Almost everything recorded about the kamuy comes out of chanted oral literature, and the form of that literature is itself the argument. In the kamuy yukar, the songs of the kamuy, the kamuy narrates. The bear, the owl, the fox or the fire says what it did, what it saw the humans doing, what it thought of them, and how it decided to act. The audience is not told about a being; the audience is put inside one.
That is a theological claim delivered by grammar. If a kamuy is a person with a point of view, the way to present it is to let it speak, and a tradition that had wanted to present its powers as forces to be placated would not have chosen this form. The songs are full of judgements on human conduct made from the far side, and a good many of them are complaints.
Each song carries a refrain, a fixed burden repeated through the narrative, which identifies it and keeps the beat as the chanter marks time. Collectors have usually left the refrains untranslated, because they often carry no lexical sense, and printing them as sound is more honest than inventing a meaning.
The songs were written down late, mostly by outsiders working from elderly informants, and unevenly. One collection stands apart because it was made from inside: a young Ainu woman transcribed the kamuy yukar she had learned from her grandmother, translated them into Japanese herself, and the volume appeared in 1923. The atlas points at these texts and does not attempt to summarise the songs into a doctrine they were never written to hold.