A while back, I was lucky enough to speak to a Mashpee-Wampanoag person about pukwudgies and their connection with my ancestors. That one is a story and a half that we'll revisit another time. Knowing I was planning to go to Hockomock to look for pukwudgies, they gave me some porcupine quills as protection. At the time, I had just assumed that the significance was the correspondence between the quills and protection because those the porcupines line of defense and they're native to the area, but now I think there might be more to it.
Yesterday I was reading Wendigo Lore: Monsters, Myths and Madness by Chad Lewis and Kevin Lee Nelson (great book, definitely check it out), and read that the Ojibwe associate porcupines with the Wendigo and some other pretty scary stuff. The word pukwudgie actually comes from the Ojibwe language. Pukwudgies are also known to shapes shift into porcupines.
Reading the traditional descriptions of pukwudgies and looking at drawings, my long standing belief was that at least some of the sightings were actually people just seeing a porcupine standing up. I'm now questioning if it isnt the other way around...
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