This is a very comprehensive and enjoyable collection of stories. It spans everything from the peoples of the arctic and the Pacific Northwest to those of New England and the American Southwest, with what I can only assume is every story Moskowitz Strain was able to get her hands on. There are stories collected in the early 1900s and in the early 2000s, folklore and accounts of encounters in living memory—and all of it’s enriched by old photos featuring whichever nation the current story’s from. (There are even photos of ceremonial Sasquatch regalia.)

And as I said, I enjoyed it! Folklore and fairy tales have long been a favourite genre of mine, and there’s something about Indigenous tales that I find especially enjoyable. I love collections like this, where you can not only dip in and out as desired, but trace the connections between the stories of different nations. There are so many stories here where the Bigfoot-figure kidnaps children in a basket on her back, and tropes of Achilles’ heels and fire pit deaths. It was wonderful to see the stories shift and flow, and to see tropes pop up in entirely separate geographic regions.

Put together, it’s a compelling argument for Sasquatch, Bigfoot, or something similar truly existing. How else would people in Florida, Newfoundland, and Alaska all be describing the same creature with the same behaviours? (Alternatively, it’s a really compelling argument for how old the Sasquatch is as a folkloric figure, for it to be that entrenched across a continent.)

However, this book isn’t without its flaws. Moskowitz Strain introduces every section with a paragraph describing the featured nation, which is great except that some of the words she uses are off-putting (e.g., ”of Iroquois stock”) and she’s not consistent about giving info about, say, language or culture. She also frequently suggests variant spellings as separate words (Klikitat vs. Klickitat), so I kept wondering if there were other lapses of critical thinking that I missed.

Also, if you’re looking for context beyond those paragraphs and the photos, you’re not going to get it. There’s little information about the cultures except what can be gotten from the stories themselves, and some but not many mentions of injustices and traumas such as forced relocation. I would’ve liked to see maps of trade routes and not just traditional territories, for instance, so I could trace better where the nations and tales would’ve intersected. Moskowitz Strain does make a point of mentioning that the nations still exist, though it’s easy to assume from the preponderance stories recorded over 70 years ago that these are not living tales still in use in the communities.

This is still a collection I’d recommend though. Moskowitz Strain has clearly done a lot of research for this book and it shows, and this is a book that’ll work for the casually interested as well as the more in-depth student of folklore and the Bigfoot believer. It was a fascinating read, but I think a lot of the stories were helped along by my existing knowledge of the cultures and geography involved (so I’d recommend looking up the indigenous people of North America before or during reading*.)

* or in general

To bear in mind: As many of the stories were collected roughly 50–100 years ago, and are reproduced here verbatim, words like “Indian” and “brave” occasionally pop up. Indigenous words are reproduced with non-modern spellings, or are needlessly transliterated.

8/10 ( )