The Thunderbird

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When the first thunder of the year rolls over the northern plains in spring, it is not, in the world of the nations who live beneath it, only weather. It is the return of a being. The deep sound traveling from the western horizon, the light that splits the sky an instant before, the rain that follows and wakes the grass — these are the marks of an immense bird passing overhead, its wings the source of the thunder, its eyes the source of the lightning. Across an enormous reach of North America, from the cedar coast of the Pacific to the woodlands of the Great Lakes to the open grasslands east of the Rockies, distinct peoples speaking unrelated languages have known this being and given it their own names. The English word for all of them, gathered into one, is Thunderbird.

The bird across the nations

The Thunderbird is a sky-being, a power of the upper world, and it belongs to no single nation. It is found, in varying forms, among peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes and the Eastern Woodlands, and the American Southwest — a spread so wide that the English name functions less as a translation than as a net thrown over many separate beings at once. To speak of “the” Thunderbird is therefore already to make a choice, and a contestable one, that several nations’ sky-powers resemble each other closely enough to share a word. They are not the same being, and the peoples who hold them do not, on the whole, treat them as one.

Among the Lakota and the wider Sioux nations of the plains, the thunder-power is the Wakinyan — the Thunder Beings, often spoken of in the plural. The name carries the root wakan, the sacred, the holy charged with power, joined to the sense of wings; the Wakinyan are the winged sacred, and they belong to the order of the Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery that pervades all being. The Lakota place the Wakinyan in the west, the direction from which the storms come, and reckon them among the great powers of the world. To dream of them is no small thing: a person who dreams of the Thunder Beings is bound, in Lakota understanding, to walk the path of the heyoka, the sacred contrarian who does and says things backward — a calling described in the published record but kept, in its living practice, within the nation.

Among the Anishinaabe and the broader Algonquian-speaking world of the Great Lakes and the woodlands, the sky-being is the animikii (plural animikiig), a word that names both the thunderbird and the thunder itself, and at times the lightning bolt. The animikiig are reckoned among the most powerful of the manidoog, the spirit-powers whose world is described under Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit of the Anishinaabe. They bring the rains that the crops need; they punish, with lightning, those who break the order of things. On the Pacific Northwest Coast — among the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Nuu-chah-nulth, the Coast Salish, and their neighbors — the Thunderbird is a high-ranking ancestral being and a crest of certain lineages, a master of the sky who, in the coastal traditions of these whaling peoples, is great enough to seize a whale from the sea and carry it into the mountains to feed its young. Farther afield the being recurs again: the Menominee tell of thunderbirds who live on a floating mountain in the far west and war without end against the great horned snakes; the Ho-Chunk hold that to see a thunderbird in a vision marks a person for war leadership.

How a being like this reaches the documentary record is itself part of its story, and it is worth marking the kinds of evidence apart. The nations who hold the Thunderbird had no system of writing before contact, and their living religions are, by and large, guarded. What an outside reader can know therefore rests on three very different footings: the archaeology — the carved and painted images that survive in stone, copper, and birchbark, some of them very old; the ethnographic record — the accounts set down by mostly non-Native observers, missionaries, government agents, and museum collectors, often gathered without consent and against the grain of the peoples’ own understanding; and the nations’ own oral tradition and living voice, the testimony of the peoples speaking for themselves, which has the first claim and which the older outside record too often overran. The portrait of the Thunderbird that follows is assembled from all three, and the seams between them matter.

A carved Thunderbird surmounting a Kwakwaka’wakw totem pole at Alert Bay, British Columbia, photographed around 1915. Otto Schallerer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Sky against water

If there is a single idea that gives the Thunderbird its shape across so many nations, it is opposition. In a great band of traditions — clearest among the Anishinaabe and the wider Algonquian world, but echoed well beyond — the Thunderbird governs the upper world, and the upper world has an enemy. Beneath the lakes and rivers lives a power of the deep: a horned water-serpent in some tellings, and, in the Great Lakes country above all, a great underwater cat. The Anishinaabe call it Mishipeshu (also Mishibizhiw), a name that means, literally, the Great Lynx. It is rendered as a feline body — cougar or lynx — crowned with the horns of a deer or bison, its spine ridged with scales, its tail long and serpentine. It is the most powerful of the underworld beings, master of the water creatures; it raises storms and rapids, swamps canoes, and pulls the unwary down. By tradition it guards the copper of Lake Superior, the metal taken to be the substance of its horns, as the record of the underwater panther preserves it.

