Raven creates the world

At a Glance

• Central figures: Raven (Yéil in Tlingit), the trickster and creator who brought the world into its present form; the Old Man who kept the light locked in nested boxes; the Old Man’s daughter.
• Setting: Tlingit tradition (southeast Alaska coastal islands and mainland); the Raven cycle is one of the central narrative traditions of Pacific Northwest Coast peoples, including the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian.
• The turn: Raven, unable to steal the light by force or cunning from outside, transformed himself into a hemlock needle, was swallowed by the Old Man’s daughter, and was born as her child - a child who screamed until the boxes were opened.
• The outcome: Raven released the stars, the moon, and the sun into the sky, ending the absolute darkness in which the world had existed; in escaping through the smoke hole with the last box, his feathers were scorched permanently black.
• The legacy: The world as it exists - sky with stars, moon, and sun - is Raven’s doing, and his black feathers remain the mark of that passage through smoke and fire.

The world was dark. Not dark the way a winter night is dark, where you can still see the edge of the water against the sky. Dark entirely. No stars. No moon. No sun. The people stumbled along the beaches and through the forests by feel, and Raven flew blind above the tops of the cedar trees, hungry as he always was, bumping into mountains.

Raven knew about the light. Everyone knew. There was an old man who lived at the headwaters of the Nass River, in a great house, and he had the light. He kept it in boxes - nested boxes, one inside the other inside the other - stacked in the back of his house. He had a daughter. No one else lived there. The old man liked the dark. He had no intention of sharing.

The Hemlock Needle

Raven tried the front door first. He put on his best human face - he could wear many faces - and walked up to the house and called out. The old man did not answer. Raven circled the house. He tried the walls. He tried the roof. The house was well-built, tight-jointed red cedar, and smoke came out of the smoke hole but Raven could not get in that way either.

So he sat on the beach and thought. Raven was not patient by nature. He was greedy and easily bored and he lied constantly, but when something mattered to him he could think for a long time without moving.

He watched the old man’s daughter come down to the river to drink. She knelt at the edge of the water and cupped her hands.

Raven pulled a needle from a hemlock branch. He flew to the river. He dropped the needle into the water just upstream of where the daughter was drinking. She swallowed it.

The Crying Child

The daughter became pregnant. She did not know why or how, but the old man accepted it. In time she gave birth to a boy - dark-eyed, hungry, loud. The old man loved his grandson immediately. He held him and bounced him and gave him whatever he wanted.

The child wanted everything. He screamed for food. He screamed when he was put down. He screamed at the walls. But most of all, he screamed at the boxes.

The old man’s house had many boxes. Some held dried fish. Some held furs and blankets. The ones in the back - the nested ones - held the light. The child crawled toward those boxes and screamed until the house shook.

The old man resisted for a time. The daughter tried to calm the child. Nothing worked. The screaming went on for days. Finally the old man opened the outermost box and took out the next box and opened that one too, working his way inward until he reached a small box that glowed faintly at the seams. He opened it and took out a bright ball - the stars, bundled together - and gave it to the child to play with.

The child stopped crying. He rolled the ball of stars around on the floor. He threw it. He chased it. Then, when no one was watching closely, he threw it up through the smoke hole.

The stars scattered across the sky and stuck there.

The Moon on the Floor

The old man was furious but the child screamed again, harder, and would not stop. The old man opened the next set of boxes. Inside was the moon - cold and white and round. He gave it to the child.

The child played with the moon the same way. He rolled it across the packed-earth floor of the house. He held it up and looked at it. The old man watched him nervously. The daughter watched too. The child seemed content.

Then he threw the moon through the smoke hole.

It rose and kept rising and settled into the sky above the mountains. Now the world had starlight and moonlight both. The people along the coast could see the water again. They could see each other’s faces in pale silver.

But Raven was not finished.

The Sun in the Last Box

There was one more set of boxes. The innermost. The old man knew what the child wanted. He refused. He sealed the boxes with cord and pushed them deeper into the back of the house. The child screamed. The screaming was terrible - it filled the house and rang off the cedar walls and the daughter begged her father to give in.

The old man held out longer this time. Days. The child would not eat. Would not sleep. Would not stop screaming.

At last the old man opened the final box.

The light inside was so bright it hurt. The sun. It filled the whole house with gold and heat, and the old man squinted and reached in and handed the ball of light to his grandson.

Raven dropped the child’s body like a coat. He was Raven again - wings, beak, black eyes - and he seized the sun in his claws and flew straight up toward the smoke hole. The old man shouted. The daughter grabbed at the bird’s tail feathers. Raven was already through.

The smoke hole was narrow and the fire was burning beneath it. The smoke and soot blackened Raven’s feathers as he pushed through. They had been white before - some say grey, some say white as a gull - but the smoke turned them black, and they stayed black. He burst out into the open air carrying the sun.

Raven in the Open Sky

He flew high. The world opened below him - rivers, mountains, the ocean, the islands of the coast, the cedar forests, the villages of the people. All of it had been there in the dark but now it was visible, every detail, every color. Raven could see fish in the water. He could see berries on the bushes. He was already thinking about eating.

He threw the sun into the sky. It hung there and it has not come down.

The old man stood in the doorway of his house on the Nass River, shielding his eyes. His daughter stood behind him. The boxes were empty. The house was full of light for the first time, ordinary daylight coming in through the door and the smoke hole, and there was nothing left to hoard.

Raven flew along the coast. His feathers were black. His stomach was empty. He was looking for something to eat. He landed on a beach where the tide was going out and the rocks were covered with mussels and he began cracking them open with his beak, one after another, in the new light of the world he had made.