Alaska Science Forum

September 20, 2011

Fungus Man and the start of it all

Article #2082

by Ned Rozell

Mycologist and author Lawrence Millman gives a presentation at Creamer’s Field in Fairbanks.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Alaskans love fungi. This was evident on a recent Saturday when
author and mycologist Lawrence Millman offered a mushroom walk at
Creamer’s Field on one of the wettest days of the yellow-leaf season.

“Eighty people showed up in the rain, all eager to
learn about fungi,” Millman said by email after returning to his home in
Massachusetts. “I dare say the hunter-gatherer instinct is alive and
well in Fairbanks.”

And why shouldn’t it be, since Fungus Man made life
possible? During a lecture at the University of Alaska Fairbanks,
Millman introduced the crowd to Fungus Man, a character in a Haida myth.
Millman showed a drawing depicting a wide-eyed Fungus Man paddling a
canoe. Fungus Man guides Raven, who sits in the front of the canoe
holding a spear.

As the legend goes, Fungus Man paddled Raven the
Creator to the land of female genitalia, “thus making it possible for
homosapiens to appear on our beleaguered planet,” Millman said.

Robert Fogel once fleshed out Fungus Man in the journal Mycologia:
“Fungus Man originated from a bracket fungus with a white undersurface
upon which Raven drew a face . . . Of all the creatures that Raven
placed in the stern of the canoe only Fungus Man had the supernatural
powers to breach the spiritual barriers that protected the area where
women’s genital parts were located.”

So, we owe a lot to fungi, one of five kingdoms of
living things, chock full of puffballs, mushrooms, and other examples of
what Millman calls “incredible and essential biomass.”

The kingdom of fungi includes mushrooms, which are the
fruiting bodies of a more complex organism hidden underground. Without
fungi, the boreal forest would neither grow nor decay.

Fungi were important enough to Southeast Alaska and
other Pacific Northwest Natives that figurines carved from “conks”
(shelf fungus that grow from birch and other trees) were placed upon the
graves of shaman, to protect them during their “long death sleep.”
Fogel wrote this in an article about bear, eagle and human figurines,
swiped from the shaman graves in Southeast Alaska by collector George
Emmons from 1880 to 1900. Emmons shipped them away to a museum in
Chicago, where people mistook them for wood until recently.

But Millman, a frequent visitor to the far north, noted
in his lecture that Interior and coastal Alaskans didn’t seem to have
the same reverence for fungi as the Southeasterners. Though he notes the
use of puffballs to stop bleeding (the spores are about the same size
as blood cells), he has found little evidence of ancient northern
Alaskans eating mushrooms, the fruiting body of a fungus.

Perhaps, he said, it was because a Yupik translation of
mushroom means “that which makes your hands fall off.” Or because some
Natives of the far north explained mushrooms as “the (excrement) of
shooting stars.”

“You don’t invite people to dinner to eat (excrement),” he said.

Another possible theory for the absence of
mushroom-consumption among far-northern people is because fungi are poor
in calories. Millman mentioned the term “rabbit starvation,” a phrase
used to describe how someone could perish on a lean diet of only
snowshoe hare meat. Mushrooms offer even less of what it takes to propel
a body.

“If you’re on the move, you need calories,” he said.

Millman is a champion of fungi, essential to life but
forgotten for most of the year until mushrooms pop up in August. He is
also a great fan of its mythical embodiment that paddles the canoe of
creation.

“You can quote me as saying that Fungus Man is a far
more benevolent deity than the Christian God,” Millman said. “(It’s) a
pity no one believes in Him anymore.”