Petrel vs Raven

In the Tlingit Raven cycle, the owner of the world's only fresh water, an everlasting spring he guards by sleeping beside it, until Raven tricks him and flies off with the water to make the rivers.

In the Raven cycle John R. Swanton recorded in English at Sitka and published in *Tlingit Myths and Texts* (1909), Raven hears of a man named Petrel (GAnû'k) who owns an everlasting spring of water, at a time when there is none to drink anywhere else in the world. Petrel keeps the spring covered and sleeps beside it so that no one can take it.

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.