How Raven Found the Daylight and Other American Indian Stories

Book excerpt: These stories come from tales told by tribes living along the bays and inlets and rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Anthropologist Franz Boas lived with these native people and collected their stories, which he published in the form of notes, often short and incomplete. Levitt and Guralnick have embellished these notes, bringing them fully to life. In doing so, they acknowledge a double debt: one to Boas, without whom they would have no record of the tales, and one to the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, whose rich and fertile minds are the source of a colorful indigenous literature.