North America

Centuries ago, human settlements were far less concentrated and we lived in far smaller and remoter communities with barely any communication with other tribes. As a result, many, many North American tribes or people evolved their own myths surrounding the Aurora Borealis. Here are just a few of the many and varied beliefs held by our ancestors in North America.

The Cree Indians held that the Aurora was part of life’s circle and were the spirits of the dead who remained in the sky but apart from their loved ones. The Cree believed that the lights were spirits of these departed friends and relatives trying to communicate with those they had left behind on earth.

The Algonquin’s take on the Aurora was that it was created by light from a fire built by Nanahbozho, their creator. They understood the fire to be Nanahbozho’s way of telling his people that he remembered them and was watching over them.

Further north, many Inuit tribes considered the Aurora to be the spirits of dead humans playing a ball game using a walrus skull as the ball. For reasons we will doubtless never fathom, the good people of remote Nunavik Island told the same story but the other way round so for them, the Northern Lights were walrus spirits playing ball with the skull of some unfortunate human.

In Washington State, the particularly imaginative Makah Indians thought the lights were fires in the north created by a tribe of dwarves who used it to boil whale blubber. Fire and cookery were also at the forefront of the Mandan people’s thinking in North Dakota. Their explanation was that the lights were again fires over which great warriors boiled their enemies in huge cooking pots.

Just to illustrate how different the legends and myths became, disparate North Americans accepted the lights as anything from ravens to spirit guides holding torches aloft to direct the departed to the next world. The lights were deemed to be the spirits of those who had died violently, spirits rejoicing because the sun was absent, spirits of dead animals such as deer and salmon and spirits of revenging enemies killed in combat.

Image: Antti Pietikainen