Ye´il Kundayaayi´, Adventures of Raven : Tlingit Raven Stories

Raven is a legendary cultural hero, world-maker, and trickster figure among the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska. Here his adventures appear for the first time in the original language – transcribed directly from recordings of oral performance – accompanied by facing English translations and detailed annotations. This volume brings together fifty stories by seven Tlingit storytellers born between 1870 and 1915. These include the oldest known audio recordings of these stories told in Tlingit and some of the longest and most detailed Raven stories in the historical record.

These stories occupy a unique position and function in Tlingit oral literature. If ancestral narrative is the genres of history and tragedy and oratory is in the genre of ceremony, then Raven stories are in the genre of comedy. Raven hops here and there, from serious origin myth to absurd comic relief. The stories often illustrate human weaknesses but expressed humorously, typically in a bewildering combination of the sacred and the scatological.

Developed and passed down over millennia, these stories and the lessons they offer will amuse, engage, and resonate across the Northwest Coast and beyond. The text is rich with linguistic, literary, and cultural commentary especially for students and teachers of the Tlingit language, as well as anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists.

Decades in the making, Yéil Kundayaayí, Adventures of Raven brings the wisdom and skill of these master storytellers to new generations.