One English Word Over Many Distinct Beings

"Thunderbird" is an English term that covers distinct beings belonging to a number of unrelated Indigenous North American traditions, and the single name conceals real differences that the traditions themselves maintain. Among several Northwest Coast peoples it is a specific and powerful supernatural whose wingbeat is the thunder and the flash of whose eyes is the lightning, and which in some accounts hunts the whale; it appears on crest poles and regalia belonging to particular lineages and clans, where it carries defined rights and meanings.

Among Plains and Great Lakes peoples other thunder-beings appear, related to but not identical with these, often opposed to underwater powers such as the horned serpent or the underwater panther. Because these are living traditions with their own protocols about who may depict or narrate a given being, the generic pan-Indian "thunderbird" of hobby books, sports teams and cars is a modern abstraction rather than a single Native concept, and the respectful course is to name the particular people whenever the specific being is meant.