Gonakadet

The wealth-bringer

Gonakadet (Gunakadeit) is one of the best-known sea beings of Tlingit tradition. Swanton's Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909), in its Wrangell Raven myth, names Gonakadet as the head chief of the killer-whale people under the ocean and records the belief that the sight of him brings good fortune, and he is associated with wealth throughout Tlingit art and story.

The son-in-law story

Swanton prints the widely told son-in-law story as 'Origin of the Gonaqadet' (story 33). A high-caste young man is scorned by his mother-in-law as a lazy gambler. He traps a monster in a lake with a split tree, skins it, and wearing the skin hunts at night, leaving salmon, halibut, seals, and at last whales on the beach during a famine. His mother-in-law claims the food comes through her own spirit power and is honoured as a shaman. One dawn a raven calls before he can take off the skin, and he dies inside it; his wife reveals the truth, and her mother dies of shame. The wife lays his body and the skin by the lake, and later he rises in the monster's form and takes her down to its house. Swanton's text ends by saying that this Gonaqadet brings good luck to those who see him, as do his wife and their children, the Daughters of the Creek.

On poles and house posts

Gonakadet appears on house posts and poles as a crest of particular clans. Edward Keithahn's Monuments in Cedar (1945) notes that the Gonakadet pole standing before Chief Shakes's house at Wrangell held the ashes of the father and mother of Chief Shakes VI; a duplicate now stands in the same spot.