Lake Monster Mysteries (19 page)

Moon (1977, 32) cautions those seeking retribution: “Anyone thinking of killing Ogopogo had better ponder the fate of the Lambton family.… During the first half of the fifteenth century, Sir John de Lambton killed a ‘wyrm.' As a result of killing the monster, the Lambton family fell under a witch's curse: for nine generations no Lambton would die in his bed. None did. Some say the curse has pursued the Lamb-tons down to the 1970s.” Thus black magic enters the Ogopogo story.

According to Moon, “The Indians.… looked on it as a superhuman [supernatural] entity.” Other writers agree, including W. Haden Black-man (1998, 71), who points out that the Sushwap and Okanakane Indians “believed that it was an evil supernatural entity with great power and ill intent.”

N'ha-a-itk's paranormal connection to the elements is perhaps the strongest of any lake monster. Besides a seemingly supernatural control over the lake's waters, it commands aerial forces as well: “the Indians said no boat could possibly land [on Rattlesnake Island], for the monster would cause a strong wind to blow and baffle the attempt.… the monster was something more than an amphibian. It was always in some way connected with high winds” (Moon 1977, 32).

What manner of monster is this? The power to summon storms and create whirlpools? Witch curses? (Frankly, not dying in one's own bed doesn't seem like such a terrifying fate.) Such stories and descriptions suggest that N'ha-a-itk is a disincarnate force of nature, not a corporeal creature actually living and eating, breathing and breeding, in the cold waters of Lake Okanagan.

One must be careful about accepting native stories and legends as true accounts of actual creatures. Just because a given culture has a name for (or tells stories about) a strange or mysterious beast—be it Sasquatch or Ogopogo—doesn't necessarily mean that those names or stories reflect reality. Cultures around the globe tell of fantastic beasts and other entities that are important elements of human folklore. I hope that future anthropologists won't look back on our age and believe that these creatures coexisted with us just because we can all name and describe them. (Future mystery mongers might conclude that giant green ogres and talking donkeys existed in our daily lives on the basis of an antique
Shrek
DVD.) This highlights a problem that folklorist Michel Meurger points out in his groundbreaking book
Lake Monster Traditions.
Meurger suggests that claiming native evidence for unknown creatures is an “old gimmick of portraying the sighter as a kind of noble savage,'” a process he aptly names “the scientification of folklore” (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 13).

According to some traditions, Ogopogo's history predates its identification
as N'ha-a-itk. In fact, N'ha-a-itk was actually a murderer named Kel-Oni-Won. According to Dave Parker, a traditional First Nations storyteller, Kel-Oni-Won murdered a vulnerable old man with a club. The gods decided that the killer's punishment “was to change Kel-Oni-Won into a lake serpent, a restless creature who would forever be at the scene of the crime where he would suffer continued remorse. He was left in the custody of the beautiful Indian lake goddess and was known to the tribesmen as N'ha-a-itk; the remorseful one who must live in the lake with the company of other animals. It is said that the only animal who would tolerate his company was the rattlesnake” (quoted in Gaal 2001, 122).

This folkloric motif—an unending punishment for an unforgivable crime—is common in many myths. The later custom of making sacrifices (a warning to heed elders' traditions and rituals) has an analogy in other lake monster mythologies. For example, children living around many reputedly monster-inhabited lakes are told by their parents that if they don't behave and obey, they will be thrown into the lake and the monster will eat them. This “bogeyman” method of social control is a common but largely unrecognized function of lake monster traditions. The origin of N'ha-a-itk and, by extension, Ogopogo is rooted in morality tales, not eyewitness descriptions of real creatures.

