Embracing Bigfoot

These days Bigfoot or Sasquatch can be found everywhere from bumper stickers to T-shirts to carved figures outside of gas stations. What many don’t realize is that Native Americans have shared stories of the large, hairy beast for generations, long before Europeans settled in the U.S.

Unlike the mainstream version of the larger-than-life creature, however, “many Native perspectives on Sasquatch are vastly different than in popular culture,” says Dana Whitelaw, executive director of High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, which hosted the “Sensing Sasquatch” exhibit from March 2024 to January 2025. “The idea was to acknowledge pop culture but also prepare people to now leave their notions of Sasquatch at the door in order to encounter other perspectives.”

The word Sasquatch comes from Sasq’ets, which is from the Halq’emeylem language of Coast Salish First Nations peoples from southwestern British Columbia. For many Indigenous peoples, an encounter with Sasquatch is said to be a blessing and a life-changing experience. The creature is considered a sacred being and a spiritual guide meant to relay important communications to humans.

A similar sentiment is echoed at The World Forestry Center’s Discovery Museum in Portland, Oregon. The “Sasquatch: Ancestral Guardians” exhibit, which runs through January 2026, has artwork by Indigenous artists, including carved masks, a life-size visual of what Bigfoot may look like and a piece by Phillip Cash Cash, an endangered language advocate who is Nez Perce and Cayuse.

He created a 13-foot Bigfoot rattle, made from deer antlers and a large cottonwood branch. Beneath it, there’s a quote from Cash Cash which sums up the feelings of many Native Americans who say they’ve had eyewitness accounts: “When the world touches your heart and you have an experience with a being like Sasquatch, then you will know the world as we do.”

In other words, for Native Americans the existence of Sasquatch is not questioned. Rather, it is a living, breathing being and a protector of the earth.

“In museums, that moment when someone says, ‘Oh, I never thought of it that way,’ is a powerful one,” Whitelaw says. “Art provides a path for that moment and offers a visceral way to see someone else’s understanding of the world.”