Kats, a Ka’gwantan hunter from Sitka, married a female bear who sheltered him after a hunt. Living with her, he fathered cubs and discovered bears shed their skins indoors to appear human. Returning to his people, he secretly provided for his bear family. However, breaking his wife’s warnings, he touched his child, prompting his bear family to kill him. Their offspring caused chaos before being eradicated by the Sitka people. This tale explains the taboo against eating grizzly bear meat.
Source:
Tlingit Myths and Texts
by John R. Swanton
[Smithsonian Institution]
Bureau of American Ethnology
Bulletin 39
Washington, 1909
► Themes of the story
Forbidden Love: Kats’s union with a bear defies natural and societal norms, highlighting the complexities and consequences of such relationships.
Transformation: The story explores physical and metaphorical changes, as bears shed their skins to become human-like indoors, and Kats transitions between human and animal worlds.
Divine Punishment: Kats’s disregard for his bear wife’s warnings leads to his demise, illustrating retribution from higher powers for transgressions.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about the Tlingit people
Myth recorded in English at Sitka, Alaska
January-April 1904
Kats belonged to the Ka’gwantan and lived at Sitka. One day he went hunting with dogs, and, while his dogs ran on after a male bear, this bear’s wife took him into her den, concealed him from her husband, and married him. He had several children by her. Indoors the bears take off their skin coats and are just like human beings.
By and by he wanted to go back to his people, but before he started she told him not to smile at or touch his Indian wife or take up either of his children.
After his return, he would go out for seal, sea lions, and other animals which he carried up into an inlet where his bear wife was awaiting him.
► Continue reading…
Then the cubs would come down, pull the canoe ashore violently, take out the game and throw it from one to another up to their mother. On account of the roughness of these cubs it came to be a saying in Sitka, “If you think you are brave, be steersman for Kats.”
One day Kats pitied one of his children and took it up. The next time he went up the inlet, however, the cubs seized him and threw him from one to another up to their mother, and so killed him. Then they scattered all over the world and are said to have been killed in various places.
What is thought to have been the last of these was killed at White Stone Narrows. When some people were encamped there a girl spoke angrily about Kats’s child, and it came upon them, killing all except a few who escaped in their canoes, and this woman, whom it carried off alive, making her groan with pain. One man tried to kill it but did not cut farther than its hair. Finally all the Indians together killed it with their spears and knives. [Because a human being married among the grizzly bears, people will not eat grizzly-bear meat]
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