• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Native American myths/traditions support Bigfoot? A critical look.

kitakaze

Resident DJ/NSA Supermole
kitakaze
Joined
Apr 5, 2006
Messages
9,272
Location
Sapporo ichiban!
A common theme that has often come up here and in general with proponents is the statement as fact that Native American traditions and myths support the existence of bigfoot. This has been discussed many times to varying degrees of depth in other threads but I think it would be best to have a devoted thread on the subject as it is a persistent notion.

It is my assertion that Native American traditions do not support the existence of bigfoot and that what is put forth by bigfoot enthusiasts as evidence for the existence of bigfoot has been cherry-picked and misrepresented. IMO this at best amounts to a collection of boogeyman tales not significantly different than that of countless other cultures.

A good example of this is the lengthy discussion in the 'Simple Challenge for Bigfoot Supporters' thread regarding kushtaka (kû'cta-qa), a mythical being in the traditions of the Tlingit people of northwestern North America. We were told that kushtaka was a well-known and supported term for bigfoot and after much discussion and examination by skeptics the claim was dropped after the 'Land Otter Man' nature of the myth was established.

More recently we were told of the bukwus of the Kwakiutl people of Northern Vancouver Island:

One tribe dresses as animals and all the animals are known creatures except the sasquatch or buk'wus as they call them. They just consider it another primate and think nothing strange about its existence.
Click to expand...

This poster was apparently unaware of the legendary Thunderbird and its place in Kwakiutl mythology. As for the supposed sasquatch/bukwus, again, critical examination reveals...

From the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture:
Like the Dzoonokwa, Bukwus is a wild creature of the woods. Described as a "chief of the ghosts", he tempts travellers to eat his food, which transforms them into wild spirits like himself. The Bukwus dance is performed during the Tlasula.
Click to expand...
https://www.washington.edu/burkemuse...y.php?ID=93120

From northwestcoastnativeartists.com:


Bukwus, the wild man of the woods, is a supernatural ghost like figure. He is associated with the spirits of people who have drowned. He lives in an invisible house in the forest and attracts the spirits of those who have drowned to his home.

Bukwus also tries to persuade humans to eat ghost food so that they will become like him. The Bukwus was a significant character for the Kwakiutl people.
Click to expand...
http://www.northwestcoastnativeartis...bolsDetail=008

One of the main proponents of correlations between Native traditions/mythology and bigfoot existence is a lady we've enjoyed much discussion with on the subject in the past here, US Forest Service Archaeologist Kathy Moskowitz Strain. Kathy is a bright women with a fine sense of humour who has over the years invested much study on the matter. She has a book on the subject forthcoming that is due to be released sometime this year IIRC. Kathy is a well-known bigfoot proponent/researcher who has appeared on the History Channel series Monster Quest a number of times. She posts here under the handle 'Hairyman'.

Here is a youtube clip of her speaking on Native myths/traditions and bigfoot on the 'Gigantopithecus: The Real King Kong' episode of Monster Quest:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vUThgEGxjEM

I find myself in disagreement with some key ideas of Kathy's on the subject and think some can be illustrated by her comments in the above Monster Quest clip. For example, the statement "...as a scientist and archaeologist it doesn't make sense to me that tribes would give names to imaginary creatures." I find it difficult following Strain's reasoning here. It seems to presuppose the idea that Native American cultures did not have mythical creatures when, as is clear with the example of the ubiquitous Thunderbird, we know this to not be the case.

She also states in the clip "that Native Americans have literally a hundred names for these creatures and I'm still discovering them." Interestingly she then lists a few and includes the word 'sasquatch' which we have often been told to be a native word. Once again, upon further examination the word turns out to be a neologism coined in the 20's by a British Colombian school teacher, J.W. Burns:

Formal use of "Sasquatch" can be traced to the 1920s, when the term was coined by J.W. Burns, a school teacher at the Chehalis, British Columbia Indian Reserve, on the Harrison River about 100 kilometres east of Vancouver. Burns collected Native American accounts of large, hairy creatures said to live in the wild. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark wrote that Burns's "Native American informants called these beasts by various names, including 'sokqueatl' and 'soss-q'tal'" (Coleman and Clark, p. 215). Burns noted the phonetically similar names for the creatures and decided to invent one term for them all.

Over time, Burns's neologism "Sasquatch" came to be used by others, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. In 1929, Maclean's published one of Burns's articles, "Introducing British Columbia's Hairy Giants," which called the large creatures by this term.
Click to expand...

