Copyrighted Material
32
BIGFOOT
into Native American stories flattens context and nuance; at worst, it may become a naive and even ugly sort of paternalism in which whites tell Native Americans what their tales “really” mean. As a practical matter, many of these appropriated stories are also a very bad fit. For example, Bigfooters routinely cite tales from eastern North America that feature man-eating “giants” whose bodies are literally covered with stone.4 These stories are detailed right down to the creatures’ use of magical talismans to locate human prey and their Achilles-heel weaknesses that allow warriors to escape (such as their inability to swim, look up, or gaze on menstruating women).5 These stone-covered cannibal-wizards are clearly not close analogues to the fuzzy, gentle, largely herbivorous Bigfoot. To their credit, some monster advocates are uneasy about this wholesale co-optation of Native American lore as evidence for Bigfoot. Pro-Sasquatch anthropologist Grover Krantz thought that “Native stories that can confidently be related to the sasquatch occur throughout the Pacific Northwest” but complained that “it is only with some difficulty that a sasquatch image can be read into” tales from elsewhere on the continent.6 (In particular, Krantz doubted that legends of stone giants “who strike with lightning from their fingers” had “any physical referent at all.”) Yet even in the Pacific Northwest, Native stories include a wide variety of monsters with human-like forms. Are the underground dwarves or the underwater people described by the Twana of the Skokomish River drainage “really” Sasquatches? What of the soul-stealing “wet-cedar-tree ogre”?7 Should we project our expectations of Bigfoot onto the giants described by the Quinault of the Olympic Peninsula who look almost the same as humans—except for a 6-foot-long quartz spike growing out of the big toe of their right foot? (Recording this story in the 1920s, anthropologist Ronald Olson deadpanned, “If a human is kicked with this he will likely die.”)8 And what are we to make of the cannibal-ogress tales widespread throughout the region? In her depiction by the Kwakwaka’wakw, called Dzunuk’wa (figure 2.1),9 the ogress is frequently presented by Bigfoot proponents as a distorted, mythologized representation of their modern monster.10 However, there is little to justify this cultural appropriation. The Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest typically drew a sharp distinction between the cannibal ogress, on the one hand, and any of several more Sasquatch-like races of giants or feral humans, on the other.11 The cannibal ogress was usually regarded not as a race but as a terrifying singular character, similar to Hansel and Gretel’s witch or eastern Europe’s Baba Yaga. Luring or snatching