Tlingit and Haida TraditionSupernatural Craftsman
Master Carpenter
Also known as Master-carpenter
- woodworking
- canoes
- craft
A supernatural craftsman of Haida tradition who, in a Skidegate story Swanton recorded, sets out to build a canoe to make war on South-East, the storm wind.
About Master Carpenter
The craftsman
Master Carpenter is a supernatural being in the Haida stories John R. Swanton recorded at Skidegate in 1900 and 1901, the embodiment of the woodworking skill on which Haida life depended: great cedar canoes, plank houses, boxes, and poles.
A canoe for war
In 'How Master-carpenter began making a canoe to war with South-East', he begins work at a steep place at one end of the town of Sqa-i. His first canoe splits when he throws it into the water; so do the next, each thicker than the last. Along the way a figure called Greatest Fool shows him how to use bent wedges to split one log into two canoes. At last he gives up on building and sets out for South-East's house, the stormy south-east wind whose weather dominates the coast of Haida Gwaii.
Craft against weather
The story sets human and supernatural skill against the sea and storm that every canoe on the coast must survive. This entry follows Swanton's published text and does not fill in episodes it does not give.
Worship and cult
Temples, festivals, and practices recorded for Master Carpenter
No ceremony for this figure is described in the published sources this site draws on.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- John R. Swanton, Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 29), "How Master-carpenter began making a canoe to war with South-East"
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Parallels are editorial comparisons across traditions: a shared role does not, by itself, establish a shared origin.