Blue Jay is the great buffoon of Chinookan storytelling, a noisy, vain, meddling spirit-being who is forever acting on impulse and misunderstanding the world. In the cycle recorded by Boas from Charles Cultee he is the younger brother of the knowledgeable Io'i, whose careful instructions he ignores at every turn. His most famous adventure carries him into the land of the dead, where his sister has gone to live as the wife of a ghost; there he inverts the customs of the dead, laughs at the wrong things, and finally dies himself. As with other Chinookan animal-people, his name is simply the name of the bird, and his loud complaining call is heard as the residue of the reckless character he was in the myth-age.