Lightning Spirit

Thunder Bird of Native American Mythology

The Thunderbird (English Thunderbird, Algonquian/Ojibwe Animikii, Lakota Wakinyan) is the canonical iconographic figure of the giant bird-form spiritual being — resembling an eagle or condor — that widely appears in Native American mythology, in which the flapping of its wings creates thunder and its eyes shoot lightning — the decisive canon. The etymology is the English Thunderbird ('bird of thunder'), settled as the decisive canonical vocabulary by 1830s American naturalists and folklorists translating the Algonquian/Ojibwe Animikii ('thunderer') and Lakota Wakinyan ('flying sacred') into English. The decisive tribal traditions are (1) the Algonquian/Ojibwe — the decisive Thunderbird canon of the Lake Michigan and Great Lakes region; (2) the Lakota — the decisive Wakinyan canon of the Dakota and Black Hills region; and (3) the Pacific Northwest Coast tribes Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw — the totem-pole-top canon of the coast of British Columbia, Canada. The decisive textual record is the journal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Lewis and Clark Expedition) of 1804-1806 — recording the Thunderbird belief of the Indigenous people along the Columbia River — and the decisive English scholarly canonisation of the Ojibwe Animikii canon in the Algic Researches (2 volumes) of the American folklorist Henry Schoolcraft (Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 1793-1864) of 1849, and the epic The Song of Hiawatha (22 cantos) of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) published in the USA on 10 November 1855 is the decisive 19th-century American-literary Thunderbird canon.