Native American Historical Accounts of Tornadoes and/or Hurricanes?

by MercuryCrest

I've never heard of either, but I'm very curious as to the general reaction to these phenomena, but also spiritual reaction.

I'm wondering what they did for safety, but also how they viewed them in a traditional sense.

scarlet_sage

Mentioning previous answers is not intended to discourage discussion -- further questions, information, and debate is welcome.

The FAQ has ... huh, used to have: /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov yanked it 6 months ago. Anyway, the applicable question was "How did pre-colonization, Midwest, Native Americans deal with tornados? Did they write any records of these types of storms?" at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ekw2j/how_did_precolonization_midwest_native_americans/ . The standards for discussion were looser then, so a lot of irrelevancy (tobacco, horses, unverified "dead man walking") and lightly sourced items are in there.

  • The top reply, from /u/SEpdx , is from the 19th C.
  • /u/limonflora pointed to an external page dealing with legends, but unfortunately didn't summarize it, but the linked page is still there.
  • SEpdx pointed to a dissertation, but didn't provide the title and author, and the link is dead. The one hit on "Arikara Whirlwind Woman" is NANI SUZETTE PYBUS, WHIRLWIND WOMAN: NATIVE AMERICAN TORNADO MYTHOLOGY AND GLOBAL PARALLELS, Oklahoma State University, Ph.D. thesis in December 2009, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/etd/Pybus_okstate_0664D_10609.pdf.
  • /u/ahalenia linked to a couple of Google-scanned books.
  • contrarian_barbarian linked to Shawnee stories.

So that's just a large AskHistorians thread that could have used better scholarship, for what it's worth.