Raven
Also known as: Yéil, Xuuya, Yáahl
Mythological Narrative
Among the rainforest peoples from southeast Alaska down the British Columbia coast, Raven (Xhuuya in Haida, Yéil in Tlingit) is the chief shaper of the present world. Greedy, cunning, and never satisfied, he built the order of things almost by accident, piece by piece, while pursuing his own appetites: light, fire, the tides, and the salmon in the rivers were mostly stolen or swindled into being.
The most famous story is the theft of light. The world lay in darkness, the sun, moon, and stars locked in boxes in the house of an old chief. Raven turned himself into a hemlock needle floating in the basket of the chief's daughter as she drank; she conceived, and he was born as the old man's adored grandson. Crying for the boxes one by one, he released the stars and the moon, then seized the sun and flew out through the smokehole to scatter light over the world; the soot of that escape is why the raven is black. The Haida also tell that after the great flood receded, Raven heard small voices inside a giant clamshell at Rose Spit on Haida Gwaii and coaxed the frightened little beings out: the first humans.
Raven and Eagle (or Wolf) form the two moieties of Northwest Coast society, still governing marriage and inheritance among the Haida and Tlingit. Bill Reid's monumental cedar carving The Raven and the First Men (1980) renders the clamshell scene, and stands in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## Not simply a trickster
As the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst wrote of the Haida telling, Raven "never actually creates anything; he made the world by stealing, exchanging, redistributing, and generally moving things around." Both Tlingit and Haida traditions cast Raven this way: greedy, funny, and self-interested, yet the figure through whom the world's useful and beautiful things (daylight, salmon, the first people) come to be. Raven's stories are told today by Tlingit and Haida people as living oral tradition, and Sealaska Heritage Institute, the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations' own cultural institution, publishes Raven stories for public audiences.
## Two nations, two tellings
Raven appears independently in both Tlingit and Haida tradition, and this entry does not merge the two into one story. In the Tlingit telling recorded by John R. Swanton in *Tlingit Myths and Texts* (1909), Raven tricks his way into a wealthy old man's household at the head of the Nass River to steal his boxes of stars, moon, and sun. In a Haida telling recorded by Swanton in *Haida Texts and Myths* (1905) and reinterpreted by the Haida artist Bill Reid in his sculpture *The Raven and the First Men* (1978 to 1980), Raven finds a giant clamshell on the beach at Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii, and coaxes the small beings inside it out to become the first Haida.
## Clan property and public telling
Among the Tlingit, Raven-cycle stories can be clan-owned (at.óow) in their fullest ceremonial form. What this site presents follows the form these stories take in the public retellings published by Sealaska Heritage Institute and in Swanton's and the Dauenhauers' recorded texts, not a claim to ceremonial or clan-specific content.
Cross-Pantheon Parallels & Archetypes
Classical Art & Museum Artifacts
High-resolution museum artifacts, classical sculptures, pottery reliefs, and bronze idols preserving authentic historical representations of Raven.
Neptune
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Raven.
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