blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories.
The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter, because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: “I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it.” Or, more optimistically, “When I woke up in the morning, my cabin was just dripping with water!” In this case the narrator implies that the spring thaw has suddenly begun.
Distant Time stories also provide the Koyukon with a foundation for understanding the natural world and humanity’s proper relationship to it. When people discuss the plants, animals, or physical environment they often refer to the stories. Here they find explanations for the full range of natural phenomena, down to the smallest details. In one story a snowshoe hare was attacked by the hawk owl, which was so small that it only managed to make a little wound in its victim’s shoulder. Koyukon people point out a tiny notch in the hare’s scapula as evidence that the Distant Time events really took place.
The narratives also provide an extensive code of proper behavior toward the environment and its resources. They contain many episodes showing that certain kinds of actions toward nature can have bad consequences, and these are taken as guidelines to follow today. Stories therefore serve as a medium for instructing young people in the traditional code and as an infallible standard of conduct for everyone.
Nobody made it up, these things we’re supposed to do. It came from the stories; it’s just like our Bible. My grandfather said he told the stories because they would bring the people good luck, keep them healthy, and make a good life. When he came to songs in the stories, he sang them like they were hymns.
The most important parts of the code are taboos (hutłaanee), prohibitions against acting certain ways toward nature. For example, in one story a salmon-woman was scraping skins at night with her upper jaw, and while doing this she was killed. This is why it is taboo for women to scrape hides during the night. Hundreds of such taboos exist, and a person who violates them (or someone in the immediate family) may suffer bad luck in subsistence activities, clumsiness, illness, accident, or early death. In Koyukuk River villages it is a rare day when someone is not heard saying, “Hutlanee!” (“It’s taboo!”).
Personalities in Nature
Stories of the Distant Time often portray the animal-people as having distinctive personalities, and this affects the way a species is regarded today. Often these personalities can be known only through the stories, because the animals do not visibly express them any longer. People sometimes have strong positive or negative feelings about particular species because of the way they are portrayed in the stories.
The sucker fish, for example, was a great thief in the Distant Time and so it is not well thought of. One man told me he could never bring himself to eat this fish, knowing what it had been and fearing that it would make a thief of him:
Even in springtime, sometimes we run short of food. But if we catch a sucker in the net, I just can’t eat him.
People will sometimes characterize someone by referring to an animal’s personality. In fact, Jetté … writes that Yukon River Koyukon may inquire about a person by asking, “What animal is he?” Someone known as a thief may be described as “just like a sucker fish.” When a person talks big, promises a lot but accomplishes little, or gets ahead by trickery, he or she is said to be “just like a raven.” Although Raven is the creator, he is portrayed in the stories as a lazy trickster who usually finds a way to get ahead by the efforts of others. The Koyukon have a kind of jocular respect for ravens, mocking their personality but still awed by their spirit power.
When I asked about relatedness among animals, people usually answered with reference to their social behavior and personality. For example, a Distant Time story reveals that bears and porcupines are cousins, and people cite as proof their occasional sharing of a den. When relatedness is not mentioned in a story it may be revealed by a tendency to “get along.” Muskrats and beavers often live close together and they eat the same kinds of plants, so they are considered relatives. Wolves may kill a loose dog, which shows that the two are not related.
Animal relationships are also shown by shared characteristics, but usually not those chosen by Western taxonomists. One story of the Distant Time says that all the smaller animals were related as sisters who lived together in an underground house. These included red squirrel, mink, fox, several owl species, short-tailed weasel, ptarmigan, and others. Another related group includes the four water mammals: otter, mink, beaver, and muskrat. Stories also reveal that the raven is mink’s uncle. And in obviously paired species, the larger is considered the older brother to the smaller – brown bear to the black bear, for example, and flicker to the woodpecker.
The Koyukon people conceptualize a natural order, but its structure and foundation are quite different from our own. No one described to me a system of phylogeny or biological interrelatedness, but I did not probe this matter exhaustively and may have failed to ask the right questions. Such a system might exist, or perhaps the world’s makeup is sufficiently explained in the stories.
The Place of Humans in a Natural Order
When Raven created humans, he first used rock for the raw materials, and people never died. But this was too easy so he recreated them, using dust instead. In this way humans became mortal, as they remain today.
How does humanity fit into the world of nature and the scheme of living things? For the Koyukon, humans and animals are clearly and qualitatively separated. Only the human possesses a soul (nukk’ubidza, “eye flutterer”), which people say is different from the animals’ spirits. I never understood the differences, except that the human soul seems less vengeful and it alone enjoys immortality in a special place after death. The distinction between animals and people is less sharply drawn than in Western thought – the human organism, after all, was created by an animal’s power.
The Koyukon seem to conceptualize humans and animals as very similar beings. This derives not so much from the animal nature of humans as from the human nature of animals. I noted earlier, for example, that today’s animals once belonged to an essentially human society, and that transmutations between human and animal form were common. One of my Koyukon teachers said, however, that after the Distant Time people and animals became completely separate and unrelated.
Animals still possess qualities that Westerners consider exclusively human, though – they have a range of emotions, they have distinct personalities, they communicate among themselves, and they understand human behavior and language. They are constantly aware of what people say and do, and their presiding spirits are easily offended by disrespectful behavior. The interaction here is very intense, and the two orders of being coexist far more closely than in our own tradition. But animals do not use human language among themselves. They communicate with sounds which are considered their own form of language.
The closeness of animals to humans is reinforced by the fact that some animals are given funeral rituals following the basic form of those held for people, only on a smaller scale …. In these cases, at least, animal spirits are placated much as human souls are after death.
Most interesting of all is animal behavior interpreted to be religious. “Even animals have their taboos,” a woman once told me. From her grandfather, she learned that gestating female beavers will not eat bark from the fork of a branch, because it is apparently tabooed for them. The late Chief Henry had told her of seeing a brown bear kill a ground squirrel, then tear out its heart, lungs, and windpipe and leave them on a rock. Again, the organs must have been taboo (hutłaanee) ….
Nature Spirits and Their Treatment
From the Distant Time stories, Koyukon people learn rules for proper conduct toward nature. But punishment for offenses against these rules is given by powerful spirits that are part of the living,