The Raven and the Totem:: Alaska Native Myths and Legends

By John Smelcer and Alan Dundes

This is a collection of Alaska Native folklore and mythology. All the various regions and tribal groups are represented in this collection. The collector is John Smelcer who is a writer, poet, and folklorist and who is himself a member of an Alaska Native tribe. Several of the stories are accompanied by illustrations by Larry Vienneau. This work

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blazing Sapphire Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936135134

John Smelcer

JOHN SMELCER is the author of many nonfiction and poetry books for adults, as well as a young adult novel, The Trap. Mr. Smelcer has been a visiting professor at various universities around the world and is the associate publisher and poetry editor of the literary magazine Rosebud.

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The Raven and the Totem Alaska Native Myths and Legends

The Raven and the Totem Alaska Native Myths and Legends

Collected & Edited by

John Smelcer

Naciketas Press

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri 63501

2015

The Raven and the Totem ©2015, 1991, 1990 John Smelcer

Cover art and illustrations ©1991 Larry Vienneau. Cover design by Rusty Nelson. Aleut section art by W. Angus, circa 1850.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author or publisher, except for educational use.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to scholarships for Native Americans.

ISBN 13: 978-1-936135-13-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937101

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Smelcer, John E., 1963-

The Raven and the Totem.

Bibliography: pp. 149-163

1. Alaska Native Mythology. 2. Native American Mythology. Folklore. 3. Oral Narratives. 4. Eskimo, Aleut, Athabaskan, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Eyak. I. Title

Published by:

Naciketas Press

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri 63501

Available at:

Nitai’s Bookstore

715 E. McPherson

Kirksville, Missouri, 63501

Phone: [phone]

http://www.nitaisbookstore.com

http://www.naciketas-press.com

Email: [e-mail]

Contents

Forewords

Introduction

Tlingit, Haida, Eyak & Tsimshian

The Creation Legend

Fire Legend

How Raven Brought Fire

Fog Woman

Raven Turns into a Woman

Yaloa and the Salmon People

The Giant Who Became Mosquitoes

Beaver and Porcupine

Porcupine and Beaver Story

Frog Woman

The Girl Who Was Taken by the Frog People

Raven and Whale

The Creation of the Killer Whale

Raven Steals the Sun, Stars and Moon

Raven Tricks Seagull and Crane

How Cormorant Lost His Tongue

The Owl Legend

Shunyuxklax and the Salmon People

Wolf and Wolverine

Beaver, Groundhog and Brown Bear

Raven Made the Rivers, Lakes, and Streams (How Raven Became Black)

Origin of the Chilkat Blanket

Blackskin

Raven and the First Haida

Shag and Raven

The Devilfish

The Octopus Who Married a Woman

Eagle-Man’s Revenge

The Squirrel Shaman

Ko’edhan Volcano Legend

The Nass River Volcano

The Dog-Husband Story

Eskimo

The Boy and the Bears

The Woman in the Moon

The Blind Boy and the Loon

The Ten-Footed Polar Bear

Raven and Owl

Fox and Raven

The Hunter and the Eagle

Crane and Goose

The Woman in the Whale

The Boy Who Couldn’t Remember

Taboo Story (The Ptarmigan Story)

The Mammoth Hunters

How Crane’s Eyes Became Blue

Walrus’s Gift

Arnarr, the Bear Woman

The Woman Who Married the Muskrat

The Giant Sea Monster

Caribou Man

Stone Woman

A Story of Raven

How Light Was Brought into the World

The Greedy Husband

Kajortoq, the White Fox

Athabaskan

Skolce’s, a Rabbit Tale

Lake Monster

Stone Woman

Raven Steals the Light

The Loon Story

Bush Indians

How Moose Got His Dewlap

When Raven Made Denali

How Wolverine Became Fierce

The Giant Ice Worm

The Old Man and the Bear

A Mouse Story

Beaver and Fox

The Rich Chief’s Son

How Raven Killed the Whale

Raven and Goose-Wife

Dotson’ Sa, Great Raven Makes the World

The First Mosquitoes

Beaver Story

Old Man and Old Woman Rock

He Who Flew to the Moon

How Porcupine Got His Quills

Raven and Loon: The Necklace Story

When Raven Was Killed

Fire in the Sky: The Northern Lights

When Raven Killed Grizzly Bear

Aleut

Preface to Aleut Stories

The First Seals: An Aleut Origin Myth

The First Sea Otters

The Woman Who Married Fur Seals

The Lonely Woman of Attu

How Aleuts Discovered the Pribilof Islands

Bibliography

Preface to the Bibliographic Index

Aleut

Athabaskan

Eskimo

Eyak

Haida

Tlingit

Tsimshian

About the Author and Artist

John Smelcer

Larry Vienneau

Forewords

I came across these stories by way of my esteemed colleague and historian, James Michener, who told me about his friendship with John Smelcer while he was conducting research in Alaska for his book, which eventually bore the same title. James asked me to read the stories and to offer support for a book by way of writing a brief introduction. He told me that John is the son of an Alaskan Native father. As far as I can tell, this is the most comprehensive collection of its kind, stories collected from all over Alaska. I was astonished to learn that John was so young—barely in his twenties—and that he had been collecting stories since he was in his late teens. I began my own journey by studying the folklore of American Indians when I was similarly aged. John reminded me of myself, so I agreed.

