Glacial Theory Of The Natives
By: Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1896)
The Stikines, hearing the mysterious roars and
crashes from within this bay ("Hutli"-Thunder Bay, now called Le Conte),
believed it the home of the Thunder Bird, and Hutli's rough ayllables stand
for that mythical creature, the flaping of whose wings causes the rolling
noise heard. All Tlingits believe that in the beginning the mountains
were living creatures, grandly embodied spirits, whom they long worshipped.
The glaciers are the children of the mountains, and these parents hold
them in their arms, dip their feet in the sea, cover them with deep snows
in the winter, and scatter earth and rocks over them to ward off the summer
sun. Sitth is their general name for ice, and its whispered sibilants
suggest the Tlingits' horror of cold, even their dull imaginations conceiving
a hell of ice - a place of everlasting cold as the future state of those
buried in the ground rather than cremated. Sitth tooYehk is their
ice spirit, an invisable power of evil, whose chill breath is death, who
manifests himselfin the keen, peculiar wind blowing over glacial reaches;
whose voice is heard in the angry roar of falling bergs, and in the hiss,
the crackle, and tinkle of singing ice-flows. He hurls down bergs in his
wrath, he tosses them to and fro, crushes canoes, and washes the land with
great waves. When the ice-wind dies away and the glacier's front is still,
Sitth
too Yehk sleeps or roams under ice labyrinths, planning further distruction.
The natives speak in whispers, for fear of rousing or offending this eil
one, and refrain from striking his subjects - the icebergs - with ther
canoe-paddles. When they must make a journey across a glacier, they
implore the mercy of Sitth too Yehk with much big medicine and incantations,
speak softly, tread lightly, and neither defile nor offend it with crumb
or odour of their food. The hair-seals are the children of the glacier,
and proof against all this magic. They may ride on the ice-cakes with impunity,
and under the Hutli's and Klumma Gutta's (Taku's) front the
man-faced seals live, terrible creatures whose spell can only be broken
by one's pouring some fresh water into the sea.
Scource: Scidmore, Eliza Ruhamah. Appletons' Guide-Book to Alaska,
New York:
D. Appleton and Company, 1896, 76
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