BEAR-WOMAN

Among the Canadian Dakota, when a boy wished to enter to all effects into manhood, he could submit himself to a ritual, during which he had to “make a bear”. A hole was built to represent the bear’s den, with four tracks leading out of it towards the cardinal directions of the cosmos, and here the candidate had to remain a certain time in meditation. Then, during a pantomime imitating a bear’s hunt, he leaped out from his den and was symbolically slain (Wallis 1947: 64-65). In this case too, according to Native thought, the candidate was not simply imitating a bear, but it was believed that he turned actually into a bear, whose killing represented his changing back to the human condition. From this experience of transformation, the individual obtained an empowerment, an increase in energy and new qualities, which permitted him to accede to his new condition as adult male and to obtain the social recognition of his actual transformation. In a way, the experience of transformation was the central nucleus for the construction and development of personality.
Analogously, among the Ojibwa, a girl who reached puberty was called wemukowe, meaning “she is going to become a bear”. When the first menstrual flow occurred, the girl was segregated in a little lodge, where she lived secluded from her family for some days. During this period she was called mukowe, “she is a bear” (Rockwell 1991: 185). Still in the 1950s, among the Northern Ojibwa in Canada, the girl remained in the home for some days when she has her first menstruation, and a father explained that his daughter’s absence from school was not due to a disease, but to the fact that “she was a bear” (wa-uhkawin-akosi-dashmukowe) (Dunning 1959: p. 100).

 

Little Bird, an Ojibwa woman, photographed by Roland W. Reed in 1908		Portray of an Ojibwa woman, photographed in 1907 by Roland W. Reed (National Geographic Society)

 

These traditions are extraordinarily similar to what is known of the ancient Greek sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, near Athens. Here, a group of girls remained for a certain time in the sanctuary, were they submitted themselves to the arkteia, a ritual performance during which they had to imitate the bears, or, to put it better, to become “she-bears” (arktoi) (Brelich 1969: 229 sgg.). The mythical narrative related to this ritual explained that a she-bear had been killed, because it had wounded a girl. The oracle of Delphi ordained that the Athenian girls, from then on, should have to “make the bears” during the “she-bear ritual”  (arkteia). It is rather unlikely that in Classical time  this ceremony was celebrated by all the Athenian girls. More probably only some girls, selected with principles which we do not know, had to represent all the girls of the same age (Dowden 1989: 33-34).  It is also possible that the ones called “she-bears” were the priestesses who were leading the ceremony, as well as their disciples.
Perhaps in conjunction with this customs, there are several mythic tales which tell of the transformation of a woman into a bear. In one of its more diffused variants, a young woman refused all marriage proposals and every day she left the village to go into the woods, where she encountered her secret lover, a bear. When the villagers discovered this, on the advice of the girl’s younger sister, they decided to kill the animal in an ambush. Some time after this, while she was playing with her younger sister, the young woman began to joke imitating a bear’s behaviour, but she turned actually into a fierce bear, which attacked and killed many people in the encampment. Her six brothers, with the sister, tried to escape but were pursued by the enraged bear. They climbed on the top of a tree and from there were finally able to kill the pursuing animal. Then, they decided to go in the sky, where they turned into the stars of the Big Dipper [also called “Great Bear”, Ursa Major] (Comba 1999).
One of the places in which, according to the legends, this story was located is the rocky hill known as Devils Tower, in Wyoming, which was known by the Native peoples of the area as the “Mountain of the Bear”. On top of this mountain a group of children found a temporary refuge trying to escape to their companion, a girl who had turned into a huge bear and left the racks of her claws on the surface of the rock wall (Gunderson 1988).

 

Painting representing the myth of the woman transformed into a bear, located at Devils Tower, realized by Herbert A. Collins in 1936 (Devils Tower Visitor Center, Wyoming)