![]() They are said to be related to the summer – which is the time of year when the storms rumble over the Great Lakes –, the heat, the sun, the south, and the red color that symbolizes this cardinal point. Us Indians know it's a heck of a climb you see… Anyway, it was the start of a long night laughter and storytelling I will never forget, and that has inspired me into writing several stories like the one you're reading now …Īs “spirits of the sky realm, ” Thunderbirds are considered the most pervasive and powerful beings of all the aadizookaanag – Spirit Grandfathers, Supernatural Makers of Stories – that guard the four cardinal points of the Universe. He grinned at me and said, enh, I am familiar with the stories about the Thunderbird nests and gaawiin, I have never climbed the mountain to pray or fast or leave my tobacco ties and ribbons and cloth up there. It was easy to imagine snake bones and Thunderbird egg scales scattering around the place! Could it be one of the nests the sacred stories tell us about? I asked Moses, who at that time lived in Thunder Bay and whom I knew to be a spiritual person, if he knew the story of the Thunderbird nests of stone, and how many times he had gone up there for ceremony. ) The following day Simone and I returned to the spot where I had met the bear, and after we had prayed to makwa 's spirit and tied ribbons and cloth to the bushes and hung up tobacco ties in a tree, Simone discovered a wide, shallow crater nearby covered by low shrubs and fern. ![]() (Later, I heard from an Ojibwe lady who lives on the nearby reserve that in the summer bears go up the mountain with their cubs in search of berries. I related to Moses how, as I was standing on top of Animikii-wajiw, the Thunder Mountain, looking for the Thunderbird nests that I had heard about in the stories, I stood face to face with makade noozhek (a black female bear), who came out of a bush and who, standing on her hind legs, seemed as surprised to see me as I was awe-struck by her suddenly being there.
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