Mishipishu, the Water Panther

Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.

One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.

Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:

Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.

Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today

In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.

Rock petroglyphs depicting Mishipishu include abstract ideograms such as the first two images below which, nonetheless, clearly show the dorsal spikes of the stegosaur, and the occasional more representational depiction such as the third image, from Agawa Rock in Ontario.

The Friends of Bon Echo Park WWW system notes that:

"As some of the meanings of the pictographs are not known, it is believed that the image in the lower right depicts a canoe carrying people across to the Rock. The larger image above the canoe figure is believed to be that of a Great Water Lynx, termed Mishipashoo in Ojibway. Native legends say that this water spirit inhabits large bodies of water, like Mazinaw Lake. Natives would offer tobacco to this spirit before embarking on a journey across such waters. The tobacco was offered with a prayer to appease this spirit with the hope that it would not whip up its great spiked tail and tip their canoe.

The reference to the "great spiked tail" refers to a stegasaur.

Note the proportions in the center image, i.e. the relative sizes of the humans in the canoe and the stegasaur. That appears to be a standard feature of such representations. The idea of the "spiked tail" is also standard. Thor Conway ("Painted Dreams") notes that:

". . . A third Chignebik joined the fight and Myeengun was slowly pulled under the darkened depths of Lake Superior.

Still alive, Nanabush's closest brother descended to the chilled bottom of the largest freshwater lake in the world. There, the massive serpents delivered Mycengun to the very spirit of Lake Superior, the underwater panther known to this day as Mishi-Peshu. Seated in a dark cavern far below the lake's surface, Mishi-Peshu swung its spike-covered tail and mortally wounded Myeengun.

The idea of the 70 million years which supposedly exists between our time and the time of dinosaurs thus turns out to be another whiteman's fairytale.

Evolution, and the Redneck Watermelon Truck

The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.

Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.

Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for Algor to get elected president and immediately implement his childhood dream of outlawing the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money buying for $2 in Fla and selling in Chicago for $2.

Likewise, the realization that Mishipishu and his comrades lived well within the age of man demolishes the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrine. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.

Other Lake Superior/Agawa Rock Links

Other WWW Links Dealing with Evidence of Dinosaurs

Within the Age of Man