Raven

Not simply a trickster

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.

Two nations, two tellings

Raven appears independently in both Tlingit and Haida tradition, and this entry does not merge the two into one story. In the Tlingit telling recorded by John R. Swanton in Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909), Raven tricks his way into a wealthy old man's household at the head of the Nass River to steal his boxes of stars, moon, and sun. In a Haida telling recorded by Swanton in Haida Texts and Myths (1905) and reinterpreted by the Haida artist Bill Reid in his sculpture The Raven and the First Men (1978 to 1980), Raven finds a giant clamshell on the beach at Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, and coaxes the small beings inside it out to become the first Haida.

Clan property and public telling

Among the Tlingit, Raven-cycle stories can be clan-owned (at.óow) in their fullest ceremonial form. What this site presents follows the form these stories take in the public retellings published by Sealaska Heritage Institute and in Swanton's and the Dauenhauers' recorded texts, not a claim to ceremonial or clan-specific content.