Reading Notes: Alaskan Legends (A)

Title: How Raven Stole the Lake
Author: Katharine Berry Judson
Link: Story link.

Plot:

• Raven meets a number of Beavers on the road.
• Raven flies out some distance and discovers a lake, with a small house on the banks.
• Within the lake is a fish trap, full to the brim with salmon.
• Deciding he likes what he see, Raven rolls up the lake (and the house and the fish trap) like a blanket and takes it with him.
• He goes and hides in a tall tree.
• The resident of the house and the Beavers attempt to confront him for his theft, but they are unable to catch him as he flies from tree to tree.
• Raven eventually unrolls the lake in a large clearing elsewhere, but keeps both the house and the fish trap with him in order to teach nearby tribes about them.
• Ostensibly, this is where the Haida people supposedly learned to build lodges like the one in the picture below.

Setting:

• This story originates from the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Here's a picture of where that is in relation to the rest of Alaska (the very southern tip of the state):

Source: Wikipedia Commons.

And here's a picture of what a traditional Haida lodging might look like:

The Haida people may have told myths about Raven in homes just like this one. Source: Flickr.

Characters:

• Raven: Less of a trickster and more of a creator god. He's incredibly powerful and influential for a creature so small and the regular rules of physics and reality do not apply to him.
• He seems to mean well, as he does what he does in order to teach the people of different nations.
• Raven is also the "why" factor that a lot of mythology includes. For example, he is the reason that crows are black in color.
• Beavers: After the theft of the lake, the Beavers try to fell the trees that Raven is hiding in to confront him. They are dogged and persistent, but eventually are forced to give up and settle in a new lake.

Writing Style:

• This reads a bit like a Biblical passage, in that it is awfully sterile and doesn't rely on a lot of dialogue. There's a lot of telling us what happened, but we don't get to see it happening (e.g. witnessing conversations and plot developments). Truth be told, I'm not really a fan of this style, because it makes the reader feel like a definite third party to the action and I find it difficult to immerse myself in the plot.