Old-Woman-Underneath vs Raven

In the Tlingit Raven cycle, the old woman beneath the earth who tends the post it rests on and controls the tides; when she is hungry the earth shakes, and Raven forces her to let the tide rise and fall.

Swanton's Sitka Raven cycle describes the earth as resting on a post attended by Old-woman-underneath (Hayicâ'nak!u). When she is hungry the earth shakes, and people put grease into the fire to send to her. She also controls the rising and falling of the water.

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.