The Legend of the Mimigwesseos

Adam Ballantyne

Transcribed and Edited by Prentice G. Downes
Introduction by Robert Cockburn
Woodcuts by Annie Downes Catterson

9 X 12 inches, 40 pages

'TALKING BEARS; MOOSE THAT LIVED UNDER WATER; the trickster god named Wisakyjak, who created the animal kingdom; the blackened, lipless, fanged cannibals known as "witigos"—all these beings and others as wonderfully strange once inhabited northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the homeland of the Woodland Cree. So too did "mimigwesseos." They lived among rocks on islands and in the ledges and cliffs of lakes and rivers; elf-like creatures with flat, noseless faces, they were sometimes helpful but were dangerous to meddle with. This book is about them.

'It is about them, the vast, water-laced boreal forest where they led their secret lives, and the Indians who sometimes saw and always feared them. They are gone now, the mimigwesseos; gone with the underwater moose and the talking animals and the terrifying witigos. But they were still alive only sixty years ago in the minds and recollections of Cree elders, men who remembered with reverence their people's traditional, immemorial beliefs and way of life....'

Adam Ballantyne

Storyteller

'... Adam Ballantyne was, at the time he told me these stories, a man probably about seventy-five years old. This was in the summer of 1937. I saw him again in the summer of 1947 and he was still quite alive. As he was not a Christian Indian there was no definite record of his birth. He spoke no English and the stories were told to me in his native Cree language.... Adam was a member of the Pelican Narrows Band, a forest dwelling, hunting people found at Pelican Lake in far northeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. Though these Indians have long been exposed to the white man and the white man's various religious concepts, as one can see, the more ancient beliefs still persist, at least among such of the old men as Adam. He himself occupies a curious postion in the band. Though the younger members are inclined to ridicule his ancient beliefs, when all the white man's religion, his nostrums, painkillers and pills fail, they turn to the old medicine man—Adam.'

Prentice G. Downes

(1909-1959)

Editor, Transcriber

'P.G. Downes was a naturalist, cartographer, geologist and a teacher. Above all he was a northern traveller. During the summer from 1936 to 1947 he packed only what he could carry on his back and set out for the Canadian North travelling the wild rivers and crossing lakes few white men had ever seen.... Adam shared with Downes stories, myths and information about his people, especially the dream life and spiritual world of the Woodland Cree. "To the Cree mind, all the world was spirit-bearing and animistic. He and the world about him were a completely dual world of the physical and its spiritual counterpart." Downes carefully recorded all that he heard and gathered in his journals. He knew that the old ways of the North were being fast forgotten... He had travelled a great distance "in order to learn the things of long ago."'

Annie Downes Catterson

Artist

Annie Downes Catterson has illustrated this trilogy of Cree stories that the raconteur Adam told her father. Annie is a practising artist and teacher of art in Chicago.

Eighteen stunning woodcuts from Wisakyjak and the New World, the second book in the series, are available in a limited edition portfolio or as individual prints.