Customer Reviews

The Raven Steals the Light: Native American Tales

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I brought this book on a trip to Vancouver and Victoria and read it in the evenings after returning to my hotels. As a European American, I found it indispensable to understanding much of the art I saw on vacation (especially Totem Poles). This book relates many of the best known Haida stories, including those of the noble, tragic Bear; the intrepid, versatile human fisherman-hunter Nanasigmit and above all the amoral but always fascinating Raven. Almost all the stories are simple, yet strike a deep chord. Add this to "Looking at Totem Poles" and "Kwakuitl Legends", both also reasonably priced, and you'll be well on your way to understanding the basics of First Nations culture.

I grew up in the pacific north-west and experienced many of these stories as a child. This was a wonderful book to bring back most of those memories. It is well written. Simple yet engaging. Once I started I couldn't put it down. I've since used it as a teaching resourse in social studies and will be ordering other copies for fellow teachers I've shown it to and were equally impressed. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in native legends or mythology.

Ten delightful stories, not just of the Raven, but also of the First Men, Bear Mother, Mouse Woman and other early tales from the times of myth. The stories are full of humor, love, speaking animals and bawdy scenes of lust. Boy, does the Raven get into trouble. This version of the book is a tiny, pocket size, edition. Great for carrying on a bus, car, train, plane, and so on.

I always thought this was a children's book. To my surprise, it is anything but. The tales are simply told, but they're oddly complex. Raven makes an appearance in many of them and he's unfailingly ribald, disingenuous, and greedy for all worldly pleasures. He's hardly a role model, but his devious ways give the myths both dark energy and dark humor.

Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst have allowed the ten tales to unfold with all their enigmas, contradictions, and mysteries intact. In other re-tellings of these same stories, the events have often been cleaned up for the sake of continuity, and the characters have been made more substantial---more human and less Spirit-being. Here, a beaver can be a man and a man can be a beaver, depending on the necessities of the moment. A young man can return to his village after many years absence in the company of his new wife, a cloud, who waits demurely in the canoe for his family to welcome her ashore. There are worlds below the waters, and worlds on the edges of the sky. Cosmological and cultural themes are presented in a form barely recognizable for all their transformative elements and fantastic personalities. Yet the Mythworld functions with its own sort of upside-down morality and logic, which is very close to magical.

Bill Reid's pencil drawings add an extra dimension of strange beauty to the beautiful strangeness of the stories. Anyone living in, or travelling in, the Pacific Northwest would benefit from reading these tales, which open up the depths of the physical landscape even as they expand the limits of the imagination.

There's much to be learned from prehistoric belief systems and this collection of stories is just that. The need to understand the natural world around us and our place in it along with explaining the existence of consciousness in us and whether in other creatures. Well told by a fine artist.

Perhaps the best compilation of Haida oral traditions by famous carver Bill Reid with accompanying illustrations. These are stories written to be heard out loud.