Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

Continuing yesterday’s post about pukwudgie drawings from 1890, today I want to examine an Anglo-American drawing of a Wabanaki mikummwess (one of the Little People) from 1921.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, writers of children’s literature such as Mabel Powers, L.J. Bridgman, and John C. Farrar began to incorporate elements of Indigenous folklore into their stories. The idea of Indigenous “fairies” offered these writers a ready-made mythology of the American landscape, which they could use to entertain their readers. Unfortunately, this newfound appreciation of Indigenous stories coincided with the disempowerment and displacement of the very people for whom this folklore was meaningful. For this reason, it’s impossible to read these stories without an awareness of the historical facts surrounding them.

By comparing traditional Wabanaki depictions of the mikummwessuk (Little People) with portrayals from Anglo-American literature, we learn how American writers altered Indigenous folklore to enchant their non-Indigenous readers. Below are two images of a mikummwess, the first an etching in birchbark by Passamaquoddy artist Tomah Joseph (1837–1914), the second a drawing by American artist Gordon Ross from 1921.

Ross’s depiction of the mikummwess (from a magazine called The Bookman) appears to draw on nineteenth-century descriptions of Penobscot and Abenaki “water fairies” (oonohgamesuk rather than mikummwessuk): the water fairies in those descriptions, like Bridgman’s mikummwess, have noses that take up most of their face. This isn’t true of the mikummwess in Joseph’s etching, for there the little man’s face is round, with a hardly visible nose. Ross’s drawing also reveals the influence of folklorist Charles Leland—in particular, that author’s widely circulated but unfaithful copy of Tomah Joseph’s original etching, in which the mikummwess is seen sitting on a tree stump (see below).

The story accompanying Ross’s illustration—by writer John C. Farrar—exploits Wabanaki folklore to elicit the “magic” (or “medicine”) that exists in the woods of the eastern United States. “Medicine. . . is Indian for magic,” says the mikummwess, adding that the wood in which he’s met the girl is “the great medicine wood of the Indian fairies.”

The fact that Farrar wished to put this “medicine” at the service of his Anglo-American audience can be seen in his insertion of a little white girl into the traditional scene (a mikummwess viewed head-on and framed by the natural landscape). Rather than placing the mikummwess at the center of the scene, the new image depicts a perfectly symmetrical meeting—in profile—between two very different beings. This recontextualizes Joseph’s original scene: whereas, in the original image, the mikummwess gazes out at the Wabanaki viewer, the viewer in the 1921 image is revealed to be a little white girl. The shift from a first-person perspective (that is, the perspective of the Wabanaki viewer gazing at the mikummwess) to a third-person perspective (that is, the viewer observing the meeting between the mikummwess and the girl) represents a transition from immediacy to abstraction and from iconicity to storytelling. Nevertheless, this moment in the story, frozen in time, becomes a new icon representing the transfer of the land’s magic to the new settler communities.

The image echoes the ancient idea that the Little People befriend children, but it changes the child’s ethnicity. This encounter possibly represents the (literary) healing of the American imagination through contact with the magic of the formerly Indigenous-occupied land. Indigenous people are absent from this scene, but their “medicine” (a certain understanding of it, anyway) remains available to young readers.

To read about more fairies, order my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.