How Raven Brought Light

No one knows just how the story of Raven truly begins. Each Tlingit storyteller starts from the point where they know it. In the time before memory, there was no light. The world lay in perfect darkness, and in that darkness, a rich old man on the Nass River kept all the light locked in a box. He had stolen it from the sky, and he would not give it back. The world shivered and stumbled in the dark. Animals bumped into one another. People could not find their food. The salmon could not find the river mouths. The world was cold and stumbling.

Raven saw this and decided to fix it. He was not virtuous in his intentions — he was, as always, hungry, and he could not eat properly in the dark. But his solution would reshape the world. Raven transformed himself into a cedar needle floating in a stream of drinking water, and when the rich man's daughter came to drink, she swallowed him. In time, she gave birth to a child with bright, raven-black eyes — Raven reborn in human form.

The grandfather adored the child. And the child, in the cunning way of Raven, wept and wept until the old man relented and gave him the glowing boxes to play with, one by one. The box that held the stars. Then the box that held the moon. Then, at last, the box that held the sun.

The moment the box was in his hands, Raven shed his human skin, burst into his true feathered form, and flew — up through the smoke hole of the house, into the sky, and across the dark world. He opened the box. Light poured into every corner of the creation. The animals blinked and saw each other for the first time. The rivers found their way to the sea. The mountains stood revealed in their full height, still bearing the watermarks of the ancient flood, and people looked at each other across the brightened land and wept with something they had never felt before: they wept with recognition.

But before the light came, the Tlingit also remember the water. When the great flood rose — when the waters climbed past the forests and halfway up the mountains — Raven flew to the highest cloud and hung there by his bill. His tail was in the water. He hung in the clouds for days and days — nobody knows how long — until the waters went down. Then he found his people on the heights and brought them back to the new land, which was the old land renewed.