Kaatsʼ and the Bear Wife

A clan story

This story belongs to the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit, for whom the bear is a crest. The retelling below follows the version John R. Swanton recorded and published in Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909) as 'Kâts!'. Related stories of people who marry bears are told widely across the Northwest Coast and the interior.

Into the den

Kaats' was a hunter of the Kaagwaantaan who lived at Sitka. A female bear took him as her husband, and he lived with her in the bears' world, where she bore him children who were cubs.

The promise

In time Kaats' went back to his own people. Before he left, his bear wife made him promise that he would not touch or smile at his human wife and children. He kept hunting for his bear family, bringing game down to the shore, where his rough, strong cubs came to haul them away.

The breaking

One day, moved by his human family, Kaats' broke the promise. When he next went to the bear family, his cubs fell on him and killed him.

After

Swanton's text follows the bear children after their father's death and records that the last of them was killed at White Stone Narrows. It also connects the story to the reasons people did not eat grizzly bear meat. The story joins the human and animal worlds through marriage and makes the obligations of both binding.

Telling it

Stories of a person who marries into the bear people are among the most widespread in the Northwest Coast and the northern interior, told by Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Tagish, and other nations, and they often carry instructions about how bears should be addressed and treated. The Kaagwaantaan version is distinct because it belongs to a particular clan and explains that clan's relationship with the bear. This retelling follows Swanton's published text and does not reproduce any clan-owned form of the story.