Here in Massachusetts where I live you can find this gorgeous silvery green reindeer lichen on rocks. Reindeer lichen, as it is known, nourishes the wide-antlered caribou whose hoofbeats once crossed this very land in epic pilgrimage, antlered and unbroken, flowing across the earth in divine rhythm. Though their bodies have faded from our local forests their breath still lingers in the stone and soil. Their memory, is preciously cherished and cradled in ancient reindeer folktales that tie together landscapes we now think of as separate countries including: Finland, Russia, Greenland and Canada, and the United States (specifically Alaska) circling the arctic like a wide necklace made of woven strands of interconnected stories and antler bones. Though modern borders attempt to erase it, archaeological evidence rises defiantly from the soil whispering of a time when humans and reindeer lived as one family - a grand migratory story of our deep human entwinement with the wild. These stories arrive not as artifacts, but as invitations—wild, antlered invitations to remember what it is to belong.
I speak not as a scholar of these peoples, but as a listener—ears pressed to the ground, heart open to the echoes. What follows are not definitions, but devotions and reflections on what has moved me in hopes that it may move you too.
One polished bone in this great necklace of northern tales is “Caribou Mother”, also known in the Iglulik language as Pakitsumanga, is a folk heroine who appears in stories told among the Inuit of West Greenland and Canadian Baffin Island, Labrador, Hudson Bay and Eastern Canadian Arctic. Caribou Mother, or “the one with whom the caribou are”, watches over all the caribou only offering them to those humans who show respect for the animals. Another bead is the story told among the Innu of Canada, where there is a folk hero who plays a similar role known as the “Caribou Master”, a human man who falls in love with a caribou woman and becomes a caribou himself who then watches over all the caribou. In Alaska USA among the Gwich’in and Inupiat, there is a creation story about how people and the caribou were one before they separated and, since then, have always been relatives.
Another luminous bone in this northern necklace is found in the epic “Song of Vaadin,” told among the indigenous Saami and Karelians of Finland and Russia. This poem honors a female reindeer—goddess, divine ancestor, and guardian of herds. Similarly, among the Saami tribes in Russia near to the Kuola Peninsula there is a folktale about an ancestor named Myandash who crosses the threshold between reindeer and man, never quite staying on one side of the veil.
Some believe that long before Santa charioted his herd of reindeer across the wintery skies it was a Reindeer Goddess who carried the sun between her wide antlers bringing in the Winter Solstice, a folktale which draws loosely from several ancient stories from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, including many elements from indigenous Saami folklore. In the summer months when the sun shines brightly, the Sun is pulled by a giant bear. Then as the year progresses and winter approaches, her light wanes and the bear would transform into a herd of reindeer. Unlike the male reindeer who sheds his antlers in winter, it is She, the doe, who still bears her antlers through the cold, majestic and radiant retains her antlers during the cold winter months. And so we remember: Santa’s sleigh is pulled by mothers.
Circling back to Northeast Woodland region of North America, in many indigenous stories animals are rarely “just animals.” They are kin—relatives and teachers in an interconnected web of life. The relationship is often based on mutual respect, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. Humans learn from animals how to live in balance and honor the gifts of the earth. Just as caribou symbolize connection and survival in Arctic cultures, their cousins deer and moose often represent the same themes of interdependence and belonging in the Northeast. These animals are part of a sacred story‑necklace in their own right—each tale a bead on the string that connects humans to the land and to each other. In a Cree legend, for example, a young bull moose accepts a hunter’s ceremonial pipe—understanding that by doing so, he ensures the tribe’s survival, teaching that respectful reciprocity makes him, too, part of the human circle—and thus becomes another luminous antler‑bone clasp in this shared necklace of kinship.
These stories live outside time, inside soul and together, these stories are beads woven together in the antlered necklace of memory, linking peoples and places through a shared reverence for the caribou. They transport us back into deep time, and return us to a place where human and animal danced in the same breath, where kinship meant more than species, where human identity was forged around rhythm and relationship, living in fidelity to the movement and migration of reindeer rather than confined to national or political borderlines. Colonial lines have long cut through these sacred paths, severing people from reindeer, spirit from soil, undermining people’s self-reliance and mutual human-to-human support, erasing their sense of a shared storied landscape. These stories mend - not with nostalgia, but with knowing. They remind us that once, we moved not by nation, but by migration—following antlers across ice and sun, guided by interdependence and fidelity to the sacred rhythm of the seasons, the cadence of creation. What do we invite back into our psyches, and how are we reconfiguring our relationship to the wild when we choose to listen, read about and retell these stories today?