Myth is one of the consistent enterprises of humanity. Our religions are informed by myth. Yet, for the layman, the word myth has come to imply a kind of falsehood, something that is untrue, quaint, and even superstitious. But in reality, the word’s origin stems from truth. Myths are not the simple or frivolous stories of a people. Instead, they are didactic narratives that teach how the universe was created and ordered. They are transmitted orally from generation to generation with surprising fidelity, and within their message are social lessons as well as knowledge of the world. Myths are at the very center of human activity and history. They come not from a recent, measurable past as do legends, but from a deep time before history and without known origins.

These stories were meant to entertain, educate, and engage audiences. They are alive and dynamic. They are cultural versions of universal tendencies. Different meaning and depth of understanding is garnered at different stages and circumstances of life. Fantastic, bizarre, tragic, and even humorous, the many stories assembled here are colloquial yet poetic, timeless and complex. They are accounts of magic, transformation, and of how and why things exist as they do in the natural world, a world that is as mysterious as it is harsh and unforgiving.

Joseph Campbell (1987), The Masks of God, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers).

How the stars must have aligned to create someone like John Smelcer, a cultural insider who speaks the ancient, but nearly forgotten language of his people, has access to living culture bearers, and has an interest in anthropology, linguistics, and folklore. It is a more rare event than you might imagine. If he had come along even a little later in history, there might have been no one left to tell these stories. If he come along sooner, no one would have listened to him. The fact that Joseph Campbell was his mentor makes it even more astonishing. The range of Smelcer’s work is impressive. His research has taken him around the world. There are few folklorists like him ... or as gifted. John Smelcer is gaining a reputation as one of our best folklorists.

Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore, Interpreting Folklore, and In Quest of the Hero.

Introduction

This book has remained a perennial bestseller in Alaska for a quarter of a century. It has been reprinted many times, and it has been translated and published into numerous languages, including Dutch, German, Russian, and even Marathi (India). In Germany, the book is entitled Im Land Des Weissen Raben: Fabeln und Sagen aus Alaska (In the Land of the White Raven: Fables and Stories from Alaska).¹ In 2014, it won the Federation of Indian Publishers’ National Book Award. Stories in the book have been adapted for television (Northern Exposure) and cinema (Free Willy). Some of the stories have been adapted into stage performance, and many have worked their way into my Alaska-themed novels, like Edge of Nowhere, and Lone Wolves, which the American Library Association named one of the best feminist novels of 2013. Some of them also appear in my other novels, like The Trap and The Great Death. I couldn’t have imagined the success this book would garner when I first compiled it all those years ago.

The 25th anniversary edition offered me a chance to significantly revise the book. For all that time the text had a cramped typewriter look, mostly because it was typed on a typewriter in the late 1980s and then published from camera-ready plates. The text was single-spaced and hard to read, especially for older readers. More importantly, during the ensuing two-and-a-half decades, I continued to collect myths, interviewing Native elders from across Alaska. Besides, the original volume lacked even a single Aleut story. I have corrected that oversight, adding a number of narratives. The truth is, I had collected several stories from Aleut elders in 1987, when U. S. Senator Ted Stevens had asked me to interview Aleuts about their internment experience during World War II. He planned to include them in the bill for the Aleut Restitution Act, which he was then drafting. But for some reason I can’t recall now, the stories were not included in the first edition. For a quarter of a century, I have been troubled by that unintentional omission. This new, expanded second edition contains more than two dozen new stories not found in the original edition, many incorporated from my books A Cycle of Myths and In the Shadows of Mountains. This new edition truly is the most comprehensive book of its kind.

There were twenty Alaska Native languages when this book was first published, but Marie Smith, the last fluent native speaker of Eyak, died in 2008. Nineteen remain. Eskimo-Aleut is a language family, with Aleut as one branch and Eskimo the other. Four Eskimo languages are spoken today in Alaska, three of the Yupik language family (Alutiiq [also called Sugpiaq], Central Yup’ik, and Siberian Yup’ik), the forth being Inupiaq. Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit is another language family, with the now extinct Eyak as one branch and all the Athabaskan languages as another. Tlingit is in some ways distantly related to both. The Athabaskan languages dominate interior Alaska, with eleven distinct languages, each differing in varying degrees from the others. Haida is a completely different language, spoken also in Canada. Tsimshian is also a completely different language, spoken mostly in Canada. None of the Alaska Native languages were written before the coming of the Russians.

Distribution of Alaska Native Cultures and Languages.

Each Alaska Native language has its own intricate beauty, a highly complex and regular grammar, and a lexicon (vocabulary) that has been developed by the people over the thousands of years they have lived in their respective geographical regions.

