Week 9 Essay: Location, Location, Location

The most interesting thing to stand out when I was reading the Alaskan Legends Unit was the duality of Raven. For the first several stories Raven is your normal head-god-type character. He shapes, he teaches, he guides humanity through the first stages of civilization. He fulfills the role of the main god perfectly, giving humanity laws to follow and punishing them when they disobey with things like taking the sun away and flooding the world.

Then abruptly, it shifts. Somewhere between “Raven’s Marriage” and “Raven and the Seals” Raven seems to depart almost entirely from his role as head deity and takes on the role of the trickster instead. He holds a large feast with the intention of seeing a hat and blanket. He finds himself a wife through braggings and showing off, ultimately being unable to keep it up. He finds the seals just so he can eat mass quantities of them daily. He tricks Pitch into fishing past sunrise so he can use the melted substance to repair his boat and keep the fish they caught for himself.

In “How Raven Stole the Lake” things change once more, but to a combination of his previous roles. Raven steals an entire lake from where it laid, but he does it to fly it home to a human tribe and place it near them so they are able to live better, aided by his teachings about the new feature of their landscape.

In some stories Raven is just the head deity, in others he is a trickster little better than Anansi, in still others Raven is an odd combination of the two archetypes. One thing that can be said for this is the fact that the Alaskan natives all lived in different tribes stretched out over a wide expanse of land. The note under the title states which tribe the legend comes from, and it has a direct correlation with how Raven is seen. Those in the Bering Straits view Raven more as a head god. The Tsimshian hold the legends of Raven as a trickster. It’s a very interesting look at how location oftentimes decides the structure and fate of a story.

(Raven - web source)

Week 9 Storytelling: People of the Long Winter

They say that one day, Raven became enraged with the senseless killing that man engaged in. But the people refused to learn and change, so Raven took the sun away. The world was covered in a long night. The other peoples inland began to panic and pray to Raven. Their tribe took part in this as well, until it became obvious that Raven would not hear. And so their leaders took upon their shoulders the decision to turn to the sea.

Under the water it was always dark - those creatures would be best adapted to teaching them how to live in a world without the sun. They turned to the moon and the tides to show them their way, learned the crafts of fishing and hunting through the dark woods upon the coast. They built strong canoes and sleds for running out upon the solid ice. They took the harsh winter that came from the long night and learned from it, coming out stronger than the inland peoples that ran in fear.

When the sun came back, their tribe kept to the lessons learned during the long night. So when the days grew shorter and the sun eventually took many moons to return, they were prepared and did not lack. They turned from Raven and the sun and gave themselves over fully to the Moon and the Sea - the true constants in life.

Many years later, men from a land of fire came to see them. They carried tales of a sun that always shined and a land that saw no snow. As is often the case with fire and ice, it wasn’t long until the two peoples clashed in an eruption of steam and war. It was bitter, long, and hard, no less than their elements demanded.

Years had passed, and the war seemed to finally be slowing down when the chief found a boy among the wreckage of one of the last Fire Ships to leave their lands. Though he was a child of sun, the chief’s heart went out to the injured child. So he picked the boy up, and took him home to his own tent. The others in the village protested, wanting him to abandon the child because he was of the peoples of fire. The chief tried to get them to see how well the child had taken to their ways, and how badly the boy wished to be a part of their water tribe.

Finally, the long winter came. As the days grew shorter, the boy grew colder, quieter. Their shamans said his fire was dying without the sun. The chief called a meeting, and the tribe hashed out the boy’s fate until a conclusion had been reached: if the boy lived past the long winter, he was meant to be there and would become water. It was all in the spirit’s hands now.

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Notes: So I was really intrigued by the story about Raven-Boy and the Sun. It was such a neat idea, that Raven took the sun away and his brother/son had to steal it back. The story reminded me of a little story I’d read some years before (couldn’t remember the name, or find it) so I basically wove the two into one. I made the people adapt during the period of no sun, and added bits of the adopted child. It made for a neat little thing, I think.

Bib: “The Raven Myth: Raven-Boy and the Sun” from Myths and Legends of Alaska by Katharine Berry Judson (1911). Web Source.

Image: Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender, gifed in one of his greater moments. Web source.

Week 9 Reading Diary: Alaskan Legends

Reading Diary - Alaskan Legends

• The Raven Myth: Raven’s Creation
• Oh look, Pod People! Could do an alien twist on it
• Raven has a mask and turns into a man? Definite sci-fi vibes
• The animals marching two-by-two, the wolves, the sheep, and the kangaroo and they all went marching, marching two-by-two
• “This is why woman is fair-skinned” Oh my God Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white! (quote from Mean Girls)
• TRM: Raven Creates the People
• … Mosquitoes make earth cheerful?
• TRM: The Skyland and the Sea
• I like the idea that we turn into bears while sleeping
• TRM: Raven-Boy and the Sun
• that’s a really interesting reason for why the sun leaves
• kinda makes me think of a little drabble I read a long time ago
• cannot see the sun and so while some beg, others adapt. They take the moon as their guide and listen to the sea instead of the air and it’s birds. As time goes on they meet other people who still worship the sun. Hmm, could redo the neat part of that little story.
• The Flood
• That was a highly ineffective punishment
• The Origin of the Tides
• Raven’s Feast
• Raven’s Marriage
• that’s the most interesting marriage story I’ve ever heard
• Raven and the Seals
• he turns into Anansi in this one
• Raven and Pitch
• Raven and Marmot
• The Bringing of Light by Raven
• It’s like a retelling of the first one, with Raven-Boy being a normal kid with a Raven coat
• Snow-hill makes the light disappear. This reminds me of when I drove down a hilly road and the guy behind me had his brights on. He was just far enough behind me that I couldn’t see him, but the road would get brighter and darker as he crested the hills behind me. I started seriously thinking it might be a UFO (it certainly pulsed like in the movies) but then the dude sped up and I noticed the car and figured it out.
• This sounds more like the usual kind of tale for night and day
• The Naming of the Birds
• Grouse and Sea-Lion understand each other because they throw pebbles at humans to kill them? Pfft...
• How Raven Stole the Lake*
• it’s really interesting that they have a story about Raven stealing their lake to go teach other tribes with it.
• Origin of the Chilkat Blanket
• really, really pretty story
• The First Woman
• I love how it has included proof so you don’t question the tale
• Origin of the Winds
• The Land of the Dead
• Dude, that’s so totally a parallel of Inferno
• The Ghost Land
• I’m pretty sure there are better ways of committing suicide
• The Lost Light
• do a combo with this story and Raven-Boy and the Sun? Could be how I get the kid to the tribe
• The Boy in the Moon
• the sun feeds the moon and that’s how it ‘waxes’? Very different
• Cradle Song
• The Wolves and the Deer
• what an awkward party
• The Last of the Thunderbirds
• Thunderbirds, HO!!!
• Origin of the Killer Whale Crest
• The Discontented Grass Plant
• moral of the story? Some people are just never happy
• Tricks of the Fox
• no matter where the tale is from, foxes are always tricky