Celeste Ganassin, curator of education at the Kelowna Museum, explains that for many early First Nations peoples, the distinction between reality and myth was not particularly important, because the stories hold a culturally specific significance that renders objective truth somewhat arbitrary. Native Indians' stories are not the white man's literal, empirical reality. In the same way that one misses the significance of an urban legend by focusing on whether it corresponds to reality (Ellis 2001, 144), one misses the importance of N'ha-a-itk by treating it as simply Ogopogo or its predecessor. The beliefs and stories serve important functions, Ganassin says, and divorcing the N'ha-a-itk myths from their cultural context strips them of their value. Writers tread shaky ground when they conscript Indian myths of N'ha-a-itk into evidence for present-day Ogopogo's reality. “People pick and choose parts of the First Nations myths to fit their needs, to support whatever argument
they are trying to make. They take what they want and use it to support their ideas” (Ganassin 2005). Almost invariably, it is white writers, not native people, who insist that N'ha-a-itk and Ogopogo are one in the same.

It's not hard to imagine why native groups might create or perpetuate traditions about the lake. The area around Rattlesnake Island can be a cold, desolate, foreboding area. Nearby lies Squally Point, so named for the violent squalls that can quickly arise and menace boaters. As Arlene Gaal (1986, 121) notes about a rocky bluff across from the city of Peachland, “When you look down into the water from there, there's no bottom whatsoever. The water goes out of sight. It looks eerie. Little waves hit the caves along the rocky shore, and they make sucking sounds. The combination of what you see and hear is kind of scary.” There are many “cursed” places around the world, where local legend warns off savvy travelers and where monsters are said to dwell. I encountered one such area on the coast of Newfoundland near Bonavista: a huge, dark, unusual sinkhole near a rocky cliff that had washed out two holes toward the ocean. It's known as The Dungeon and is said to be home to sea monsters (
figure 7.7
)

Ganassin suggests that to really understand N'ha-a-itk you need to examine its social function. “To those people who crossed that body of water, it was a real phenomena. The ritual of honor and sacrifice was tied to sacred practice.” Ganassin also points out that Lake Okanagan is hardly unique in its native stories of terrifying creatures inhabiting the depths. “You can't look at a First Nations group anywhere without finding a tradition of some sort of entity in a lake they had to respect or fear. Typically they believed that some sort of spirit inhabits it. Any body of water in First Nations culture can—and often did—generate these stories to explain natural phenomena such as storms, sudden winds, and so on” (Ganassin 2005).

Indeed, the stories of N'ha-a-itk are virtually identical to those told about many other North American lakes, including Ontario and Superior. Meurger, for example, tells of an 1864 account by Indian captive Nicolas Perrot, who reported, “They honoured the Great Tiger as the god of the water.… They tell you that the [lake spirit] stays at a very
deep level, and has a long tail which raises great winds when it moves to go to drink; but if it wags its tail energetically it brings about violent tempests.” As at Okanagan, the Indians would make live sacrifices to appease the water spirit. “Before undertaking longer voyages they take care to break the heads of some dogs, which they hang from a tree or a branch” (for a fuller discussion, see Meurger and Gagnon 1988, ch. 3).

Figure 7.7
“The Dungeon,” said to be the home of sea serpents in northeastern
Newfoundland, near Bonavista. (Photo by Benjamin Radford)

If the N'ha-a-itk story is going to be used as supporting evidence for Ogopogo, one has to explain not only what the link is but also why all the other lakes throughout the world with similar traditions have supposed lake monsters that no one has found. (For a parallel example of native stories in the Bigfoot milieu, see anthropologist Wayne Suttles's discussion in Dave Daegling's
Bigfoot Exposed.
)

Though most writers gloss over the tenuousness of the link between N'ha-a-itk stories and Ogopogo, others acknowledge it but claim that ancient Indian petroglyphs, or rock art, depict the lake monster. Costello (1974, 220) writes, “The Indians have left crude drawings on
stone of what is thought to be Naitaka, in which we can see the now familiar long neck, flippers, and even the two ‘ears' on the crown of the head.” Mackal (1980, 225) states, “There are at least three crude pic-tographs on rocks around the lake, now in an extremely poor state of preservation, which may be related to an alleged lake monster.” Mackal quotes Moon's discussion of a drawing “showing a creature ‘stealing' away through the weeds.” Consulting the original source, I found that Mackal neglects to mention that Moon (1977) specifically states that this creature was “rodent-like” and therefore less of a fit for N'ha-a-itk than Mackal implies. Mackal suggests that “the relationship is tenuous and can be inferred only from the nature and location of the picto-graphs themselves.” Yet the petroglyphs suggested as Ogopogo depictions are dubious for exactly these reasons. The petroglyph most often cited (
figure 7.8
) is not from the Okanagan Valley at all but from Sproat Lake on Vancouver Island (Kirk 2005).