Recently, the history of these languages has been tragic. From about 1900 until the 1960s, Native languages were severely depressed. Children were punished for speaking their Native language in school. They were forced to abandon their language in order to speak English only. In 1972, the Alaska State Legislature passed the Bilingual Education Bill, giving children the right to use and cultivate their Native language in school, and also established the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Despite these policy changes, almost all Alaska Native languages are in decline, and many are severely endangered. Some school administrators still believe Native languages have no place in schools or in the world. One public school superintendent once told me (despite the law) that he didn’t want that Indian gobbledygook in his school. As for my own language (Ahtna), there are only a few of us left who speak the language. I am the only tribal member left who can read and write in it fluently. In 1998, after years of working with elders, I edited and published The Ahtna Noun Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide. Efforts are taking place now to maintain for future generations of Alaskans the precious heritage of their Native cultures, including their languages.

John Smelcer interviewing an Ahtna Athabaskan elder in July, 1996.

In the past several decades, the Alaska Native Language Center has been the most significant preserver of Alaska Native languages. Besides the many scholarly studies, reports, conferences, and language texts, the A.N.L.C. has also either produced or participated in the publication of numerous collections and translations of Alaska Native folklore. Many of the books I used as references during my research and collection process, all of which are listed in the bibliography, were produced by the Alaska Native Language Center. Those scholars most responsible for the success of the A.N.L.C. are Michael Krauss, Lawrence Kaplan, and James Kari. I studied linguistics under Kaplan, and attended numerous lectures by Krauss and Kari, who worked with my own Athabaskan language (Ahtna). In almost every recently published text I encountered in the literature review, one or more of their names appeared somewhere in the acknowledgments. I, too, owe a great debt to them as do the Native Peoples of Alaska for their careful and meticulous documentation and preservation of these oral texts and translations.

Although I had been hearing these ancient stories all my life, not until I met James Michener did the idea of collecting them into a volume begin to coalesce. For a semester during the mid-1980s, Michener was conducting research in the University of Alaska, Fairbanks’s Elmer E. Rasmuson Library while writing a book on the history of Alaska. The finished book, Alaska, would be published in 1988. Michener had a little office in the English Department, where, as an English major, I frequently stopped in to talk to him. We developed a friendship, going to the Wood Center Student Union for lunch weekly, both of us usually ordering a baked potato dressed in one of a variety of ways at a condiment bar. My favorite was Mexican. When I told Michener that my father’s side of the family is Alaska Native and that elders had told me many folk stories, he encouraged me to write them all down. Later, when I presented him a typed manuscript, he liked it so much that he sent it off to Joseph Campbell, asking the great mythologist to read the stories and consider writing an introduction for it.

To my great delight, Campbell agreed.

Around that same time, I was enrolled in Dr. Jack Bernet’s course on Alaska Native Oral Narrative Literature (mythology). I recall that I interviewed a few more elders and submitted an expanded manuscript and bibliography as part of my course grade. I painted his house that summer and replaced damaged rain gutters. In 1990, I self-published a small-run edition of the collection, calling it simply Raven Stories. The second printing, bearing the current title and cover art, was produced in 1991. Alaska Magazine named it one of the best books about Alaska that year. Not long after, a representative from the Emmy Award winning television series Northern Exposure called to ask if they could adapt one of my stories into a Christmas episode in which the Natives of fictitious Cicely perform a traditional myth for the rest of the community. They selected the myth of how Raven brought light to the world. I was flown down to Redmond, Washington, to watch the filming and to meet the cast. I developed a crush on Janine Turner, who played bush pilot Maggie O’Connell. Several of the origin myths are also included in Stories from the Great Land, an anthology of the greatest writing about Alaska and the Yukon, including work by Jack London, Robert Service, James Michener, and Louis L’Amour, whose western novel Sitka (1957) is set in Alaska during the tumultuous Klondike Gold Rush. Over the years, magazines around the world have published stories from this book, including Parabola, which published a story on compassion, alongside an essay by the Dalai Lama. In the years since, the Dalai Lama and I have collaborated on a couple of literary projects, including co-writing an illustrated poem on the nature of compassion.

Many of the stories assembled in this anthology are the result of comparative methodology, the close examination and comparison of previously recorded narratives. While much of my research came from these studies, a large number of tales were told to me by Natives from across Alaska. It should be said that for every story contained in this book, numerous variations exist. As a case in point, let me share this episode: While participating in ritual dancing at a potlatch in 1997, a young Athabaskan man danced his way closer to me. When we were side by side, dancing to the beat of the elder’s traditional drums in the log community hall, stomping till our feet hurt, he said that one of my stories didn’t end the way his grandmother always told it. I acknowledged his observation, pointing out, however, that the version I included in my book was the most commonly told variant of the story, which satisfied him. Years ago, when I first began to think about publishing an expanded second edition, I asked Alan Dundes at the University of California, Berkley, to write a foreword. Dundes, one of his generation’s most widely known interpreters of folklore, had worked extensively in American Indian folklore. Alan very kindly agreed. I am indebted to Joseph Campbell and Alan Dundes for their contributions to this book. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Neal and Betsy Delmonico, Dan Johnson, and my wife, Amber Johnson, who kindly retyped the stories from A Cycle of Myths (1993) since no original disk existed.

A few tales, I believe, have never been published prior to this book, and I am pleased to bring them into print, where they can be preserved for future generations. Whereas archaeologists