Nora Marks Dauenhauer – författare

Tlingit tales reveal Raven’s wit and world-shaping powerRaven is a legendary cultural hero, world-maker, and trickster figure among the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska. Here his adventures appear for the first time in the original language—transcribed directly from recordings of oral performance—accompanied by facing English translations and detailed annotations. This volume brings together fifty stories by seven Tlingit storytellers born between 1870 and 1915. These include the oldest known audio recordings of these stories told in Tlingit and some of the longest and most detailed Raven stories in the historical record. These stories occupy a unique position and function in Tlingit oral literature. If ancestral narrative is the genres of history and tragedy, and oratory is in the genre of ceremony, then Raven stories are in the genre of comedy. Raven hops here and there, from serious origin myth to absurd comic relief. The stories often illustrate human weaknesses but expressed humorously, typically in a bewildering combination of the sacred and the scatological.Developed and passed down over millennia, these stories and the lessons they offer will amuse, engage, and resonate across the Northwest Coast and beyond. The text is rich with linguistic, literary, and cultural commentary especially for students and teachers of the Tlingit language, as well as anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists. Decades in the making, Yéil Kundayaayí, Adventures of Raven brings the wisdom and skill of these master storytellers to new generations.

These gripping and powerful prose narratives relate monumental events in the lives of the forebears of Tlingit clans, from the prehistoric migration to the coast of Southeast Alaska to the first contact with Europeans. The stories were recorded from the 1960s to the present by twelve tradition bearers who where passing down for future generations the accounts of haa shuka, which means “our ancestors.” Their narratives tell of the origin of social and spiritual concepts and explain the complex relationships among members of a given clan to their relatives in other clans, to spirits of the land where the vents took place, to the spirits of departed ancestors, and to the spirits of various animals, including killer whale and bear.The focus here is on the stories and story tellers themselves, who lived amazingly different lives, reflecting in a small way the complexity of Tlingit life in the twentieth century, a period characterized by unprecedented political, economic, and social change. The stories were told in Tlingit and then transcribed from the tape recorded versions. The editors have attempted to write these stories the way they were told, and to then translate them into English keeping the unique Tlingit oral style.This book will be of interest to the general reader of Native American literature and comparative literature, as well as to folklorists, linguists, and anthropologists. Of special interest to linguist will be the new texts (transcribed in three different Tlingit dialects) containing many hitherto unattested grammatical forms.

Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit is the first publication of Tlingit oratory recorded in performance. It features Tlingit texts with facing English translations and detailed annotations; photographs of the orators and the settings in which the speeches were delivered; and biographies of the elders. There are thirty-two speeches by twenty-one Tlingit elders. Most were taped between 1968 and 1988, but two speeches were recorded on wax cylinders by the Harriman Expedition in Sitka in 1899, and are the oldest known sound recordings of Tlingit.The book is of importance both to native and non-native readers alike. For those of Native American heritage it articulates concepts understood and practiced by elders but difficult for them to explain, and often bewildering to younger generations. For people around the world interested in Northwest Coast culture, it offers new insights into a traditional world view and the classics of Tlingit oral literature.Careful attention is given to transcription, translation, and annotation by the collaboration of Nora Marks Dauenhauer, a native speaker of Tlingit and a published poet, with a degree in anthropology, and her husband Richard Dauenhauer, a translator of European poetry and a former poet laureate of Alaska, with a Ph. D. in comparative literature.