The Thunderbird and the underwater power are ancient and eternal enemies. The bird of the sky casts its lightning down at the creatures of the deep; the cat of the water reaches up to drag down what it can. Neither destroys the other, and that is the point. Their enmity is not a story with an ending but a permanent tension, and the cosmos is ordered by it — divided into a realm above and a realm below, sky against water, air against the dark beneath the surface, each held in check by the other. The phenomena of the world — the storm that breaks over the lake, the flood, the drowning, the strike of lightning on a tree — are the visible edge of a struggle that never resolves. Among the Anishinaabe the two powers are complementary as much as opposed; balance between them, not the victory of one, is what keeps the world livable. The Prairie Band Potawatomi were still performing ceremonies to keep that balance into the twentieth century.

This duality is, of the three footings named above, the most fully a matter of the nations’ own understanding — a tradition-internal teaching about how the world is built, not a claim an archaeologist can excavate or an agent could verify. It is also the place where the older outside record is least to be trusted to have understood what it was hearing, and where the peoples’ own telling carries the weight. What can be said with the firmest external support is that the opposition is old, and that its image was made and remade for a very long time.

The proof in the ground is at Agawa Rock, on the eastern shore of Lake Superior in what is now Ontario, where Ojibwe painters set images of Mishibizhiw — the horned, spined water-cat — onto the cliff face above the water in red ochre, alongside serpents and canoes. The rock paintings of the Great Lakes, and the engraved scrolls of birchbark that carried the teachings of the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society of the Anishinaabe, preserved the powers of the upper and lower worlds in a visual language that long predated any written one. The line drawn between the realm of the Thunderbird and the realm of the Great Lynx is among the oldest legible ideas in the art of the continent’s interior.

The power of the storm

The Thunderbird is not a gentle being. It is awesome in the older sense of the word — a power that commands awe because it can destroy — and its gifts and its dangers are the same gifts and dangers. Its wings, beating, make the thunder; its eyes, flashing, throw the lightning, and in some tellings the lightning is cast deliberately, a weapon hurled at the creatures below or at a wrongdoer on the ground. Among the Lakota the Wakinyan are held to protect the honest and the pure of heart and to strike the liar and the oath-breaker; they are, in this register, enforcers of a moral order, the truth-tellers of the sky whose lightning answers deceit. The reference work of the Native Languages of the Americas project gathers these threads across many nations and is careful to keep their differences visible.

What the Thunderbird most reliably brings is rain, and with the rain, life. On the plains and in the woodlands alike the first thunder of spring is the bird’s return, and its return wakes the year — the rains that swell the rivers and green the prairie, the growing season that the crops depend on. To a maize-growing people of the Eastern Woodlands or a buffalo-following people of the plains, the being whose passage means rain is a being whose favor is survival, and whose anger, withheld or turned to drought and flood, is ruin. The Thunderbird’s power is double in the way that the storm itself is double: the same dark wall on the horizon brings the water the world cannot live without and the lightning that can kill.

Because it is so great a power, the Thunderbird is among the most depicted beings in Native North American art, and the forms vary as widely as the languages. On the Northwest Coast it is carved at the head of poles and painted on house-fronts, a broad-winged bird often with curved horns or a crest, sometimes shown grasping a whale or carrying the lightning-snakes it uses as harpoons. On the plains it is painted on shields and tipis and worked into beadwork, its protection carried into war and onto the body. In the Great Lakes it is incised on birchbark and painted on rock. The image is never quite the same twice, and the differences are not careless: they are the marks of distinct nations rendering distinct beings, each its own, in the visual grammar of its own people.

The deep record

The antiquity of the sky-being reaches back past the reach of any living memory, and here the archaeology speaks most clearly. Across the late prehistoric Southeast and mid-continent, the societies that scholars group as the Mississippian world — the mound-building culture centered on the great city of Cahokia and flourishing from roughly 1000 to 1500 CE — shared a body of religious imagery now called the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, or SECC. At its heart stands a winged figure, the so-called Birdman or falcon-dancer: a human-bird being in a costume of raptor feathers, marked with the forked eye of the falcon, a figure that scholars read as the embodiment of the Upper World and the power of the sky.