Here is a partial list of tradtional Native names from the eastern United States provided by Strain that are supposed to represent bigfoot:

Hairy Man said:
I'm assuming when you say east of the Mississippi that you are including the headwaters as well, so here is a list for your use. The list is not all there is, just what picked out quickly from a list of several hundred:

Tribe - Traditional Name - Translation

Alabama-Coushatta - Eeyachuba - Wild man
Algonkian - Yeahoh- Wild man
Caddo - Ha'yacatsi - Lost giants
Cherokee - Kecleh-Kudleh - Hairy savage
Cherokee - Nun’ Yunu’ Wi - Stone man
Chickasaw - Lofa - Smelly, hairy being that could speak
Chippewa - Djeneta` - Giant
Choctaw - Kashehotapalo - Cannibal man
Choctaw - Nalusa Falaya - Big giant
Choctaw - Shampe - Giant monster
Comanche - Mu pitz - Cannibal monster
Comanche - Piamupits - Cannibal monster
Creeks - Honka - Hairy man
Iroquois - Ot ne yar heh - Stonish giant
Iroquois - Tarhuhyiawahku - Giant monster
Iroquois/Seneca - Ge no sqwa - Stone giants
Menomini - Manabai'wok - The Giants
Micmac - Chenoo - Devil cannibal
Mosopelea - Yeahoh - Monster
Ojibwa - Manito - Wild man
Seminole - Esti capcaki -Tall man
Seminole - Ssti capcaki - Tall hairy man
Seneca - Ge no'sgwa - Stone giants
​
Click to expand...

One thing I would like to accomplish in this thread is to examine some of these myths and traditions critically and see how well they correlate to what we are commonly told of bigfoot. One should keep in mind though that there is nowhere near a consensus on what bigfoot is.

My question to bigfoot enthusiasts is what Native American myth or tradition do you think most clearly and obviously represents bigfoot? For my part I will attempt to identify and examine some of the more touted examples.
 
Another list of Native American names alledged to correlate to bigfoot compiled by Kyle Mizokami, Henry Franzoni, Jeff Glickman:

http://unifiedworlds.com/NAbigfootnames.htm

Some examples of some of the more ambiguous entries:

Name>Tribe>Translation

Skanicum Colville Indians "Stick Indians"

Steta'l Puyallup/Nisqually Indian "Spirt Spear"

Qui yihahs Yakama/Klickitat Indian "The Five Brothers"

Kushtaka Tlingit Indian "Otter Man"

Tah tah kle' ah Yakama/Shasta Indian "Owl Woman Monster"

Gilyuk Nelchina Plateau Indian "Big Man with little hat"

Ge no'sgwa Seneca Indian "Stone Coats"

Atahsaia Zuni Indian "The Cannibal Demon"

Misinghalikun Lenni Lenape Indian "Living Solid Face"

Wsinkhoalican Lenni Lenape Indian "The Game Keeper"

Hecaitomixw Quinault Indians "Dangerous Being"

Yé'iitsoh Navajo Indians "Big God "
Click to expand...

It's nice that they have a great big list put together but one wonders how they established a link to bigfoot or if it just 'felt right'.
 
kitakaze said:
I find myself in disagreement with some key ideas of Kathy's on the subject and think some can be illustrated by her comments in the above Monster Quest clip. For example, the statement "...as a scientist and archaeologist it doesn't make sense to me that tribes would give names to imaginary creatures." I find it difficult following Strain's reasoning here. It seems to presuppose the idea that Native American cultures did not have mythical creatures when, as is clear with the example of the ubiquitous Thunderbird, we know this to not be the case.
Click to expand...

This is a rather bizzare thing to be saying, especially for someone who is supposed to have studied this. I can't think of a single culture that doesn't have numerous imaginary creatures, usually not just with names but also with detailed descriptions of their behaviour. Does Kathy also believe in fairies, goblins, leprechauns, unicorns, dragons, sheep, pixies, gryphons, dryads, nymphs, and so on? How can anyone possibly claim to be a scientist in the same sentence they come out with such nonsense?
 
I am some curious about that myself - but then names like Wood and Jones, the Piltdown guys, the cold fusion guys, the people who kept denying HeLa contamination (because it would have meant their experiments were not what they had published), etc. remind me: Scientists can have extra orifices in their cephalic areas too.
 
One of the first prime examples that I was thinking of looking at is one that I have seen put forward by bigfoot enthusiasts countless time is Dsonoqua, The Wild Woman of the Woods. A classic boogeyman type figure, she is a mythical being of the Kwakiutl people of the northern tip of Vancouver Island and the adjacent BC coast who is said to be a stealer of children.

