This article appeared in the March/April issue of Discover magazine as "Speaking the Past." Subscribe for more stories like these.
On the Copper River in south-central Alaska, a celebrated chief named Łtaxda’x (EL-tax-da) once owned a dish hewn from the antler of a giant moose. When Łtaxda’x died, four brothers fought over this ceremonial platter of the Raven clan. According to some tellings of the ancient story, one brother who lost gathered the people who sided with him and led them away from their ancestral home into the unknown.
They journeyed for many years, crossing a glacier and nearly starving. When they followed what looked like a rabbit on the snowy horizon, it turned out to be the distant peak of Mount St. Elias. From the top, they could see the deep blue sea, and they built their home on an island. They prospered under the protection of the mountain with the glacier spirit that adopted them and taught them how to hunt seals living there.
Their village, Tlákw.aan (KLAK-wan), grew to have so many people that smoke from hearthfires hung over the houses. These clouds led to an incident remembered by their descendants even today — generations after they abandoned Tlákw.aan and built a town on the nearby Yakutat mainland (350 miles from Anchorage in present-day Alaska). “It’s said that there was so much smoke coming up from the houses that Raven choked and fell from the sky,” says Aron Crowell, director of the Alaska division of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center.
