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Rivers, lakes and water courses were, according to Native American belief, inhabited by great water serpents, which often presented themselves with horns on their heads. The Lakota called these water beings with the term Hunktehi and described them sometimes as huge serpents, sometimes as great animals, like big quadrupeds with long tails and horns. In their aspect of horned serpents, these beings were more usually termed Mini watu, but it seems that the two categories were strictly related and in some measure interchangeable. Both were in perpetual struggle against the Thunder Spirits, as it was illustrated in the cosmology of the Eastern Woodland Algonquian peoples. The intrinsic dangerousness o these beings was guaranteed by their name: unktehi literally signifies “one who kills” (Walker 1980: 72). They were indeed continually on the alert in the deep waters, waiting for the opportunity to catch those who should unwisely come too near the place in which they were hidden. Those who were caught by the water monsters were brought in the deep waters and transformed themselves in water beings.

On the other hand, the water monsters were regarded as supernatural beings, provided with great power, to which offerings and ritual ceremonies were addressed. They seem to escape from the order instituted in the world, both from a chronological and from a spatial viewpoint. Chronologically, they preceded the institution of the cosmic order and can be identified with the primordial waters which covered the world before the earth was formed. Spatially, they are located at the margins of the knowable world, delimiting the ultimate borders of the earth, as well as the most wild and peripheral regions, the deep waters or the mountain caves (Comba 1999: p. 198-201).
According to a cosmology diffused in most of North America, the water beings were in continuous fighting against the Thunder beings, and the traces of this struggle could still be observed on the landscape. For example, accordind to a Huron tradition, the appalling engagement between the Thunder Spirit and a huge water serpent occurred near the Niagara Falls, and the wriggling of the serpent tail produced the collapse of a portion of the rock wall, creating the particular shape similar to a “horse shoe” that has become the name with which that part of the Fall is known today (Horseshoe Fall) (Barbeau 1914).

	Niagara Falls scenery in which the profile reveals, according to amerindian mythical traditions, the outline left by the tail of a giant snake during its fight against the Thunder Bird.

Among the Ojibwa, the term Mishebeshu means literally “great lynx” and was utilized to designate a group of monstrous beings which lived in the waters, some of which had the aspect of great water felines, while they could show themselves also as horned serpents or as animals which mingled the characteristics of both (Smith 1995: p. 97-98). In the mythical epic of the cultural hero, shared by the Algonquian peoples, these beings killed the Wolf, the hero’s foster-brother, causing thus his vengeance. This, in turn, brought about the unleashing of the flood, produced by the water beings, which covered again the earth with water. The survived hero provided for the creation of a new earth, inviting some animals to dive to reach the bottom and bring up a piece of mud, with which the first nucleus of the earth surface should be formed. According to a Menomini variant, the heavenly gods and the underground monsters decided to build together a sacred lodge, the lodge of the Midewiwin, the great shamanistic ceremony of the Algonquians. Thanks to the intervention of the Otter, the cultural hero was persuaded to participate to the ritual, which was thus transmitted to humankind  (Michelson 1911). Through the ritual, the powers of the world above and those of the world below were interlocked and reconciled, permitting to the cosmos to attain a new balance, with the human beings in the centre, between two opposing force fields, from both of which they can obtain blessings and power.

Quillwork decorated bag, from the area of the North-eastern Woodlands, representing two water monsters, in the shape of horned felines with long tail (Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan).