This bird had “a face like a man, nose like an eagle bill, body long and slender and four joints to each wing, which were painted zigzag like the lightning, and the back of the head was rough and red,” according to the Dakota tradition. This is the Sioux story of the Thunderbird. Going a little further east we find the Ojibwa, who live in Minnesota and around the shores of Lake Superior with a myth of the thunderer which makes it entirely a good spirit, a sort of servant of the medicine man, shaman or priest, and who helps them to work cures, find good medicine plants, and many other things which have a good influence.
With the Ojibwa it is also an immense eagle-like bird but without any superfluity of wing joints. The thunder is the noise of its flying and it causes rain which makes medicine plants grow and also it can apparently find a medicine plant to fit the particular disease by looking on the earth, in the sky or in the inside of the earth, either of which places it can visit at will under the instructions of the medicine man or shaman, who holds a controlling power over it.
There is no record of any masks being used to represent the thunderer, directly east of the coast tribes, the only representations being from Indian drawings, which interpret their idea and which are represented in this book.
There are no carvings or images except those worked in beads, from near Fort Snelling, Minnesota, which represent the bird with the red breast and tail, and having somewhat of an eagle form.
OJIBWA THUNDERER
The Ojibwa figures are from drawings on the “music board” used by the Ojibwa at the initiation of candidates into the society of the Mide-wiwin or great medicine, and are really notes in the medicine song of this society, for they are only one of numerous characters painted in rows on a board which are translated into a chant by the Mide men to mean some particular achievement of the Thunderbird under the guidance of that society.
This Thunderbird lives somewhere up in the sky and can only be brought to the earth by the Mide or shaman priests, who are the medicine men of the tribe, and members of the Mide-wiwin society, and then only to serve some good end in the making of medicine.
Thus the Thunderbird of the Pacific Coast degenerates into a servant of the Ojibwa medicine man, or else the servant grows to the proportion of a God as he travels West according to which version is taken as to the origin, but it is likely that the servant grew to be the God, as all tales grow in the telling, especially among an ignorant people like the Indians.