Tlingit and Haida Tradition

Two nations, one entry, carefully framed

Tlingit and Haida are distinct nations of the Northwest Coast, the Tlingit centered in what is now Southeast Alaska and the Haida on Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) in British Columbia and in southern Alaska. Both are living, sovereign peoples, and Raven's stories are told by their own tellers today, not only recorded in old books. Archaeological evidence, karst-cave finds on Haida Gwaii and remains from On Your Knees Cave in Southeast Alaska, documents human presence on this coast for at least 10,000 to 13,000 years; that figure describes how long people have lived here, not the age of any single story, since these are living oral traditions passed down and retold, not artifacts with a fixed date of composition.

Clan property and what this site includes

Among the Tlingit especially, many stories, crests, and songs are at.óow: property owned by a specific clan, whose telling in full ceremonial context requires that clan's standing and permission. What follows here are Raven-cycle stories in the form they have been published for a general public audience, by the tellers' own nations or with their direct involvement (Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations' own cultural institution, publishes Raven stories for exactly this kind of public telling) or recorded by name from specific tellers by early ethnographers. Nothing describing a restricted ceremony or a clan's exclusive at.óow is included.

Raven

Raven, Yéil in Tlingit and, in Haida, Xuuya or Yáahl depending on dialect (Skidegate and Masset), is the central figure of this cycle: not a simple trickster but, as the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst put it of the Haida telling, one who "never actually creates anything; he made the world by stealing, exchanging, redistributing, and generally moving things around." Raven steals daylight from an old man's nested boxes at the head of the Nass River in the best-known Tlingit telling, and in a Haida telling recorded by John R. Swanton and reinterpreted in Bill Reid's sculpture The Raven and the First Men (1978 to 1980, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia), he coaxes the first people out of a clamshell on the beach at Rose Spit on Haida Gwaii.

Sources used here, and how they differ

John R. Swanton's Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909) and Haida Texts and Myths (1905) are outsider recordings, made by a non-Native ethnographer, but they record specific named Tlingit and Haida tellers and remain the fullest early written source for many of these stories. Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer's Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives (1987), edited with extensive Tlingit-language and cultural annotation, and Robert Bringhurst's translations of the Haida poets Skaay and Ghandl in A Story as Sharp as a Knife (1999) represent later, more collaborative scholarship, though Bringhurst's own standing to translate Haida oral literature has itself been debated within Haida and academic communities, and this site notes that debate rather than treating his translations as beyond question. Tellings differ across nation, dialect, and individual teller on details as basic as Raven's kin and exact route to the light; this entry does not force them into a single version.