A high-caste girl stepped on a snail, triggering a series of events leading to her mysterious disappearance. Her four brothers found her trapped on a cliff entwined with a giant snail. Using yellow cedar wings, they rescued her but abandoned their village in shame, becoming the Thunders. They provided for their starving village before ascending to the sky, where they are revered as powerful beings by the Taqestina’.
Source:
Tlingit Myths and Texts
by John R. Swanton
[Smithsonian Institution]
Bureau of American Ethnology
Bulletin 39
Washington, 1909
► Themes of the story
Transformation: The four brothers transform into the Thunders, embodying natural forces like thunder and lightning.
Conflict with Nature: The narrative begins with the sister’s encounter with a snail, leading to her entrapment and the subsequent events involving natural elements.
Sacred Objects: The brothers’ creation of wings from yellow cedar, a material with cultural significance, plays a crucial role in their transformation and rescue mission.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about the Tlingit people
Myth recorded in English at Wrangell, Alaska, in January-April 1904
A high-caste girl who had four brothers went out of the house one morning and stepped on a snail. Then she said. “Oh! this nasty thing. There isn’t a time when I go out but that snail is around this house.” The evening after a youth of about her own age came to the girl, and she went off with him.
When the people found that she had disappeared they searched for her everywhere. They did not know what had become of her. Her brothers also hunted everywhere, but for a long time without result. Some distance behind the village was a high, vertical cliff without a tree or a bush on it, and half way up they at last saw their sister with a very large snail coiled around her. They ran about underneath and called to her to throw herself down, but she could not. She was stuck there.
► Continue reading…
After this the four brothers tried to find some way of flying. They tried one kind of wood after another and also bone for wings but in vain. After they had flown for a short distance they always dropped down again. Finally they employed yellow cedar. The first time they used it they got half way up to the place where their sister was, but the second time they reached her and dragged her down, leaving the snail still there.
But the four brothers now left their own village, because they said that their sister had disgraced them, and they became the Thunders. When they wove their wings you hear the thunder, and, when they wink, you see the lightning.
At the time when these brothers first went away the people at their father’s village were starving, so they flew out over the ocean, caught a whale and brought it to the town that it might be found next morning. So nowadays people claim that the Thunder is powerful and can get anything, because they know that it was powerful at that time. After the famine was over they left the world below, went to the sky to live, and have never been seen since.
The, Taqestina’ claim the Thunder, because those brothers belonged to that family.
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Dreamtime Whispers 