Cuniraya Viracocha vs Raven

The ragged trickster-creator of the Huarochirí stories, who makes terraces and canals with a word, fathers a child on the proud huaca Cavillaca through a fruit, and blesses or curses each animal he meets as he chases her to the sea.

No birth is told; he simply 'appeared in the form and dress of a very poor Indian' in the most ancient times (Ávila, ch. II).

The Huarochirí Manuscript (ch. 2) and Francisco de Ávila's Spanish retelling (1608) describe Cuniraya wandering the land as a lice-ridden beggar whom people mock. Yet with a word he makes terraces rise on the ravine sides and, by throwing a cane, sets irrigation channels flowing. In the most famous story he fathers a child on the beautiful and aloof huaca Cavillaca by placing his seed in a ripe lúcuma fruit, then pursues her to the sea at Pachacamac, rewarding the condor, puma, and falcon that give him hopeful news and cursing the skunk, fox, and parrots that do not.

The central figure of Tlingit and Haida oral tradition, who steals daylight from a wealthy old man's nested boxes at the head of the Nass River and, in a Haida telling, coaxes the first people from a clamshell on the beach at Haida Gwaii.

As the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst wrote of the Haida telling, Raven "never actually creates anything; he made the world by stealing, exchanging, redistributing, and generally moving things around." Both Tlingit and Haida traditions cast Raven this way: greedy, funny, and self-interested, yet the figure through whom the world's useful and beautiful things (daylight, salmon, the first people) come to be. Raven's stories are told today by Tlingit and Haida people as living oral tradition, and Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations' own cultural institution, publishes Raven stories for public audiences.