The Powerful Old Man of Chilkak

On Kodiak Island, the Alutiiq preserve a creation account that begins with a powerful old man in a settlement called Chilkak. This old man, who was neither fully human nor fully something else, one day shaped from the earth a man and a woman and breathed into them the breath of the world.

The man and the woman woke up on the beach. The old man taught them to make boats — the baidarka, the skin kayak — and he taught them the language of the ocean swells and the language of the birds, which told you where the fish were running.

Before the old man made people, the Alutiiq tell of a great destruction: a time of fire from the sky. The stories describe something falling — something bright and terrible — and after it fell, the sea rose and covered the land. When the sea went back, there was ash on the beaches and the bones of great animals exposed in the cliffs.

The world had been cleaned by fire and by water, and the old man began his making work in this cleared space. All of this knowledge, in the Alutiiq tradition, traces back to what was given in the beginning.