Pukwudgie

Common card · No. 204475

A Pukwudgie (American English pronunciation: ), also spelled Puk-Wudjie is a mischievous or menacing dwarfish human-like creature of Native American lore. It has become particularly known as part of the folklore of the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts in the Eastern U.S. (the tribe who aided the Plymouth Colony, thus related to the Thanksgiving celebration). But it was originally part of the folktale of the Ojibwe people of the Great Lakes region published in the 1839 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (whose wife Jane was of Ojibwa descent) and made famous nationwide by the adaptation by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of the canto "The Death of Kwasind" (by the hands of) in The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Though Longfellow was a New Englander (and descended from the Pilgrim fathers), it was handiwork of the hometown newspaper and local history (1906) of Middleboro, Massachusetts that transposed the setting of the Kwasind murder to their own town. Later, Wampanoag natives crafted tales that deliberately...

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