Credit: Henry Franzoni I met Gayle Highpine, a Kootenai Indian, at a monthly meeting of the Western Bigfoot Society. She had published the following paper in a very early Track Record, and gave me permission to reprint it here on the conference. Gayle has traveled extensively among the various reservations and enclaves of North American Indians for the last 30 years. She was a member of A.I.M., the American Indian Movement, during the '70s. A female Indian who was always interested in the old ways, she was and is very interested in learning more about Sasquatch, and she has listened attentively to many medicine men's Sasquatch stories as she traveled from reservation to reservation. I think her paper gives a good basic survey of Native American thought on the subject, and I find her obervation of the apparent division between "Flesh and Blood", thinkers and "Spiritual/Mystical" thinkers highly enlightening. P.S. The Kootenai tribe's home basically is southeast British Columbia. Attitudes Toward Bigfoot in Many North American Cultures
By Gayle Highpine "But, special being as he is, I have never heard anyone from a Northwestern tribe suggest that Bigfoot is anything other than a physical being, living in the same physical dimensions as humans and other animals. He eats, he sleeps, he poops, he cares for his family members. However, among many Indians elsewhere in North America... as widely separated at the Hopi, the Sioux, the Iroquois, and the Northern Athabascan Bigfoot is seen more as a sort of supernatural or spirit being, whose appearance to humans is always meant to convey some kind of message." | |
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