I believe through their retelling we acknowledge our relationality, and that rekindling this sense of connectedness is a relational job. Francis Weller, psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist. and author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, talks about the widespread feelings of loss and disconnectedness that pervades our modern lifestyle and culture that is so fundamentally divorced from the needs of the soul. In a podcast interview with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, hosts and co-founders of the Sounds of Sand Podcast, Weller talks about the opposite of emptiness as embeddedness: embeddedness to the land, embeddedness in relationship to other people and the wild. He insists that restoring a sense of soul requires reconnecting to “all my relations” which, he reminds us, is a very indigenous phrase and world view. He reminds us, soul work is relational. Grief is not cured in solitude, but in shared remembering. “It is not ‘how will I do this,’” he says, “but ‘how will we remember together?’”
And so we do. Through these tales, we reweave the threads that have unraveled. We begin to remember not just the stories, but the places inside us that can still carry them. We find our own bones echoing the rhythms of a herd once known. Ancient folktales reorient the way we see ourselves in relationship to other people, because they may be from a geographical location that transcends our modern national categories, encouraging us to rethink people, place and belonging. Folktales with shared similarities may come from ancient cultures that do not correspond with contemporary cultural categories which encourages us to rethink how we relate to our own sense of identity, how we relate to others, and our past. More often than not, ancient folktales uphold a worldview where humans and the wild are in a more interdependent, reciprocal, intimate relationship with each other, challenging modern ways of objectifying and commodifying the wild. In the mythical world of folktales, we are invited to enter back into relationship with nature. Wholistically speaking, through reindeer folktales we witness a synchronicities in our shared ancestral stories, a middling place. . .Perhaps we can call this “Middle Earth”, using the term of the beloved writer Tolkien in his books. . . where we recalibrate our minds to accommodate new constellations of relationships we may have overlooked before.
When I created my most recent artwork—just days after a total solar eclipse crossed our New England sky—I thought of these tales. Of celestial bodies aligning, moon shadowing sun, opposites merging in momentary union. So too, do these folktales eclipse the borders we’ve drawn, rekindling our attention to circularity, offering instead a mystical merging of many into one —antler, star, story, sun.
Through these timeless reindeer folktales, we see these creatures featured prominently as divine mystical beings, caretakers, mothers, fathers, companions, family members as well as celestial beings poetically ushering in the seasonal cycles. We discover shared similarities emerging, transcending linguistic and cultural barriers, uniting communities of people who migrated with the reindeer as they circled the northern latitudes. These narratives not only portray the deep connection between humans and reindeer but also highlight the shared human reverence for nature's wisdom and the importance of living in harmony with the wild. Most importantly, these folktales reflect our deep human need to feel welcomed and embraced by the herd, and the vital human need to feel that we intimately belong to the landscape. What would it mean to remember ourselves as part of the herd again? How do we begin to listen and dance in a world whose rhythm beats in depths of our hearts, but we just have forgotten how to hear it?
Note* Though there are two different words for reindeer (“caribou” are undomesticated and “reindeer” are domesticated versions of the same creature) I have used the word “reindeer” consistently in this piece to refer to both.
Blog Post Cover Image credit: Juan Encalada on Unsplash
References:
Aboriginal History. (n.d.). How the people hunted the moose. Retrieved July 9, 2025, from https://aboriginalhistory.ca/sections/Documents/Documents/Mythological/How_the_People_Hunted_the_Moose.html
Kent, Neil (2019). The Sami Peoples of the North: A Social and Cultural History.
Laestadius, Lars Levi. (2002). Fragments of Lappish Mythology. Aspasia Books.
Merkur, Daniel (1991). Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit. University of Idaho Press. (https://archive.org/details/powerswhichwedon0000merk)
Mishan, Ligaya (Nov 9., 2020). “In the Arctic, Reindeer Are Sustenance and a Sacred Presence” (https://www/nytimes.com/2020/11/09/t-magazine/reindeer-arctic-food.html)
Pentikäinen, Juha. (1997). The Mythology of the Sami. Reinhold Schletzer.
©2021 Protect The Arctic.
Shaw, Judith (December 18, 2016) “The Reindeer Goddess by Judith Shaw” (https://www.feminismandreligion.com/2016/12/18/-the-reindeer-goddess-by-judith-shaw/)
Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo (Hosts) (December 14, 2023). Francis Weller [audio podcast interview[]. “Emptiness & Grief with Francis Weller”. In Sounds of Sand Podcast. (https://we.scienceandnonduality.com/podcasts/sounds-of-sand/episodes/2148370296)
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