Nunani: Feathered Friend, Feather Foe (Part Seven)

RACHEL QITSUALIK

I shall now conclude my series on the importance of the raven to Inuit culture.

This has been an unusual series in that, from the beginning, it has been plagued with interruptions (the details of which I won’t plague you, the reader, with). But such discontinuity has been useful in one respect: it has allowed some time in which readers can approach me, on the street, at the grocery store, regarding the articles. In each instance when I’ve been approached, the question has been the same:

What happened to the raven?

Honestly, the question delights me, but isn’t surprising. The reason I’ve had ravens on the brain is that Inuit culture has always held such a special place for them. They are the great hecklers and pranksters of the Arctic’s windswept haunts.

In the last few articles, I’ve been writing out a very, very ancient Alaskan creation myth — the story of how the raven finds himself existent, alone, the first being. His own existence is a mystery to him. All he knows is that he has the power to create other plants and animals.

His first act is to create a plant, a beach-pea, which produces a man from its pod. The raven takes responsibility for this accidental creation by caring for the man and teaching him how to survive. Now everyone wants to know how the story ends.

The truth? It doesn’t. The raven’s tale is not only one of the most widespread myths in Alaska, but also one of the longest. The raven is the great culture-hero and numen of Alaska, both creator and adventurer.

The creation of the plant and the man were only the beginning. It was the raven who deliberately made woman, realizing that the man needed her. As he did so, that first plant still lay on the beach, hatching out three more men. And so the raven created mates for them as well. Together, they were the beginnings of the human race.

They propagated while the raven himself flew all around the world, creating every kind of creature — even other ravens, images of himself. But he got into a lot of trouble as well; such as when he got himself stuck in a whale’s belly, for example; or like the time when he had to will himself to be born to a girl whose father held the glowing stone that would later be shaped into the sun and moon. The old man wouldn’t allow anyone but himself light enough to hunt by, you see, so the raven really had no choice but to steal it, providing light for all.

This barely scratches the surface of the wealth of Alaskan raven stories and, yes, many such stories are versions of those existent in the eastern Arctic. A nice, meaty, detailed telling of the raven’s full adventures demands a more dedicated storyteller than I — as well as a text about the size of a novel.

All I’m trying to illustrate over the course of these articles, by discussing first the eastern raven tales and then moving westward to the spectacular Alaskan ones, is that the raven is the Arctic’s special bird.

Across the ocean, the bird’s image as a creature of darkness is just about set and final. There was a time when it was cherished in Europe. It was a symbol of the Celtic triple-faced goddess known as Badb, whose domains included fate and battle.

To the Norsemen, it was the ultimate symbol of wisdom, so that Odin, greatest of the gods, had the twin ravens Hugin and Munin (“thought” and “memory”) sitting on his shoulders, whispering to him of all the things that they had witnessed while daily flying over the earth. Tragically, it was this very non-Christian reverence that caused the church to later demonize the bird, associating it with devils and black magic.

So I sigh a breathe of relief when I think of the Arctic, noting that it remains a place where this fantastic bird is relatively free of evil repute. West Nile virus, as we now know, is on its slow march northwards — a disease that kills corvids swiftly and rapaciously. May God spare the Arctic. I don’t want to lose one such heavy wing-beat, the flash of blue-rippling-black, that voice that often murmurs like a man. Our raven.

Pijariiqpunga.