Tlingit and Haida Tradition
Tlingit and Haida (Northwest Coast peoples of present-day Southeast Alaska and Haida Gwaii, British Columbia)
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.
- Region
- Pacific Northwest Coast
- Era
- Ancient times
- Deities
- 4
About
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.
Cosmology
A World Without a Stack: Raven's Coast
Tlingit and Haida tradition does not describe a tiered universe of sky, earth, and underworld realms; this entry keeps to a single coastal world, honestly flagging where the site's usual layered cosmology format is a poor fit.
The Coastal World
MiddleThe Coastal World
The single world of sea, forest, and river where Raven's stories take place: the Nass River household where daylight is stolen, and the beach at Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, where the first people leave the clamshell.
Visit Haida Gwaii
Deities
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.
In Tlingit tradition, the daughter of Chief Fog-Over-the-Salmon who marries Raven and creates a run of sockeye salmon, then withdraws it and herself into the water after he mistreats her, explaining why salmon return to Tlingit rivers each year.
In Tlingit tradition, the father of Fog Woman, named in the story of her marriage to Raven and the origin of the salmon run.
In the Tlingit telling of Raven and the box of daylight, the wealthy old man living at the head of the Nass River who keeps the stars, moon, and sun locked in nested boxes, until Raven tricks his way into his household to steal them.
Stories & Myths
Raven tricks his way into the household of a wealthy old man at the head of the Nass River to steal his nested boxes holding the stars, moon, and sun, freeing daylight into the world.
Walking alone on the beach at Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, Raven finds a giant clamshell full of small frightened beings and coaxes them out to become the first Haida.