Bear symbolism
In Greek myth the Great Bear in the northern sky is Callisto, turned into a bear by Juno. Among the Ojibwe, Makwa the bear is the largest clan, known as the protectors and medicine people; Cherokee storytellers say bears were once a Cherokee clan.
Meaning
Bears stand for people in several traditions. Ovid tells how the nymph Callisto became a bear and then the constellation of the Great Bear. For the Ojibwe, Makwa is a clan animal with a role in the community, the protector. The Cherokee told James Mooney that bears are people of an old clan who changed their shape and could still talk if they wished. The Norse berserks fought like bears, and their name may mean “bear-shirt”, though that etymology is disputed.
Origin and history
In Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book II), Juno, jealous of Jupiter's love for the nymph Callisto, turns her into a bear. Ovid dwells on the bear who keeps a woman's mind, fleeing the hunters and dogs she once hunted with; “a bear herself”, she fears the bears on the mountain. Fifteen years later her son Arcas meets her while hunting and raises his spear, and Jupiter lifts them both into the sky as the constellations of the Great and the Little Bear.
In Old Norse tradition the berserks were Odin's warriors who went into battle without armour, “strong as bears or wild bulls”, in Snorri Sturluson's account. The name's origin is disputed: Snorri's translator Rasmus Anderson noted that it “has been much contested”, and preferred the derivation from the word for bear over the one from the words for “bare” and “shirt”, since champions “used to wear hides of bears, wolves and reindeer”.
Makwa, the bear clan of the Ojibwe
The Ojibwe clan system, as the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission describes it in its language materials, has seven main clans, each with its animal or bird and its role in society. Makwa, the black bear, “has the largest clan membership”, and the bear clan were traditionally “the medicine people and the protectors (police).” Bear clan members still take on the protector's role; the commission gives the Bear Clan Patrol in Canada as an example. In some communities bear clan members do not eat bear meat, and on the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, first settled by bear clan families in the mid-1700s, an informal ban has kept bears from being hunted for decades.
The Cherokee bear people
James Mooney, collecting between 1887 and 1890, recorded that the Cherokee held bears to be “transformed Cherokee of the old clan of the Ani'-Tsâ'gûhi”. Their chief, the White Bear, lives on the high peak of Kuwâ'hi in the Great Smoky Mountains, and the bears keep townhouses under the mountains where they dance each autumn. “Being really human, they can talk if they only would”: a hunter once heard a mother bear singing to her cub in words he understood.
The bear as a man's guardian
One of the first English accounts of an Ojibwe “totam” is about a bear. John Long, an interpreter and trader, wrote in 1791 of an Ojibwe hunter “whose totam was a bear”, who dreamed of a great herd, went alone, and killed a bear. On his way home a second bear stopped him and asked what could make him kill his totam. The story, and what the word came to mean, is on the spirit animal page.
Bears on Northwest Coast crests
William Housty of the Heiltsuk Nation told Discover magazine in 2021 that the animals on totem poles are family crests, arranged by family history: “They didn't just put a grizzly bear there because the grizzly bear was cool.”
Related animals
The Wolf symbolism runs beside the bear in the Norse warrior stories and among Ojibwe clan animals; the Deer symbolism and the bear are both animal peoples in Cherokee belief.
See also
Spirit animal, Wolf symbolism, Butterfly symbolism, Dragonfly symbolism, Moth symbolism, Ladybug symbolism.
Sources
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books I–VII, Book VI, Fable I, translated by Henry T. Riley, Project Gutenberg, Book II, Fables VI and VII
- Maajii-Ojibwemowag teacher and caregiver supplements: Ma’iingan, Makwa, Waabooz (GLIFWC), Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, Maajii-Ojibwemowag (They Begin to Speak Ojibwe) ANA Language Project, teacher/caregiver supplemental documents, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, Makwa (Black Bear) supplement
- Myths of the Cherokee (James Mooney, 1900), James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, Project Gutenberg, I. Introduction; 15. The four-footed tribes
- The Younger Edda (Anderson translation), Snorri Sturluson, trans. Rasmus B. Anderson, 1880, Project Gutenberg, Extract from Heimskringla on Odin, and note 125
- Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (John Long, 1791), J. Long, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader (London, 1791), pp. 86–87, Internet Archive, pp. 86–87
- The Term ‘Spirit Animal’ Means More Than Your Favorite Animal (Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover, 2021), Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 24 March 2021, Discover Magazine, article text
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research