D is for Dzunukwa

Pagan Blog Project

When I was a little girl, my father would take us into Vancouver whenever he came to the Lower Mainland to visit. We would go to the aquarium, the planetarium, or the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

The MOA is set back from the university campus - it overlooks the ocean and is partially obscured by large cedar trees. If you visit on an overcast day - which is likely, since, you know, Vancouver - as you walk toward the entrance you feel the damp of the forest and smell the salt of the ocean. After paying your admission fee (Tuesday is cheap night!) you enter a long hall where you're flanked on either side by Pacific Northwest First Nations lodge doorposts and ceremonial boxes.

Image: LeLaLa Dancers

The hall opens up into a room with high ceilings, with one huge windowed wall that looks out towards the water. There are more doorposts, and some totem poles rising high overhead. It was in this room that I first laid eyes on Dzunukwa.

Dzunukwa is a creature from Kwakwaka'wakw mythology - a giant cannibal woman  known for stealing children. She has scraggly hair, pendulous breasts, and bright red lips. Why red? From the blood of the children she's eaten. In masks and carvings, her bloody lips are pursed; Dzunukwa would make a whistling noise as she moved through the woods that people would mistake for the sound of the wind in the cedars. 

That's the story I remember being told by a tour guide. It's one that has never left my mind. 
  Cannibalism is a taboo subject that inevitably comes up if you study the Kwakwaka'wakwa in any detail; there exists a secret society called the Hamatsa which is said to be a cannibal society. (Unless you're Kwakwaka'wakw yourself, good luck in finding out if the cannibalism is/was purely symbolic or not. The Hamatsa dance is known, but there's not a lot of detail on the ceremonies or duties of the society.) The myths surrounding the subject are rich and complex; Dzunukwa is not the only cannibal creature in the cosmology, but on a personal level she has always been the most arresting. 

Dzunukwa is ugly. She's huge, hairy, and prowls the forest naked. She devours people - especially children - but seems fairly easily outsmarted. She is said to be both a bringer of nightmares, and of wealth. In fact, her mask would be worn during potlatches by the chief of the tribe, usually to signify the event was over.

Dzunukwa devours youth. She is an incarnation of the fear of the woods at night. In both those ways, she reminds me a little of Baba Yaga - the fact she can also be fooled and bestows wealth are further similarities. But for me she has always seemed more immediate, and somehow more primal.

I'm as white as the underbelly of a fish - I can't lecture on First Nations spirituality. It would be insulting if I did. I was brought up to appreciate the artwork and mythology of different groups of the Pacific Northwest - my father had books dedicated to the artwork especially, and it was from these I started to recognise the difference between Coast Salish, Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw - but I cannot begin to lay claim to the traditions at all. 

Still. Dzunukwa haunts me. She probably always will.