Thunderbird Legends

The Thunderbird is one of the great sky beings of Native American folklore, a vast and powerful creature whose wingbeats are the thunder and whose eyes flash the lightning. He is present, in one form or another, in nearly every indigenous tradition of the continent — from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes, from the Southwest to the Eastern Woodlands — and he has survived into the modern era in the names of sports teams, in the imagery of contemporary Indigenous art, and in the fiction of writers who draw on the older stories. The Thunderbird is a being of immense cosmic power, a defender of the people against the monsters of the deep, and a figure of the storm.

The image of the Thunderbird is one of the great shared images of the indigenous Americas. The Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the other nations of the Pacific Northwest carved him on the great totems of the cedar houses. The Algonquian-speaking nations of the Great Lakes and the Northeast told of his great battle with the Underwater Panther. The Sioux and the Ojibwe honoured him as one of the great beings of the sky. The Navajo and the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest had related figures, although the shape of the being varied from one tradition to the next.

The Great Winged Being

In the older North American tradition, the Thunderbird is not a single named god but a category of being — a vast winged creature, often described as an enormous eagle or hawk, whose wings span the sky and whose body is a shape of the storm. He lives on the tops of the highest mountains, where the lightning strikes, and he is the master of the weather.

Among the Algonquian-speaking peoples — the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Menominee, the Potawatomi — the Thunderbird is one of the grandfathers of the world, one of the great beings who came before humanity and who still live on the high mountains. The great battle of the Thunderbird with the Underwater Panther, the great horned serpent of the deep, is one of the recurring stories of the Northeast and the Great Lakes. The two beings fight in the deep winter, when the ice is thick and the snow is heavy, and the outcome of their fight shapes the weather of the coming year.

The Lakota (Sioux) tradition keeps the Thunderbird as one of the Wakinyan, the thunder beings, a category that includes the Thunderbird and great dragon-like forms of the storm. The great Sioux medicine man Black Elk, whose visions were recorded by John G. Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks (1932), describes the Wakinyan as the most powerful of the spirit beings.

The Navajo did not have a single Thunderbird figure, but they had the related figure of Atósí (First Woman), who is the mother of the Holy People and who brings the great flood that ends the fourth world. The Atósí figure, like the Thunderbird, is a being of cosmic power, and she is associated with the dawn, the east, and the coming of the morning.

The Totem Pole and the Mask

The most spectacular visual representation of the Thunderbird in the older North American tradition is on the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest. The great red cedar poles, carved with the crests of the family and the clan, often feature the Thunderbird at the top, with a great hooked beak, a long curving body, and the outspread wings that distinguish him from the other beings. The Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish all have Thunderbird traditions, and the carved image of the great bird is one of the most distinctive of the region.

The transformation mask, the great carved and painted cedar mask that opens on a hinge to reveal another face within, is another important visual form. In the great winter ceremonies of the Northwest, the dancer wears the closed mask in the first dance, and at a dramatic moment the mask opens to reveal the inner face — often the human face of the ancestor who became the Thunderbird. The transformation mask is one of the great art forms of the indigenous Americas, and the Thunderbird is one of its principal subjects.

The Pacific Northwest Tradition

In the Pacific Northwest, the Thunderbird is the great defender of the people. The principal story is the battle with the Whale or the Sea Serpent, a great being of the deep that threatens the canoes and the villages. The Thunderbird flies down from the mountain, lifts the great creature out of the water, and carries it away to the high rocks, where the bones of the sea-monster become the cliffs of the coast. A specific site in the story is the Black Tusk of Garibaldi Provincial Park in British Columbia, a great black horn of volcanic rock that the Tlingit and the Squamish people identify as the petrified body of a great Thunderbird who fell in battle.

The principal Tlingit story of the Thunderbird is told in the Kiksadi clan, and the Gitxsan story of the Thunderbird and the Whale is preserved in a great painted screen, the Gitxsan Treaty Pole, raised in 1992 in memory of the old treaties.

The Connection to the European Dragon

The Thunderbird of North America and the dragon of Europe are not historically related, but they share the basic image of the great flying being, the bringer of storm, the guardian of treasure, the defender of the people against the chaos-monster. The two beings are the great shared images of the older Northern Hemisphere tradition.

The image of the great bird of the storm is also present in the Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica, the feathered serpent of the Aztec and the Maya. The Quetzalcoatl is not the same figure as the Thunderbird, but the two share the basic shape of the great flying being who brings the rain and who defends the people against the chaos-monster.

The connection between the Thunderbird and the dragon is one of the great themes of the modern American cryptid tradition. The Mothman of Point Pleasant, the great red-eyed winged being who appeared in West Virginia in 1966 and 1967, is in many ways a recasting of the older Thunderbird image. The two beings share the great wings, the red eyes, the appearance at times of great social anxiety, and the connection to disaster.

The Survival in Modern Indigenous Art

The Thunderbird has survived into the modern era in the work of contemporary Indigenous artists. The Pacific Northwest carving tradition, which declined under the influence of the colonial governments and the missionaries in the late nineteenth century, was revived in the 1950s and 1960s, and great new totem poles have been raised in villages from Alert Bay to Sitka. Bill Reid, a Haida artist born in 1920, did perhaps more than any other single figure to revive the older carving tradition. His great The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, completed in 1986, features the great Raven, the killer whale, the eagle, and the Thunderbird together in a great canoe.

The Jingle Dress of the Northern Plains, a modern ceremonial dress of the early twentieth century, features a Thunderbird in the design of the headdress, and the Fancy Shawl Dance of the modern powwow is sometimes told as a story of the young woman who dances with the Thunderbird.

The Modern Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones

The contemporary Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones, born in 1972 in West Texas and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, has built a body of horror fiction around the older stories of the Native American tradition. His novel The Only Good Indians (2020) is a horror story in which a group of Blackfeet men are hunted by an elk who is, in fact, a Thunderbird in disguise. His novel Mongrels (2016) re-imagines the older shapeshifter traditions of the Blackfeet. His novel My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021) is a meditation on the slasher film and the older stories of the Blackfeet, with the Thunderbird as a recurring figure. Jones’s fiction is part of the broader movement of Indigenous horror, in which writers like Tananarive Due, Darcie Little Badger, and Conor K. Nolan are drawing on the older stories of the indigenous Americas to create a new body of horror fiction.

Sources and Further Reading

Marriott, Alice. American Indian Mythology. New American Library, 1968.
Teit, James A., and Boas, Franz, eds. Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians. American Museum of Natural History, 1902.
Bastian, Dawn E., and Mitchell, Judy K. Handbook of Native American Mythology. ABC-CLIO, 2004.
Lankford, George E. Reachable Stars: Patterns in the Ethnoastronomy of Eastern North America. University of Alabama Press, 2007.