The Maymaygwashi was a creature of the folklore of the people Ojibwa, also called Ojibway or Chippewa with the the United States. The French indicated them under the name of Saulteux, because they had met them close to the Sault Sainte-Marie. These people of language algonquienne occupied an immense territory whose center was the Higher Lac. The Ojibway country included/understood a big part of the west of the Ontario, south of the Manitoba, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Nomads, hunters and fishermen, Ojibwas had moreover access to the layers of native Cuivre which one finds in current Michigan, in the south of the immense lake.

Maymaygwashi was a watery creature, described like a kind of “siréneau”, with the childish body and the hairy face living in cracks along escarpées banks of the lake. As called Nebaunaubaewuk , it was said as this being attracted the mortals in the depths where they were transformed in their turn into beings semi-men semi-fish. On the cliffs which border northern bank of the lake Supérieur, in several places one can see cave paintings, representations of animals, realities or fantastic, canoes, men and stars, often located in anfractuosities or under rock shelters natural, accessible only by the way from water, by means of a boat. Some of these works have several millenia and are undoubtedly contemporary beginning of the exploitation of the copper layers in the same area. One sees there also prints of hands, painted with the red Ocre on the rock. For Ojibwas, they are Maymaygwashis which made these prints by raising their hands out of water.

There exists an account coming from Euro-Canadian who claims to have seen a creature similar to Maymaygwashi. Coming Saint-Germain, inhabitant of Repentigny (Quebec), had made career in the trade of the furs with the autochtones of the West. The November 13rd 1812, at the Court of the Bench of the King for the district of Montreal it told under oath, in front of the judges P.L. Panet and J. Ogden, the following history:

the May 3rd 1782, St-Germain took the way of the west at the height to go Kaministikwia (today Thunder Bay) at the Western end of the lake Supérieur, edge of a canoe with a crew of three men and an old woman of the Ojibwa nation. This evening the team stopped in the island Pâté (Black and white Island), to spend the night. Once the camping installed, Saint-Germain decided to go to tighten nets to fish some fish.

In the twilight, whereas it set out again towards the bivouac, it saw, to 150 or 200 feet an unknown creature in water of the lake. The being had a chest similar to that of a eight year old child. The face had a dark dye and crisp hair, described by Saint-Germain like those of a “young Black”. The being was held with half left water, one of the arm raised, the other pressed on the hip, posture traditionally allotted to Maymaygwashi. The bottom of the body, immersed, appeared to be that of a fish. Saint-Germain called his companions who could see the creature. St-Germain ran to seek his rifle but when it pointed the weapon charged towards the creature, the Amerindian one interposed, clinging to its clothing and preventing it from aiming.

the being plunged slowly not to reappear. The woman tança then sharply Saint-Germain, to have wanted to shoot at the “god from water and the lakes”, the Manitoban Niba Nabais. She predicts that the creature would send a storm to them. What did not fail to occur. Around eleven hours of the evening, a storm started, which was soon such an intensity that the travellers had to draw their higher boat on bank and to take refuge on the heights of the island. The storm lasted three days, immobilizing them on the island. Saint-Germain known as to have seen only one coincidence in the release of the storm. The fourth day, they could take again their road.

According to Saint-Germain, another traveller would have claimed that a similar creature had already been seen close to the Pâté island, the place of residence of the Manitoban Niba Nabais according to Ojibwas.

Let us announce that, at Ojibwas of the north of Minnesota, one feared the Memegwicios , kinds of Pygmy S of the desert grounds, the size of children from ten to eleven years with covered bodies of hairs and nesting on the high rock cornices of Badlands. Memegwicios seem to be cousins of Maymaygwashi to which the name is close étymologiquement.