Raven

Raven is a major figure in the traditions of the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and other nations of the Northwest Coast, and he is both creator and thief, often in the same story and without contradiction.

The best-documented cycle is the release of the light. In the Tlingit version, Raven, Yeil, learns that an old man at the head of the Nass River keeps the stars, the moon and the sun in boxes. Raven transforms himself into a hemlock needle, is swallowed in a drink of water by the old man's daughter, and is born as her child. As a favoured grandchild he cries until he is given the boxes to play with, one at a time, and releases the stars, then the moon, then the sun, escaping through the smokehole. Haida tellings are closely related; Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst's The Raven Steals the Light of 1984 is the best-known Haida-side rendering.

Versions differ substantially between nations and between families entitled to tell them. In several, Raven is white before the theft and is blackened by the smoke of the smokehole. In others the light is taken from a different keeper.

Raven is not only a story character. Among both the Tlingit and the Haida, Raven and Eagle are the two moieties into which the whole society is divided, determining descent, marriage and ceremonial obligation. To say someone is Raven is a statement about their family and their standing, not about their personality.

He is also selfish, greedy and frequently disgraceful. The stories are funny, and they are not morality tales with Raven as the hero. Accounts that present him as a solemn wisdom figure have flattened him.

Odin keeps two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, whose names mean roughly thought and memory. They fly out over the world each day and return to tell him what they have seen, and Snorri's Prose Edda records Odin saying he fears more for Muninn's return than Huginn's, a line usually read as anxiety about memory rather than intellect. Odin's raven association is part of a wider battlefield connection: ravens follow armies because armies produce carrion, and Old Norse and Old English poetry has a recurring formula, the beasts of battle, in which raven, eagle and wolf attend a slaughter. This is realism before it is symbolism.

The Bible uses the raven twice in quick contrast. Genesis 8:7 has Noah send out a raven, which goes to and fro without returning, before the dove; 1 Kings 17:4-6 has ravens bring bread and meat to Elijah at the brook Cherith. Leviticus lists the raven among unclean birds, which makes the Elijah passage more pointed rather than less.

The cognitive research is genuinely striking and is worth stating carefully. Corvids cache food and will re-cache it if another bird watched them, which requires tracking what a competitor has seen. New Caledonian crows manufacture hooked tools from twigs and pandanus leaves and use them in sequence. Ravens have solved multi-step problems in the laboratory and have been shown to plan for future use of a tool. Some corvids have passed mirror-mark tests, though those results are debated.

What the research does not support is the claim, common in popular writing, that ravens can talk in any linguistic sense. They mimic sounds, including speech, as several unrelated bird families do.

Raven, wolf, eagle and bear are the animals most often invoked in the modern spirit-animal genre, and the genre's history is short and documented.

The English usage descends from neoshamanism, not from any Indigenous tradition. Michael Harner's The Way of the Shaman, published in 1980, set out what he called core shamanism, an explicitly decontextualised synthesis, assembled from ethnographies of many unrelated peoples and stripped of the specific languages, obligations and communities the practices belonged to. The power animal and the technique for retrieving one come from that book. Ted Andrews's Animal Speak, published by Llewellyn in 1993, converted the idea into the dictionary format that now dominates, an alphabetical list of animals with fixed meanings, and sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Nearly all what-is-your-spirit-animal material descends from these two books. It is roughly forty years old, commercially produced, and marketed with Indigenous associations it does not have.

The genuine term is different in kind. Doodem, in Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe languages, is the source of the English word totem, and it means a clan: an inherited kinship group with a defining being, determining descent, marriage eligibility and responsibility within the nation. It is not chosen, it does not describe a personality, and it is not a personal guide. A person does not have a doodem in the way one might have a favourite animal; a person belongs to one.

Totem poles are a further confusion, being crest poles of the Northwest Coast nations, Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, and unrelated to Ojibwe clan systems. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian has published directly on this, and the objection made by Indigenous educators is specific: the popular usage takes a structure of obligation and kinship and sells it back as a quiz result.