Raven

Also Known As: Yéil in Tlingit; Txamsem or We-gyet in Tsimshian; Nankil’slas among the Haida
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Native American Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A trickster and transformer who slips freely between bird and human shape and bends the world to feed his own bottomless appetites.
Role in Mythos: He looses daylight, fresh water, and the salmon into a dark and empty world, working as both a thieving nuisance and the creator who furnishes creation.
Relation to Humans: Raven’s thefts and blunders supply the human world with nearly everything it cannot live without, from the sun overhead to the rivers full of fish. He is neither a guardian nor an enemy but a self-serving force whose greed keeps leaving people better provided for than they were before.

The world began in the dark. Not the soft dark of a single night, which at least promises a morning, but a flat unbroken blackness in which the first people fished by feel and the animals bumped shoulders on the trails. Somewhere in that blackness a bird was already scheming. Raven had appetites the size of the sky and no patience for a world arranged so badly, and the light that everyone wanted was locked in a nest of carved boxes at the head of the Nass River, kept by a rich old man who had no intention of letting any of it out.

Force was rarely Raven’s answer to a locked box. He watched the old man’s daughter come down to the water to drink, and he made himself small. In one telling he became a hemlock needle floating on the surface; in another, a speck of dirt in a cup of water. Either way she swallowed him without noticing. Months later the rich man had a grandson, a dark-eyed boy who crawled the floor of the great cedar house and cried for the things he was forbidden to touch. He wept for the box that held the stars until his grandfather gave way, and the boy rolled it open and sent the stars streaming up through the smoke hole. He cried again for the box of the moon and loosed that too. Then he cried for the last and largest box, and when the old man finally surrendered it the child turned back into a bird, caught the daylight in his beak, and was gone through the roof before anyone could shout.

On an ordinary day, before and after all of this, he is only a bird working a shoreline. He walks the tideline at low water with that stiff-legged strut, flipping stones for whatever the sea has left behind, cocking his head at anything that glints. Nothing is beneath his notice and nothing is safe from it.

The daylight was not the only thing hoarded in the early world. Fresh water belonged to a being the Tlingit call Petrel, who kept the only spring under his own roof and guarded it jealously. Raven arrived as a guest, ate and talked and waited until his host was asleep, then lifted the cover and drank. He drank and drank, meaning to carry the water off in his belly, and he had nearly emptied the spring when Petrel woke and saw him. Raven bolted straight up toward the smoke hole with his throat full of water. Petrel called on the spirits of the smoke hole to hold him fast, and there Raven stuck, wedged in the opening while his host heaped pitchwood on the fire and sent up a black choking column of smoke. Raven was white before that morning. When the spirits finally let him go he burst free, sooted from beak to tail, and flew off spitting water as he went. Where the drops fell he made the Nass, then the Stikine, the Taku, the Chilkat, the Alsek, every great river of the coast. He never did wash the black out of his feathers.

He is not kind. The stories are honest about this, and they are funnier for it. Where the Tsimshian tell of him they call him Txamsem or We-gyet and set him up as the maker who ordered the whole world into being, an intermediary between its seen and unseen halves, and in almost the same breath they show him gorging, lying, and falling into his own traps. The Haida name him Nankil’slas, the one whose voice is obeyed. Older Tlingit accounts say he was there before the great flood and rode it out by turning himself into a stone until the waters fell, then shook off the shape and went back to work on the drowned and rearranged land.

His power is the power to become anything, large or small, feathered or fleshed, needle or stone, and to think a step past whoever is holding what he wants. He can read a miser’s weakness in a heartbeat and build a whole scheme on it. His voice carries. His hunger, in the end, is the engine of the world, because everything he takes he cannot help but spill into it.

That same hunger is the flaw sewn into him. He is caught, again and again, because he cannot stop. He drinks until the spring is dry and the owner wakes; he eats until he is too heavy to fly clean; he lingers over a meal he should have abandoned. He wins nothing by strength and everything by cunning, which means a cleverer host, or simple bad luck, can strand him in a smoke hole with his prize wedged in his throat. The world he furnished is generous. He got greedy in it, and he paid for every gift with a little humiliation, and the black on his feathers is the receipt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Raven Spirit?

Raven is the trickster, transformer, and creator figure of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples, including the Tlingit (who call him Yéil), the Haida (Nankil’slas), and the Tsimshian (Txamsem or We-gyet). He is both a greedy, deceitful trickster and a culture hero whose thefts brought daylight, fresh water, and the rivers into the world.

How did Raven bring light to the world?

Raven brought light by stealing it from a rich man at the head of the Nass River who kept the sun, moon, and stars locked in carved boxes. He turned himself into a needle or a speck of dirt, was swallowed by the man’s daughter, and was reborn as a child who cried until his grandfather let him open the boxes, releasing the light into the sky.

Why are ravens black?

In the Tlingit story, Raven was white until he stole fresh water from a being called Petrel. Fleeing up through the smoke hole with the water, he was caught by the smoke-hole spirits while Petrel built up a smoky fire beneath him, and the soot stained his feathers the black they have kept ever since.

Is the Raven Spirit good or evil?

Raven is neither good nor evil but self-interested, and that is the point of him. He lies, steals, and overeats to satisfy his own appetites, yet almost everything he takes ends up benefiting humanity, so his selfishness repeatedly does the work of a creator.

Which cultures tell stories about Raven?

Raven stories are told most fully by the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and closely related Raven traditions extend among the Athabaskan peoples of interior Alaska, the Inuit of the Arctic, and even across into Siberia. His myths were documented in detail by the ethnologist John Swanton for the Smithsonian in the early twentieth century.