The trickster Blue Jay

At a Glance

• Central figures: Blue Jay, a loud and boastful trickster; his patient sister Ioi; and the ghosts of the Land of the Dead.
• Setting: Chinook tradition (lower Columbia River, Pacific Northwest); Blue Jay and Ioi appear in a cycle of stories recorded among the Chinook and Kathlamet peoples of present-day Washington and Oregon.
• The turn: Blue Jay’s sister Ioi marries a dead chief and goes to live in the Land of the Supernatural People, and Blue Jay follows her there, refusing to treat the dead with respect.
• The outcome: Blue Jay’s constant meddling and mockery disrupts the ghost village until he himself dies and becomes one of the dead, finally silent.
• The legacy: Blue Jay remains a figure in Chinook oral tradition - the noisy, meddlesome one who could not leave well enough alone, whose story marks the boundary between the living and the dead and the cost of crossing it without humility.

Ioi had been gone a long time. Blue Jay’s sister had married a chief, and the chief was dead, and she had followed him down to the country where the dead lived. Blue Jay did not understand this. He did not understand most things, but he talked as though he understood everything, and he talked constantly. The house was quieter without Ioi, and Blue Jay did not like quiet.

He decided to find her.

The Ghost Village

Blue Jay traveled to the Land of the Supernatural People. He found a village along a river that looked almost like a real village - cedar houses, canoes pulled up on the bank, smoke from the roofs. But the people were wrong. They were thin. They were transparent in certain light. When they spoke, their voices came from far away, as if the sound had to travel a great distance just to reach the air.

Ioi was there, living among them in the chief’s house. She looked well enough. She told Blue Jay he could stay, but he had to follow the rules of the place. He had to treat the dead as people. He had to be quiet. He had to leave their things alone.

Blue Jay said yes to all of this. He meant none of it.

The dead were piled in the houses like stacked bones. During the day they lay still - just bones, dry and pale. At night they rose up and became people again, walked around, talked in their far-off voices, fished, gambled, did the things the living do. Blue Jay watched this and did not like it. He did not like that they were bones by day and people by night. He wanted them to be one thing.

The Bone Game

Ioi told Blue Jay to go fishing with the dead. He went. The dead took him out in a canoe and they fished, and Blue Jay caught nothing while the ghosts pulled fish after fish from the water. Blue Jay grew angry. He grabbed a skull from the bottom of the canoe - because there were always skulls and bones lying around - and he put it on a different body’s neck. He mixed the bones. A child’s skull on an old woman’s body. A warrior’s leg bones on a young girl.

When night came and the dead rose up, they were confused. A tall man spoke with a child’s voice. A woman had arms too long for her body. The ghosts stumbled around the village trying to find their own parts.

Ioi was furious.

You have mixed up the dead people, she said. Put them back.

Blue Jay laughed. He thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He did not put them back. Ioi spent the night sorting bones in the dark, matching skulls to spines, while Blue Jay sat by the fire and talked about how stupid the dead were.

Blue Jay Burns the Fish

The ghosts told Blue Jay he could have their fish if he would stop mixing their bones. He took the fish. But the fish of the dead were not like the fish of the living. They were shadow-fish, thin and pale, and when Blue Jay tried to cook them over a fire, they fell apart into nothing. He was left holding smoke.

He accused the dead of cheating him. He shouted at them. The ghosts retreated into the walls of the cedar house and would not come out. Their voices came through the wood, distant and sad. Ioi told Blue Jay he was ruining everything.

These are real fish here, she said. You have to eat them the way the dead eat. You cannot cook them with a living person’s fire.

Blue Jay did not listen. He built a bigger fire. The shadow-fish dissolved faster. He built an even bigger fire. The walls of the house began to blacken, and the ghosts inside moaned, because fire hurt them. Ioi poured water on the flames.

Blue Jay said the dead were useless and their fish were useless and their village was useless. He said this loudly and at length.

The Scattered Bones

Every day Blue Jay found new ways to torment the ghosts. He scattered their bones across the beach so they could not reassemble at nightfall. He threw skulls into the river. He stole the gambling pieces the dead used at night - polished beaver teeth and carved sticks - and hid them in the forest. He shouted in the houses when the dead were trying to sleep in their bone-piles during the day, because the noise hurt them even when they were just bones.

The dead began to avoid him. The village, which had been a kind of peaceful place - dim and strange but peaceful - became disordered. Ghosts wandered at night missing arms, missing jaws. Some could not rise at all because Blue Jay had thrown essential bones too far.

Ioi stopped speaking to her brother. She spent her time repairing what he broke, carrying bones back from the river, reassembling the dead with care. She knew each person by their bones. She had lived among them long enough.

Blue Jay did not notice her silence. He was too busy talking.

Blue Jay Falls Quiet

One morning Blue Jay did not wake up. He was lying on the floor of the chief’s house, and he was still, and when Ioi came to him she saw that he had become like the others. His body was thin. His bones showed through. He was dead.

That night he rose with the rest of the ghosts. He stood up and looked around the village and for the first time he understood what the dead were. They were people. They had been people all along. The far-off quality of their voices was not stupidity - it was the distance between their world and the world he had come from. The shadow-fish were real food, eaten the way the dead eat. The bone-piles were sleep, not emptiness.

Blue Jay opened his mouth and no sound came out. His voice had to travel the same distance now. He was one of them.

Ioi looked at her brother standing among the dead, finally quiet, finally not laughing, and she did not say anything. There was nothing left to say. She had told him. She had told him every day. He was a ghost now, and the ghosts did not hold it against him. They found their bones and reassembled and went about their night, and Blue Jay stood among them, mouth open, saying nothing, while the river ran past the village in the dark.