Thunderbird

On the shore of Lake Wanipigow in Manitoba there is a ring of boulders roughly six and a half metres across, hundreds of stones piled into a low doughnut with a hollow at its centre, each one heavy enough to make lifting it a two-handed job. When an archaeologist excavated the site he found pottery and stone points suggesting people had camped around it some fifteen hundred years ago, and he found no hearth, no floor, and no purpose he could name. An elder from the Hole River Reserve gave him the plainest answer on offer. The Thunderbird built it. What man has the power to lift those great stones?

Rings and pits like that one are scattered from Manitoba into Ontario, and they carry the same name wherever they turn up. Thunderbird nests: a term that walked out of Indigenous languages into archaeological reports without much resistance. The naming is not decorative. Across an enormous stretch of North America, from the Great Lakes to the Plains to the fog belt of the Pacific coast, the sky has an occupant, and the weather is what it does.

The mechanics are consistent enough to be striking. Among Algonquian speakers the thunder is the sound of its wings. The lightning is its eyes, opening. Iroquois accounts agree about the eyes. Anyone who has stood on a lakeshore in July while the light goes green and the air turns metallic will recognise the observation being made: something up there is moving, it is very large, and it is not indifferent to what lies underneath it.

There is no single portrait, because there is no single tradition. On the Northwest Coast the Thunderbird is a raptor of frank impossibility, big enough to take a whale out of the water and carry it inland, cut into cedar with a hooked beak, coiled horns, and a wingspan that runs the width of a house front. Among Algonquian peoples the image simplifies toward a shape rather than a likeness: wings spread flat, head turned to face the viewer, the whole figure collapsing into an X. One engraved Ojibwe disc made between 1250 and 1400 shows the X with no head at all and is still unmistakable. In Passamaquoddy accounts the thunders are people. A man carried up into their country found them living much as anyone lives, using bows, taking their wings off and putting them back on as the work required.

A hot afternoon over the Great Lakes ends the way it usually ends. The heat stacks up, the water goes flat and oily, and then the far shore vanishes behind a grey wall travelling faster than anything that size ought to travel. Hail comes down hard enough to strip the leaves off a stand of birch. That is the ordinary work, done ordinarily, and nobody in the story finds it remarkable.

Where they came from depends on who is telling it. In Ojibwe accounts Nanabozho made them, and made them for a job: to fight the beings of the water. They live in the four directions, arrive in spring with the rest of the migrating birds, and go south in autumn, when the season of the underwater powers turns dangerous again. Menominee tradition puts them on a mountain in the far west that floats, from which they govern rain and hail, carry messages for the Great Sun, and fight, constantly, the great horned snakes called Misikinubik, whose numbers would otherwise overrun the earth and devour everyone on it. The thunderbirds enjoy the fighting. That detail survives every retelling.

The enmity is the spine of the whole system. The upper world belongs to the thunderbirds; the lower world belongs to the underwater panther, Mishibizhiw, a great scaled cat with spines running down its back and tail, or to the horned serpent, depending on the country. Old Anishinaabe twined and quilled bags make the arrangement explicit by putting the panther on one face and the thunderbird on the other, so that the thing cannot be held without holding both.

On the coast the enemy is a whale. In Quileute tellings a monstrous whale was killing the other whales and starving the villages of meat and oil, and the Thunderbird, watching from its home in the mountains, came down over the water and drove its talons into the whale’s back. What followed was not a clean victory. The whale went down and took the bird with it, the ground shook, and the sea stood up and came inland over the houses. Nuu-chah-nulth and Makah accounts arm the Thunderbird for this work with the lightning serpent, thrown like a harpoon to stun the whale before the talons close, and those peoples say that whaling itself came to them from the bird.

In 2005 the seismologist Ruth Ludwin set those stories beside the geological record and found that the shaking and the sudden ocean surge in the Thunderbird and Whale narratives line up with a magnitude nine rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone in January 1700, an earthquake whose tsunami crossed the Pacific and was written down in Japan by people with no idea what had caused it. Around forty coastal stories carried usable detail; nine could be pinned tightly enough to estimate a date. The myth was, among other things, a record.

Not every encounter is catastrophic. George Dorsey took down an Arikara story in which a boy called Antelope-Carrier finds a nest holding four young thunderbirds, and their mother, arriving, does not kill him but asks him for help: a two-headed serpent keeps coming up out of the lake to eat her chicks. The bargain is the point. Thunderbirds are protectors in most of the traditions that keep them, and protectors expect something back, veneration and prayer and gifts, while reserving the right to punish people who break the rules that hold a community together.

What they can do follows from what they are. They bring the rain a crop needs and the hail that flattens it. They throw lightning down at the things in the water, and the storm is that war seen from below. A Ho-Chunk man who sees a thunderbird while fasting alone is understood to have been marked out to lead in war. Their image has been cut into rock, hammered out of copper, quilled onto bags and painted onto hide for at least four thousand years, which is a longer unbroken run than most gods anywhere can claim.

What they cannot do is finish. The serpents are never destroyed, only held down, and the balance the thunderbirds maintain is maintained precisely by not winning. They are seasonal, which is to say they are absent, and the months after they fly south belong to the powers below. Their favour is conditional and can be withdrawn. The encounter itself carries a price, too: among the Lakota the Wakinyan choose people, and anyone who dreams of them lives afterwards as a heyoka, a contrary, laughing at funerals, shivering in the heat, doing everything backwards in front of everyone, permanently. Refusal is not one of the options.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Thunderbird?

The Thunderbird is a powerful sky spirit found across many Native American traditions, from the Pacific Northwest Coast to the Great Lakes, the Northeast and the Plains. It is generally understood as a bird of prey of enormous size that controls storms, rain and hail, and it is treated as a protector who expects veneration in return. Its images appear in North American rock art, copper cutouts, pottery and beadwork going back some four thousand years.

How does the Thunderbird make thunder and lightning?

Among Algonquian peoples the thunder is the sound of the Thunderbird’s wings beating, and the lightning is produced when it opens or flashes its eyes. Iroquois accounts describe the lightning the same way. The lightning is often understood as a weapon rather than a by-product, thrown down at the beings that live under the water.

What is the Thunderbird’s enemy?

In Great Lakes and Northeastern traditions the Thunderbird’s enemy is the underworld: the underwater panther Mishibizhiw, or the great horned serpent. Menominee accounts name the horned snakes Misikinubik and say the thunderbirds fight them endlessly to stop them overrunning the earth. On the Pacific coast the antagonist is instead a whale, which the Thunderbird seizes in its talons.

Is the Thunderbird and Whale story connected to a real earthquake?

Research published in 2005 by the seismologist Ruth Ludwin argued that the shaking and ocean surge described in Thunderbird and Whale stories match the magnitude nine Cascadia subduction zone earthquake of January 1700. That earthquake sent a tsunami across the Pacific that was recorded in Japan. Roughly forty coastal narratives carried usable detail, and nine allowed a date to be estimated.

What happens to someone who dreams of the Thunderbird?

It depends on the tradition. Among the Ho-Chunk, a man who sees a thunderbird during a solitary fast is understood to be marked for leadership in war. Among the Lakota, anyone who dreams of the Wakinyan must live as a heyoka, a contrary who behaves in reverse, and the calling cannot be turned down.

Related Entries

Underwater panther, Mishibizhiw, Horned Serpent, Piasa, Haietlik, Sisiutl, Unktehila, Pamola, Gluskabe, Manitou, Impundulu, Garuda, Perun, Thor, Shango