Another writer, Karl Shuker, suggests that petroglyphs dating from around 1700
BC
might be evidence for lake monsters. One particular drawing, Shuker (1995, 112) writes, “is a strikingly accurate depiction of the vertically undulating, elongate water monsters frequently reported from the lakes and seas of Canada—so much so that it could easily be taken to be a sketch made by one of these beasts' twentieth century eyewitnesses.” Yet the petroglyph he describes was found not on the shore of Lake Okanagan—nor even in British Columbia—but instead more than two thousand miles away near Peterborough, just outside of Toronto. It may represent a monster, but its location doesn't suggest Ogopogo. (The assumption that ancient artwork represents reality is what I refer to as the Bangles fallacy, after the 1980s band whose hit song “Walk Like an Egyptian” satirically assumed that real Egyptians walked as they were depicted on tomb walls.)

The criteria for inclusion seem to be so broad that nearly any ancient drawing found anywhere in North America that, to anyone's eyes, might resemble some creature that could live in water can be cited as evidence. Even desert-dwelling Indians (such as the Zuni and Pueblo) depicted horned serpents in their art and pottery. Writes Meurger, “The Zunis of New Mexico have represented their serpent god of underground
waters and of torrents, Kolowisi, as a horned reptile with many fins and gaping jaws” (Meurger and Gagnon 1988, 165).

Figure 7.8
This Indian petroglyph, claimed to represent Lake Okanagan's Ogo-pogo, is actually located on Vancouver Island. (Courtesy of Peter von Puttkamer, from his documentary
Monster Hunters
)

Thus there is little basis for the reputed links between ancient art and modern monsters. “There is no true academic evidence that specifically states that First Nations people ever put down in petroglyphs the shape of N'ha-a-itk,” Ganassin (2005) notes. “The pictures didn't come with captions.”

N'ha-a-itk is clearly a supernatural entity (one writer calls it “part god, part demon”). Yet Ogopogo, the lake monster we and others searched for in Lake Okanagan, is presumably neither god nor demon; it is a zoological reality. This second incarnation of Ogopogo is crucial to investigators, as it moves the creatures from the mythological realm into the zoological one.

Though the N'ha-a-itk of the Okanagan Valley Indians is long gone, it has been replaced by a decidedly less fearsome—and more biological—beast whose exact form is a matter of opinion and debate. Some writers (e.g., Jerome Clark) claim that the descriptions of Ogopogo are “strikingly similar”; Mackal (1980, 231), after reviewing hundreds of descriptive reports, was “struck by repetitive consistency of the descriptions, almost to the point of boredom.” He continues: “The skin is described as dark green to green-black or brown to black and dark brown.… [or] gray to blue-black or even a golden brown. Most often the skin is smooth with no scales, although the body must possess a few plates, scales, or similar structures observed by close-up viewers.… Most of the back is smooth, although a portion is saw-toothed, ragged-edged, or serrated. Sparse hair or hair-bristle structures are reported around the head, and in a few cases a mane or comblike structure has been observed at the back of the neck.” The head is said to look like that of a snake, sheep, horse, alligator, or bulldog. Sometimes it has ears or horns; sometimes it doesn't. A surprisingly large number of sightings simply refer to a featureless “log” that came alive, such as in the following descriptions: “They saw what they thought was a log, six feet
long, floating in the water,” or, “It was like a great moving log, but alive, moving up and down a little in the water.”