One thing that is a bit frustrating is the wide variation of spellings of Dsonoqua when rendered in the Roman alphabet. Here is a link the Kwakiutl Tales Index collected and translated by Franz Boas circa 1910:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/nw/kt/index.htm

With the following entry entitled The Dzô'noqwa:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/nw/kt/kt12.htm

The tale is somewhat reminiscent of The Brothers Grimm's 'Hansel and Gretel'.

The following is from reknowned Canadian artist Emily Carr's book 'Klee Wyck' (1941) entitled 'D'Sonoqua':

http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/lawson/acadia03/texts/d_sonoqua.html

Some images:

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/nof/world/images/totem_dzunukwa.jpg

http://www.beckjord.com/bigfoot/dson.jpg

http://www.seattleoutdoorart.com/images/TsonoquaD.jpg

http://cache.tias.com/stores/iis/pictures/aa265a.jpg

I think what you have here is the classic case of footers highjacking a native myth and trying to wrench it into bigfoot evidence. It seems clear from all that I've seen so far that dsonoqua was held by the Kwakiutl to be a boogeyman type figure and not the representation of a species of 8ft giant bipedal primate that they shared their land with. I will look further into this.
 
I asked a hopi elder about bigfoot one time not expecting to get a responce but he surprized me with more then I ever expected .
He only told me things becouse he liked me and he asked me to never tell any one else .
Well I did and I feel bad about it but what he knew needed to be told Ive never used his name and I never will .
He told me when he was a young man he was over 100 when he told me this he would go into the wilderness by himself for months at a time just wandering .
He did not say what wilderness he was wandering in I assume though most likley the four cornors area he said he was in the mountains .
I wont get into everything he told me its just to much and most of it I will keep to my self untell I know for sure what he said is true .
He told me he was rock climeing one day and he fell and broke his leg he knew he was going to die there becouse no one knew where he was .
He had given up hope when a creature came to him he called it a sasquatch picked him up and took him to its camp where there where others .
I think he said about 6 of them its been a long time my memory is not that great .
With out geting into a lot of detail he explaned to me how they commuicated and that he had no problem understanding them .
He also told me about there crafts and how they made usefull things and how they treated him .
Thats about all I will tell you about this at this time some of the things he said to me I will keep to myself untell I have more proof .
I have no reason to beleave he was lieing to me becouse some of the things he said where so different from what you hear about bigfoot from any other sourse .
He is one of the reasons I got into this so deep I just have to find out for myself .
I want to talk to them face to face .
Ive had the face to face encounter but he did not respond to me I want to know why he dident .
There are many other questions I want to ask also and the only way to find out is to get close to them .
Only a person that has never seen one would have negative thoughts about them .
I hope you people see one some day and I hope you feel as blessed as I did when you do let me know I want to hear about it .
 
No chance of him being in shock from exposure and trauma? Possibly Hallucinating that the people who rescued him were Sasquatchi? Fascinating stuff Creek. Here's the catch though, the term Sasquatch wasn't invented until 1920, I'm guessing that either he embellished his story and used a name he heard after the fact, or It happened after 1920 when the term was invented. Did he give you a date?
 
Lots of good stuff here, Kit! Thanks for compiling into a single thread.. and keep up the good work.

FWIW I have a friend who grew up on the Ute Indian reservation in NW Utah. I asked her about bigfoot legends a while back and she looked at me like I was crazy. She said they had lots of legends of anthropomorphised bears and even had an annual festival/dance/ritual around one of them, but nothing even close to bigfoot.
 
All I know is he was over 100 years old when I talked to him I dont know why he dident use the hopi name for them being an elder he should have used the hopi name for them .
Or he was just useing a name I would reconize I dont know .
He did tell me things that Ive never seen before about bigfoot and Ive done a lot of reading on the subject no one has ever talked about what he said to me .
And of course compareing to what I allready know first hand I have no reason not to beleave most of what he said .
That is untell I find out for sure .
 
While digging around for bigfoot sources putting forth dsonoqua (I'll stick with that spelling for now)/bigfoot connections I came across a rather lengthy Seattle Magazine August 1970 article by David Brewster entitled 'Our Last Monster' archived at Bigfoot Encounters. Here is a still rather lengthy portion (my apologies)of the article that deals with native myths and bigfoot while speaking on dsonoqua specifically:

...Sasquatch believers claim that the old Indian tales prove that the giants have been well-known for centuries, but a U. W. anthropologist, Melville Jacobs, inclines to the view that "the Sasquatch is entirely a white man's myth, deriving from the European's greater anxiety about father figures."

