winter-maker

Updated: May 11, 2025

All the birds were driven from the land but Shiñgapis; and then was it established that whenever in the future Winter-maker should come with his cold winds, fierce snows, and frozen waters, all the birds should leave for the south except Shiñgapis and his friends. So the birds that spend their winters north are called by the Algonkian philosophers "the friends of Shiñgapis."

John Wesley Powell - Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians: First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the: Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80,: Government Printing Office, Washington, 1881, pages 17-56

Some of the winds, too, were personal existences. The West-Wind, as we have seen, was father of Manabozho. There was a Summer-Maker and a Winter-Maker; and the Indians tried to keep the latter at bay by throwing firebrands into the air. When we turn from the Algonquin family of tribes to that of the Iroquois, we find another cosmogony, and other conceptions of spiritual existence.

Francis Parkman - The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century