The Importance of Humility
We will make a tobacco offering here
Tobacco for Thunder Birds
[Naamiwan (Fair Wind) at Pauingassi] There was one clap of thunder after another. Suddenly [Naamiwan] turned to his wife and asked, “Did you hear what was said?” “No,” she replied, “I didn’t catch it”.… It was, of course, the thunder. The old man thought that one of the Thunderbirds had said something to him. He was reacting to this sound in the same way as he would respond to a human being whose words he did not at once understand…. Implicit in this anecdote is the assumption that [Naamiwan] must have had previous contact with a Thunderbird in the dreams of his puberty fast.
-- A. Irving Hallowell, “The Role of Dreams in Ojibwa Culture,” Contributions to Ojibwe Studies: Essays, 1934-1972, eds. Jennifer S.H. Brown and Susan Elaine Gray (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), p. 447.