Similarly, George Quimby, curator of the Burke Museum, suspects the Sasquatch could be traced to loggers' tales and pranks. Nevertheless, the Indian stories have certainly kept things alive. Don Smith, an Indian from Ariel, Washington, who is a close student of the tales as well as a carver and singer, says the oldest story pattern concerns a cannibal woman who likes to roast children.

She is called Tsunoqua (Dzu-na-kwa) by the Kwakiutl people of northern Vancouver Island, who, together with the more northern Tlingits, seem to have developed the most elaborate stories. The majority of these are variations on a single theme: the giant kidnaps some children (on occasion by disguising herself as their grandmother), seals up their eyes with red chewing gum, tosses them in a basket which she carries on her back (where Sasquatch have a big hump of fat for winter hibernation), and heads for her cabin in the woods.

The Tsunoqua people, according to the late George Boas, the distinguished Columbia University anthropologist, are black, twice the size of man, possessed of very deep-set eyes and loud voices, and are inland dwellers. All these traits correspond to those of the Sasquatch (a Chehalis word meaning "hairy giants"). Their characteristic noise is "u, u, u, u," — hence they are usually carved with puckered lips. At night, they imitate bird noises by means of a chain of whistles worn round their necks.

In the stories of other tribes, the giants are often merely renegades who have gone wild-"Stick Indians." But the Tsunoqua is more supernatural, a kind of earth-god matched against the heroic sky gods, like the Thunderbird, who sometimes turns Tsunoqua into giant stones. They cannot be killed — the name derives from a word meaning "to be alive" — because their source of life is hidden in a secret spot in the woods or sometimes in one ankle.

(Perhaps this explains why the three dozen hunters who have shot at Sasquatch have all failed to bring one back.) Nevertheless, says Don Smith, Tsunoqua is "a terrible dum-dum who is usually just about falling asleep." (Although a Sasquatch is able to hypnotize his prey, he can himself be put to sleep by circling a pointed finger in his face.) So Tsunoqua is usually thwarted, often by the hitherto despised youth who figures heroically in numerous folk tales of all nations.

In one Kwakiutl tale, a crippled boy whose warnings went unheeded cuts a hole in the basket, allowing all the captured children to escape. Tsunoqua then appears at a village feast, where her vanity and her desire for human beauty usually prove her undoing. (In stories of the Abominable Snowman of Asia, mimicry is a common feature.) She wishes to wear carrings like the pretty girls and asks to have her cars pierced-whereupon spikes are driven into her thick skull.

The body is then invariably shoveled into a large pit — as jack the giant killer did with his first victim — where a fire is started by hot rocks. A hollow voice sings from the ashes:

I have the magic treasure,

I have the supernatural power,

I can return to life.

When the ashes are stirred, they fly up and metamorphose into lesser, but far more bothersome, cannibals — mosquitoes. Potent and pathetic, attuned to nature and yet a stumblebum around the village, the Tsunoqua, like the Sasquatch, is a marvelous image of shaggy old humanity left behind, the natural way, strong but stumped.

The lore surrounding the creature is properly ambivalent: to hear the Tsunoqua brings good fortune; to see one is calamitous. Don Smith does not quite believe in the physical existence of Sasquatch; for one thing, he remembers that he once carved a pair of gigantic wooden feet for some practical jokers. But he suspects the myth goes very deep, if only because so many Indian mothers use the story to get their children inside at bedtime. A few years ago, he was at Neah Bay, looking at some Sasquatch tracks.

At dusk, Smith or Lelooshka, to use his Kwakiutl name, watched a father position his young son's feet in the giant prints. Then the boy put his palms in the track and rubbed them on his chest, "to get the power."
Click to expand...

ETA: Link to original article:

http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/sasquatch2.htm
 
Last edited:
madurobob said:
Lots of good stuff here, Kit! Thanks for compiling into a single thread.. and keep up the good work.

FWIW I have a friend who grew up on the Ute Indian reservation in NW Utah. I asked her about bigfoot legends a while back and she looked at me like I was crazy. She said they had lots of legends of anthropomorphised bears and even had an annual festival/dance/ritual around one of them, but nothing even close to bigfoot.
Click to expand...
Thanks, Maduro. I appreciate it. Though bigfoot enthusiasts like to trot out the old hallmark that the natives 'just know' and laugh at the white man as he tries to capture or find the Boss of the Woods, I suspect that in truth many Native American people with a strong knowledge of the culture and traditions would have similar 'yeah, what?' type reactions as your friend when asked about bigfoot.
 
Let me advance through a slightly different path. The most obvious path, "every culture that I am aware of has myths about half-human-half-beast creatures", will be left aside.

