Raven vs Tulunigraq (Raven Man)

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.

In the Iñupiaq tradition of Tikiġaq (Point Hope, Alaska), the Raven Man who harpooned a great sea creature whose body became the land on which the village stands.

Tikiġaq, the Iñupiaq village known in English as Point Hope, stands on a long gravel spit reaching into the Chukchi Sea, and its people are among the oldest whaling communities in North America. Their tradition tells that the land itself was once a living creature of the sea, harpooned by Tulunigraq, Raven Man, a being part raven and part man.