Raven and the Box of Daylight

In the world's early darkness, an old and powerful chief keeps daylight, the moon, and the stars hidden away inside a set of boxes nested one within another in his house, refusing to share their light with anyone else. Raven, unwilling to accept a world kept permanently dark, transforms himself into a tiny hemlock or spruce needle and lets himself fall into the drinking water of the chief's daughter. She swallows the needle without noticing and soon finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, giving birth some time later to a boy who is Raven himself, reborn as the chief's own grandson.

The old chief, delighted with his grandson, dotes on the child and denies him nothing, and the boy uses that indulgence patiently, first crying and pointing until he is given the box holding the stars to play with, whereupon he opens it and lets the stars escape up through the smokehole into the night sky, an act his grandfather can only accept with resignation once it is already done.

Versions of this opening episode recorded among different Northwest Coast communities vary in some particulars, including whether it is a hemlock or spruce needle Raven uses, and how many attendants or maidens the chief's daughter has around her when she unknowingly swallows it, but the underlying device of Raven engineering his own birth as a trusted insider in order to gain access to something he could never simply take by force recurs consistently across the tradition.

Encouraged by his success, the boy cries and wheedles again until he is given the box containing the moon as well, which he likewise releases through the smokehole, adding its light to the stars already set loose above. Finally, persistent and seemingly insatiable in his demands, he obtains the innermost and most closely guarded box of all, the one holding daylight itself, the treasure his grandfather values above everything else in the house.

The moment the box of daylight is in his hands, the boy transforms back into his true form as Raven, snatches up the box, and flies up through the smokehole and out into the dark world beyond, carrying daylight away from the chief's house entirely. Flying over the darkened land, Raven opens the box and releases daylight across the world for the first time, an event some regional tellings describe as so sudden and startling that various animals encountered along Raven's flight are frozen forever afterward into the postures, colors, or behaviors light first caught them in. The Haida and Tlingit versions recorded by the ethnographer John Swanton in the early twentieth century differ in various incidental details, including exactly which chief hoards the light and how the deception is discovered, but share this same basic sequence of transformation, adoption, and theft.