Bigfoot researchers frequently talk about alleged similarities between wildman myths from Native American tribes (perhaps it would be better to write between selected aspects of selected myths). They say the focus should be on the physical characteristics of these entities and not on their roles, magical powers and behavior. The renderings obtained from the descriptions are claimed to be very similar from coast to coast. This, they say, would point towards a real creature at the roots of these myths, since the odds of different cultures scattered across the continent independently developing such similar mythical beings would be very low.

I will also leave aside methodological questions regarding how the physical characteristics of these mythological creatures are selected and assembled in to an archetypical sasquatch, as well as the possibility of recent "cultural contamination".

Lets just consider one aspect: how likely it was that Native American tribes spreaded across the continent could exchange their myths.

Here we will find a major weak point in this line of reasoning. There was at last one myth that was shared by distant tribes. The myth of the trickster who brought the fire to humans. Britsh Columbia, Georgia and Alabama; among tribes located nearly 5000km away from each other, the tale is nearly the same. Only the animals who play the trickster are different- coyote, crow or rabbit. More details can be found at Campbell's The Masks of God- Primitive Mythology and among the refferences he points towards.

It seems to me that this is strong evidence pointing towards contacts with cultural and mythological dissemination/interchange among Native North American tribes. In this perspective, finding myths about hairy wildmen among tribes separated by thousands of kilometers is not actually unexpected or implausible. And these myths can not be presented as reliable evidence for sasquatch/bigfeet being anything other than mythological creatures.
 
Is it possible that many of the Indian legends were the result of Sleep Hallucinations/ Fever/ Psychodelic Spirit Walks, etc...? Which were interpreted by their medicine men, or shamans as (Insert resulting spiritual figure here)?

Narcolepsy would have induced sleep hallucinations, which would have been interpreted in the best way they knew... spirits. When humans nowadays have sleep hallucinations/paralysis, they interpret them as Ufos, Bigfoots, Devils etc...
 
Sure myths could have been spread among them but I dont think they could have spread to all of them .
I am a good example I knew nothing about bigfoot except from what I saw on tv back in the 70s .
That was it I thought they where only out west and also knew most people thought they where not real .
I never gave it another thought untell I came face to face with it in my back yard .
If all of these tribes where talking about them and they all had stories of them then they must have saw something for them to want to wright about it .
I wouldent be if had not seen it so why would they ?
 
Why would only native americans be helped by Sasquatch?

Creekfreak said:
I asked a hopi elder about bigfoot one time not expecting to get a responce but he surprized me with more then I ever expected .
He only told me things becouse he liked me and he asked me to never tell any one else .
Well I did and I feel bad about it but what he knew needed to be told Ive never used his name and I never will .
He told me when he was a young man he was over 100 when he told me this he would go into the wilderness by himself for months at a time just wandering .
He did not say what wilderness he was wandering in I assume though most likley the four cornors area he said he was in the mountains .
I wont get into everything he told me its just to much and most of it I will keep to my self untell I know for sure what he said is true .
He told me he was rock climeing one day and he fell and broke his leg he knew he was going to die there becouse no one knew where he was .
He had given up hope when a creature came to him he called it a sasquatch picked him up and took him to its camp where there where others .
I think he said about 6 of them its been a long time my memory is not that great .
With out geting into a lot of detail he explaned to me how they commuicated and that he had no problem understanding them .
He also told me about there crafts and how they made usefull things and how they treated him .
Thats about all I will tell you about this at this time some of the things he said to me I will keep to myself untell I have more proof .
I have no reason to beleave he was lieing to me becouse some of the things he said where so different from what you hear about bigfoot from any other sourse .
He is one of the reasons I got into this so deep I just have to find out for myself .
I want to talk to them face to face .
Ive had the face to face encounter but he did not respond to me I want to know why he dident .
There are many other questions I want to ask also and the only way to find out is to get close to them .
Only a person that has never seen one would have negative thoughts about them .
I hope you people see one some day and I hope you feel as blessed as I did when you do let me know I want to hear about it .
Click to expand...


White people roam around in the woods and sometimes get lost. Some of them never make it back but some do. Why didn't Sasquatch help them find the way out? Why avoid us? If they can help an injured person and make "useful things" then they could trade with us and perhaps get useful things from us.
 
I'd like to hear some detail about how they communicated with the elder. That would be helpful, I suppose. Was it sign language, verbal, mental, written -- what? How much detail can there be to that?
 
Maybe they dont like white people .
No I promised not to say somethings and besides that I wouldent want to give the impression I am supporting someone elses claims .
If I find them to be true then you will hear about it I promise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom