Sisiutl

Also Known As: Kwak’wala Sisiyutł, also written Sisiyutl and Sisiwid; the double-headed serpent of the Kwakwaka’wakw
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It kills anyone who sees or touches it, yet a drop of its blood turns a warrior’s skin to armour and a belt cut from its hide grants superhuman strength.
Role in Mythos: One of the most powerful beings in Kwakwaka’wakw tradition, held as an inherited crest and a supernatural treasure by the families entitled to it.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people who see it die, and the right to display it belongs only to particular families and is transferred through ceremony. Those who hold that right carve and paint it on house fronts, poles, canoes and ceremonial gear, where it works as protection.

The plank was nearly six metres long and it had been sitting in Chicago since 1893. Carved and painted cedar, wide enough to span the front of a big house, it carried a body that ran the whole width of the wall: a serpent head at one end, a serpent head at the other, both facing away, and between them a human face looking straight out at whoever approached the door. For most of a century almost nobody who saw it knew what they were looking at. In 2020 it went home to Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island off northern Vancouver Island, where people had once walked under it every day.

That is the ordinary condition of the Sisiutl. It is a creature best known from the surfaces it is painted on.

The design is exact and it is meant to be. Two serpent heads extend in opposite directions from a human-like face at the centre. Curved horns rise from each snake head, and two more from the central one. Red tongues, often absurdly long, hang from both mouths. Some versions add a pair of hands flanking the central face. Fold the whole thing down its middle and the halves match, which is the point: Kwakwaka’wakw artists teach the creature partly as a lesson in balance, and its double head is the clearest statement of that idea anyone on the coast ever made in paint.

The being behind the design is far less companionable than the symmetry suggests. To see a Sisiutl is to die. To touch one is to die. It leaves a trail of slime behind it in the shallows, and to walk in that trail is to be finished as surely as if you had met the animal itself. Its skin cannot be pierced. It changes size when it wants to. It changes shape too, into a salmon, or into a canoe that carries its owner where he asks to go and expects to be fed for the service.

And then, from the same body, the opposite. A single drop of Sisiutl blood turns a warrior’s skin to armour. A belt cut from its hide lets the wearer do things no man should be able to do. The creature that annihilates the unprepared arms the prepared, and the difference between those two people is not courage but standing: whether you have the right to approach it at all. Franz Boas’s Kwakwaka’wakw material makes it the assistant of Winalagilis, the war spirit, and warriors who could harness it were held to be untouchable. It could still be killed, but only by a weapon smeared with blood drawn from the attacker’s own tongue, which is the sort of condition that tells you how seriously the thing was taken.

It has no origin story. This is unusual and it was noticed early. Roderick Paterson, whose 1975 master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia remains the fullest study of the figure, pointed out that Sisiutl turns up in a great many Kwakiutl myths as an established supernatural with a full set of attributes, and in none of them as something that was ever born or made. It simply is. Paterson read that absence as evidence of borrowing, arguing that the double-headed serpent came to the Kwakwaka’wakw from the northern nations, where relatives of it appear among the Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida, Nuxalk and Nuu-chah-nulth. The Tlingit version, the woodworm or grubworm, drops the serpent heads and keeps an appetite that cannot be satisfied.

The human face in the middle is usually understood as Baxbakwalanuksiwe, the cannibal spirit at the heart of the Kwakwaka’wakw winter ceremonial, though other supernatural beings sometimes occupy the same position. In the northern grubworm variant it belongs to the princess who nursed the worm and paid for it.

Nobody could simply take the crest. The right to display Sisiutl belonged to specific families, and Bill Cranmer, board chair of the U’mista Cultural Centre at Alert Bay, has described it plainly as a very special part of Kwakwaka’wakw ceremony, a thing that meant death or good fortune depending entirely on how you came to it. It could be held as a dłuǥwe’, a supernatural treasure. It went on house fronts, on totem poles, on canoe hulls, on masks that opened and shut on hinges of leather and iron nails, one of which sits in the Smithsonian’s collections, sixty-six centimetres of carved and painted wood taken from Vancouver Island sometime between 1880 and 1920.

The plank that went to Chicago left during the potlatch ban, when Canadian law made the ceremonies that gave the crest its meaning illegal. It was bought, not stolen, by George Hunt, the Kwakwaka’wakw ethnographer working for Boas after the World’s Columbian Exposition. Most of what outsiders know about Sisiutl passes through those two men.

The strangest chapter is recent. In 1971 a fishing boat called the Phyllis Cormack stopped at Alert Bay on its way to protest American nuclear testing, and the crew were fed, honoured in the big house and given a blue cloth bearing a Sisiutl crest. Within four years the young organisation those men founded had redrawn the crest, wrapped it around its own logo and painted it on a sail. Greenpeace flew it for forty years while telling the world it depicted two whales, an infinite cycle of nature. They thought it was whales. In 2015 the organisation went back to Alert Bay, apologised at a potlatch hosted by the Willie family, and unveiled a corrected crest drawn by the Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick, on written condition that it never be altered again.

The limits of the creature are the limits of the arrangement around it. Its power is real and it is conditional. Approach it without the right and the slime trail is enough to kill you; approach it with the right and it will stand between you and everything else in the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sisiutl?

The Sisiutl is a double-headed serpent from the traditions of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. It has a serpent head at each end of a snake-like body and a human-like face at the centre, all three horned. It is one of the most powerful beings in Kwakwaka’wakw tradition and appears constantly in carved and painted art.

What happens if you see a Sisiutl?

Seeing or touching a Sisiutl means death for an ordinary person, and even walking in the trail of slime it leaves behind is fatal. The exception is the warrior with the standing to approach it, for whom a drop of its blood turns the skin to armour and a belt of its hide grants superhuman strength.

Can the Sisiutl be killed?

Yes, but with difficulty, because its skin cannot be pierced by ordinary weapons. Kwakwaka’wakw accounts hold that it can be killed by a weapon smeared with blood drawn from the attacker’s own tongue.

Why is the Sisiutl on house fronts and totem poles?

The Sisiutl is an inherited family crest, and the families entitled to it display it on big house fronts, poles, canoes, masks and ceremonial regalia, where it acts as protection. The right to show it is owned and transferred through ceremony rather than being available to anyone who admires the design.

Did Greenpeace use the Sisiutl as its logo?

Greenpeace altered a Sisiutl crest given to its founders at Alert Bay in 1971 and used the hybrid image for decades, describing it inaccurately as two whales. In 2015 the organisation apologised at a Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch and adopted a corrected crest designed by the artist Beau Dick.