Tlingit Myths and Texts

John R. Swanton's Tlingit Myths and Texts, published through the Bureau of American Ethnology in the early twentieth century, is a primary linguistic and folkloric record of narratives Swanton transcribed and translated from Tlingit storytellers of southeastern Alaska. Its value as a source is its direct transcription of oral narrative material close to the form in which it was told to Swanton, preserving mythological and historical content of lasting importance to Tlingit cultural continuity and to linguistics. As with Swanton's parallel Haida collection, its limit is the era and single-collector method behind it, an early twentieth century ethnologist's translation choices reflecting his own training, so contemporary Tlingit speakers and scholars remain the appropriate check on how faithfully particular passages render the tradition's own sense and register.