This article deals with linguistic and ethnohistorical aspects of a traditional migration story. First, I show that the narrator uses direct and indirect quotative verbs to encode her second and third hand sources respectively. Second, I analyse how the rich system of deictic motion verbs is used to express the movements of the protagonists and to switch the point of views as the story develops. Lastly, I provide a comparative overview with other North American cultures where the crossing-the-water/ice mythological motif occurs and propose that the story could be a brief account, or the frame of a much larger story, of a past migration from the Great Lakes area westwards.
Vincent Collette (Tue,) studied this question.