low enough to the water that reaching it means edging along a narrow ledge above the deep. It has the horns, the arched spined back, the long tail. Most of the Agawa paintings are thought to date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and tradition attaches two names to them: Myeengun, the war leader whose fleet of canoes crossed the open lake under the panther’s protection, and Shingwaukonse, who is credited with the Mishibizhiw panel itself. The site was very nearly lost. Shingwaukonse drew the images from memory on birchbark for the ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft in the 1850s, Schoolcraft never went to see the rock for himself, and it took until 1958 for Selwyn Dewdney to follow those sketches along the shoreline and find it. The pigment has faded to a dull rust and is still unmistakable, a cat that is not a cat looking out over the water it rules.

To grasp why the panther matters, it has to be set against its enemy. Anishinaabe cosmology divides the powers of the world between the beings above and the beings below. The Thunderbirds command the upper air, the storm, the lightning that splits a tree; Mishibizhiw and the underwater manitous command the depths, the ice, the current that pulls a body down. The two are not good and evil. They are opposite and matched, and their eternal hostility is what keeps either from swallowing the world. The Thunderbirds hunt the panther and hurl lightning at the water to drive it down. The panther drags what it can into the dark. Between them, precariously, is the surface where people live and travel.

None of this stops at the Anishinaabe. Underwater panther is an English label, a convenience invented by outsiders and stretched over a whole family of beings who share a shape and a job without necessarily being the same person from one lake to the next. The Menominee set horned serpents in the first level below the earth, with a Great White Bear beneath them at the bottom of everything. The Ho-Chunk speak of Water Spirits, and lay the broken country of the Baraboo Hills to a war between those spirits and the thunderbirds. Illinois painters put a horned, long-tailed monster on the Mississippi bluffs, the figure that survives in mangled form as the Piasa. Centuries before any of it was written down, Mississippian craftsmen were cutting the same long-tailed, horned creature into shell and hammered copper.

The figure has proved unusually durable. Anishinaabe men carried twined and quilled bags with the panther worked into one panel and the thunderbird into the other, so that reaching in for a pipe meant putting a hand between the two halves of the world. In Wisconsin the same argument is laid out across the ground, long-tailed water spirit mounds raised in the same country as mounds shaped like birds. When traders at York Factory fitted muskets with brass side plates cast as European dragons, Anishinaabe buyers looked at the writhing long-tailed thing on the stock, recognised mishipizheu, and wanted them. In the 1960s Norval Morrisseau lifted the creature off the rock face and set it on canvas in heavy black outline, which is where most people meet it now.

Its powers all flow from that station. It rules the water absolutely: the waves, the whirlpools, the sudden squalls, the rotten spring ice that gives way underfoot. It is master of the serpents and every lesser creature of the lakes. It holds the copper, and through the copper a current of medicine and strength that a person brave and respectful enough might be granted rather than destroyed by. Its weaknesses are the mirror of all this. It is a creature of the underworld and cannot leave it for long without answering to the sky. The Thunderbirds are its equal and its predator, and a bolt of lightning is the one thing that reliably sends it fleeing to the bottom. Bound to its element, it is nearly untouchable in the deep and exposed the moment it climbs toward the light. The lake keeps its debts, and so does the thing that lives in it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mishibizhiw?

Mishibizhiw, also called Mishipeshu or the Great Lynx, is the underwater panther of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) tradition in the Great Lakes region. It is a powerful water manitou, the master of all creatures beneath the lakes and the guardian of the copper of Lake Superior. Far more than a monster, it is regarded as an other-than-human person with its own will and demands.

What does the underwater panther look like?

Mishibizhiw has the head and clawed paws of a large cat like a cougar, but its body is covered in scales and ridged with a crest of dagger-like spines running down its back and along an unusually long tail. That tail is often described as copper, and in many accounts the creature also bears curved horns like a deer or bison. The oldest surviving image, a red ochre pictograph at Agawa Rock on Lake Superior, shows exactly this horned, spine-backed form.

Where does Mishipeshu live?

Mishipeshu is said to make its home off Michipicoten Island in Lake Superior, deep in the cold water where the region’s native copper lies. From there it rules the whole lake and the beings within it. Because the copper was considered its guarded treasure, taking metal from the island was a serious taboo among the Ojibwe.

Why is the underwater panther the enemy of the Thunderbird?

In Anishinaabe cosmology the world is balanced between the powers above and the powers below. The Thunderbirds rule the sky, storms, and lightning, while Mishibizhiw rules the depths, the ice, and the drowning current, and the two are locked in permanent opposition. Their hostility is not a struggle of good against evil but a balance that keeps either force from overwhelming the world, and lightning striking the water is understood as the Thunderbird driving the panther down.

Was Mishibizhiw considered evil, and how did people protect themselves?

Mishibizhiw was dangerous rather than simply evil, capable of both drowning the careless and granting medicine and power to those who approached it correctly. Travelers crossing Lake Superior offered tobacco to the water to ensure a safe passage, and communities such as the Prairie Band Potawatomi held ceremonies as late as the 1950s to keep the being content. Respect, not defiance, was the traditional way to deal with the master of the water.

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