BOAS, YALIS AND THE RAVEN GWA'WINA CYCLE

On his first night in Alert Bay, after dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer and his two brothers-in-law, each, like Spencer, was married to a sister of Hunt and daughter of Anisalaga — Boas spent some hours in conversation with Annie Spencer (1856-1924), the younger sister to George (1864-1932) and William (1866-1952) Hunt, who regaled him with First Nation tales from her home in 'yalis, Alert Bay, British Columbia. 

“Mrs. Spencer was very gracious and told me many stories,” Boas wrote to Krackowizer, “which I recorded later in the evening.”

Four days later, Boas mentioned in a new note to his fiancée that he had visited Annie Spencer again and asked her to tell more tales. “She relates well and is very gracious,” he emphasized.

 “Unfortunately she is not well or I should really bother her.”

Nevertheless, Boas trod back to the Spencers’ home the same day. There he found Hunt’s sister either improved or doubly gracious, for she was “kind enough to tell me all I wanted to know. . . . The information I obtained from her was the most valuable I received in Alert Bay.”

The stories of Annie Hunt Spencer (1856-1924) daughter to Mrs. Mary Ebbits, Anisalaga, opened a vista on a narrative legacy linking all the peoples from Yakutat Bay to the Columbia River, who, though divided by physical and linguistic differences and by histories of conflict, held in common a heritage of thought. 

The Raven Cycle

A centerpiece of this heritage was the Raven Cycle, one of the oldest and largest bodies of oral literature in the Americas. In the bards who performed the Raven tales, and who daily altered them, were members not of a single school but of a living tradition whose members had innovated a stance toward the world in response to cycles of change from the Ice Age to the smallpox apocalypse. They had created a body of thought about people’s relationships to one another and to the cosmos, the beings within it, and the capacity of humans to right those relationships.

The star of the drama was Raven, scheming, ravenous, bumbling in his arrogance toward ever-greater disgrace, yet always surviving, evolving, and through his accidents and exploits establishing the present state of affairs.

Born before the earth had acquired its form, it was Raven—Old One, Great Inventor, Chief of the Ancients, Heaven Maker, Giving to the End, Going Around—who established the tools and forms of existence.

With the world veiled in darkness, Raven stole the box that held the sun and opened it, lighting the world by his ingenuity. 

He made man from grass and elderberry bushes, brought salmon to the people, fed the rivers with eulachon. He established the shapes and traits of his fellow animals and gave them their present powers and appearances. And though affairs could hardly change as radically in contemporary times as in the days of beginning, by his actions and infractions Raven pointed toward a way of being human. “So many stories are told about him,” Boas remarked during his first visit to the coast, “that they have a saying that human life is not long enough to tell all of them.”

Every First Nation of the Northwest Coast was woven into the fabric of the Raven Cycle through the warp and weft of a storytelling practice that linked speakers and listeners—messengers and mediums—within a pattern of call and response. There were no galleries around the fire, no lines dictating who paid and who performed. There were no observers, no outsiders, no Others. People did not merely listen to the Raven Cycle; they took part, asking questions, repeating refrains, goading the storyteller toward feats of ingenuity.

There was saltiness and sport in the Raven tales, sex and waste, greed and hate. The bards were like Raven: they begged, borrowed, stole, and in doing so created. They were origin poets who fostered possibilities by defying the rules of the system they had made.

The stories they told, often ending in just-so pronouncements—explaining, say, how wolves had come to behave so diffidently around humans (“they really became wolves after this,” one storyteller put it)—wove a fabric of thought that embraced every notable rock, tree, and stream in the neighbourhood, encompassing the human community within an animate cosmos. 

"I remember with the greatest pleasure many trips in colourful canoes with Indian guides who did not stop telling tales,” Boas wrote in one account of this storytelling culture for a German audience. 

“It was that mountain peak which alone reached above the waters during the great flood, and from this peak, the earth was populated again. Here, the battle took place in which the stone giants were outwitted and killed by the brave Indians. A dangerous rapid, formed in prehistoric times in a narrow strait, reminds us of the Son of God, who killed and sank a dangerous sea monster into the ocean at that place. Each strange place is woven into a legend.”