Tlingit and Haida religious life is organized around a moiety system: every person belongs by matrilineal descent to one of two reciprocal halves, most commonly named Raven and Eagle among both nations, though local names vary by clan and dialect. Each moiety is made up of clans, and each clan holds its own crests, songs, names and origin stories as property, displayed on totem poles, house fronts, blankets and regalia and invoked at potlatches that mark births, deaths, name-taking and the raising of a pole. A person from one moiety traditionally marries into the other, and the two sides perform essential ceremonial roles for each other, so that a Raven cannot properly bury a Raven or raise a Raven's pole without Eagle labor and witness, and the reverse.
Raven himself appears across both traditions as the central culture hero, a trickster whose appetite and cunning repeatedly reshape the world despite, or because of, his own selfishness. The best known cycle tells how Raven, weary of a world kept in total darkness by an old chief who hoarded the sun, moon and stars in nested boxes, transformed himself into a hemlock needle, was swallowed by the chief's daughter, and was reborn as her son. As the cherished grandchild he cried and wheedled his way through box after box until he reached the innermost one, holding daylight itself, then became Raven again and flew off with it, releasing light into the world. Haida and Tlingit versions differ in detail but agree on the shape of the story, and both nations recorded it for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the start of the twentieth century in the tellers' own words.