A Mississippian ‘birdman’ or falcon-dancer worked in copper, of the Rogan group from Etowah Mound C in Georgia. Herb Roe, www.chromesun.com, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Birdman survives most famously on the Rogan plates, thin sheets of hammered copper recovered in 1885 from a stone-box grave in Mound C at the Etowah site in Georgia, worked in the elegant Braden style that originated in the American Bottom around Cahokia and traveled outward through the trade and ritual network of the complex. The falcon-warrior, the winged human, the upper-world raptor: these belong to the same ancient family of ideas as the Thunderbird, the conviction that the sky is the seat of a great and dangerous bird-power and that a person can be marked or costumed with its force. Whether the Mississippian Birdman is the same being as the historic Thunderbird, or a distinct relative within a long iconographic lineage, is not something the copper can settle. What the copper does establish is that the sky-power and its imagery are deep — that the people of the continent were making the winged being of the upper world centuries before any European set down a word about it.

One word for many beings

The hardest thing to say honestly about the Thunderbird is the thing the English word most tempts a reader to forget. “Thunderbird” is a translation and a generalization, an English coinage that gathers the Wakinyan of the Lakota, the animikii of the Anishinaabe, the crest-bird of the Kwakwaka’wakw, the floating-mountain thunderers of the Menominee, and many more besides, under a single label — and in doing so it can quietly manufacture a unity that the traditions themselves do not assert. There is no pan-Indian Thunderbird. There are many sky-beings, held by many sovereign nations with their own languages, their own cosmologies, and their own protocols for what may be told and to whom, which an outside vocabulary has found convenient to file together.

The resemblance is genuine, and it is worth taking seriously: the cluster of shared traits — the bird of the upper world, the wing-thunder and the eye-lightning, the enmity with a power beneath the water — recurs too widely and too consistently to be coincidence, and it points to deep contact, deep antiquity, and deep exchange across the continent. But the move from “these beings resemble one another” to “these are one being” is a move made largely by outsiders, and it is the kind of reconstruction that this material does not warrant being pressed too hard. The older record on which much of the comparison rests was assembled by non-Native ethnographers, missionaries, and collectors, frequently without the consent of the people described and sometimes in open hostility to their religion — the same extractive scholarship that, applied to the diffuse sacred of wakan and manitou, produced the flattening misconception of a single Christian-style “Great Spirit.” Read critically, that record is invaluable. Read uncritically, it invents a being. The careful course is to render what the nations themselves shared and what they held apart, and to leave the assembled “Thunderbird” marked for what it is: a useful English convenience, not a fact about the heavens that any one nation would recognize as the whole of its own.

Afterlife and the living voice

The English name took on a second life entirely outside the sacred world that gave it meaning, and this afterlife should be set firmly apart from the being itself. In 1955 the Ford Motor Company gave the name to a two-seat sports car — chosen, by the company’s own accounts, as a borrowing of the Native American sky-power’s aura of speed and strength, from a being it understood only as a brand asset. From there the word spread through American commerce and sport: a Pontiac trim, a cheap fortified wine, the names and logos of athletic teams and military squadrons, a thousand businesses trading on a vague impression of power. None of this is the Thunderbird. It is reception — the conversion of a sacred being into a marketable image, a process that has run alongside the broader appropriation of Native symbols into mascots and merchandise, and that the nations whose being was borrowed have had no say in and have often had cause to resent.

Against that backdrop the most important fact about the Thunderbird is the simplest. The nations who hold it are not historical. The Lakota, the Anishinaabe, the Kwakwaka’wakw and the rest are living, sovereign peoples with living religions, and the suppression those religions endured — the boarding schools, the bans on ceremony, the long period during which Native religious practice was effectively illegal in the United States until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 — did not end them. The Thunder Beings still come west across the plains with the spring rain. The animikiig still belong to the world of the manidoog. The carvers of the Northwest Coast still raise the broad-winged bird at the head of new poles, and the descendants of the people who painted Mishibizhiw on the cliff at Agawa still know the powers of the upper and the lower worlds. The being that the English word reaches for is not a relic to be reconstructed from a dead record. It is held, named, and honored by the peoples whose word for the great bird of the storm was never Thunderbird at all.

→ Related: Wakan Tanka · The Lakota · The Anishinaabe · Gitche Manitou · White Buffalo Calf Woman · Kokopelli · The Pueblo · Serpent Mound · Poverty Point · Chaco Canyon · Bear Butte · Mississippian Cahokia · Ancestral Puebloan