Am’ala

Also Known As: also written Amala; glossed by Franz Boas as “Very Dirty”, and called Smoke-hole in the Nass River tellings
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Strength won by secret discipline rather than by birth, and grown great enough to take the weight of the turning world onto one body.
Role in Mythos: He is the despised youngest of a Tsimshian house who becomes the strongest man alive and then succeeds a failing chief as the being who holds up the pole the flat world turns on.
Relation to Humans: He is human, which is the point of him, and everything that stands above him stands because he has not moved. His survival depends on people too, since the wild-duck oil that eases his arms has to be hunted, rendered and carried out to him once a year.

Ash works into everything. It greys the hair, dulls the skin, settles into the seams of a hide shirt and never quite comes out in cold river water. That was the smell of the boy his own household called Very Dirty, who slept up where the smoke went out and woke each morning with grit in his eyelashes while his brothers slept clean and warm below him.

When Franz Boas sat down at Kincolith at the mouth of the Nass in the winter of 1894, a man named Moses gave him the whole thing in six sentences. There was a man who never slept in his house. He always lay at the edge of his smoke-hole, and therefore he grew exceedingly strong. When he went to gather firewood he pulled out a whole tree and carried it home on his shoulder. Nobody could carry what he was able to carry. That is one of the leanest tellings on the coast, and everything remarkable about the man is folded into the word therefore.

The longer Tsimshian versions give him the childhood the fragment leaves out. He is the youngest and the least of the house, stepped over rather than spoken to, sleeping in the hearth ashes and, in some tellings, in his own urine. Children have loved that detail for a very long time. The name fastens onto the condition rather than the person, which is how a boy ends up going through life answering to Very Dirty.

What nobody in the house knew was where he went in the black hours before dawn. Down at the river he broke the skin of ice with his heel and lowered himself in, and sat there until the cold stopped being pain and turned into something quieter, then scoured himself raw with cut branches and came home to lie in the ashes again before anyone stirred. That is the ordinary Northwest Coast discipline for a person who wants power, and it is done in secret because the whole point is that nobody watches you become strong. Somewhere out in that dark a supernatural being met him and gave him the rest of it.

When it finally showed, it showed all at once. He threw men who had beaten him. He out-pulled animals. In one telling he set his hands against a mountain and moved it. The family that had stepped over him for years now had a young man in the house who could walk in with a standing tree across his shoulder without breaking stride, and nobody in the story apologises.

Word of that carried to an island in the sea to the southwest, where an old chief had been lying on his back for longer than anyone could count with a long pole braced against him. The flat world turned on the top of it. He was failing, and he needed someone to take it, so he sent for the strongest man alive. The handover is the quietest moment in the story. The old man passed the pole across, the weight of everything settled onto a different chest, and the turning did not stop.

The tellings disagree about how he carries it. Some lay the pole across his chest, others brace it behind his back. None of them describe his face. What they give instead is a set of physical facts, which is more useful anyway: skin greyed by a lifetime of ash, shoulders and upper arms kept slick, and a spine that has not been permitted to change position since he lay down. When the Tsimshian carver David Boxley made the cedar house front for the Walter Soboleff Building in Juneau, dedicated in 2015, he put Am’ala on it, and gave a face to a figure the written record had never bothered to describe.

There is someone on that island whose entire work is oil. Once a year he comes with wild-duck oil and rubs it into Am’ala’s arms and shoulders, spoonful by spoonful, and the ease of it lasts another twelve months. It is a small, domestic, almost tender arrangement. It is also the thread the world hangs by.

His abilities are not really powers. He has no shape to shift, no weather, no weapon, no supernatural office. He has strength, and the strength was earned in cold water by a boy nobody was watching, which is exactly why the tradition keeps him a man rather than promoting him to a god. What he can do is hold. The villages, the rivers, the goats on the high ridges, all of it keeps its place because one person underneath declines to shift.

What he cannot do is set it down, or rest, or feed himself. The oil has to come to him, and the oil comes from ducks. When the ducks are hunted out there will be nothing left to grease him with, his arms will fail, and the world will go off the pole. It is a doomsday clock made of birds. Further north the Tlingit tell the same shape of story about Blackskin, the despised nephew who takes up the earth’s column and whose shifting grip is what an earthquake is, and the family resemblance to Atlas has been noticed often enough that some have wanted to put Am’ala down to European contact, though the smoke-hole, the cold river and the duck oil belong to nobody but this coast.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Amala in Tsimshian mythology?

Amala, more properly Am’ala, is a Tsimshian hero from the northern coast of British Columbia who holds up the pole the world turns on. He begins as the youngest and most despised member of his household, sleeping in the ashes by the fire, and earns supernatural strength through secret training. His name is glossed by Franz Boas as “Very Dirty,” and the Nass River tellings call him Smoke-hole after the place he slept.

How did Amala become strong?

Amala trained in secret before dawn, breaking the ice on the river, sitting in the freezing water and scrubbing himself with branches, then returning to the ashes before the household woke. A supernatural being met him during this training and gave him strength. This is the standard Northwest Coast discipline for acquiring power, and its secrecy is part of the method rather than an accident of the story.

What does Amala do?

Amala holds up the pole on which the flat world turns, having taken the job from a dying chief on an island in the sea to the southwest. Some versions have the pole laid across his chest, others have it braced behind his back. He does nothing else and goes nowhere, because putting it down would end the world.

Why is Amala rubbed with duck oil?

Once a year an attendant rubs wild-duck oil into Amala’s arms and shoulders to relieve the strain of holding the world’s pole, and the relief lasts him until the next application. The oil is the only thing that keeps his strength from giving out. It ties the survival of the world to the survival of a bird population.

What happens when Amala dies?

When the ducks are all hunted out there will be no more wild-duck oil, Amala’s arms will fail, and the world will topple off its pole and end. His death is the end of everything rather than a personal fate. The Tsimshian apocalypse is therefore a slow one, measured in the decline of a species rather than in a battle.