Kwatyat

Kwatyat is the transformer and culture-hero at the centre of Nuu-chah-nulth oral literature, the being who moved through the unfinished world of the mythic age and fixed its ambiguous, half-formed inhabitants into the animals, humans and landmarks known today. He is at once a solemn world-orderer and a trickster: the Sapir-Thomas Nootka Texts preserve a long cycle in which he outwits and is outwitted in turn, wanders, marries, and reshapes whatever he meets, in tales such as 'Kwatyat and Wolf' and 'Kwatyat and the Sunbeam Girls.' Sources differ on whether Kwatyat and the creator-figure recorded by early ethnographers as Quawteaht name a single being or two related ones; the transformer's dual character, both maker and mischief-maker, is characteristic of Northwest Coast culture-heroes.

Domains

• transformation
• trickery
• creation and culture

Powers

• changes his own form at will
• fixes the ambiguous first beings into their present forms

Epithets

• Kʷaƛiyat, the Transformer — the one who changes the forms of thingsSapir, Edward, and Morris Swadesh. Nootka Texts. 1939. (secondary)

Sources

• Kwatyat is the Nuu-chah-nulth transformer and culture-hero who ordered the world and figures as a trickster in a large cycle of tales.: Sapir, Edward, and Morris Swadesh. Nootka Texts: Tales and Ethnological Narratives. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America, 1939. (secondary); 'Since Kwatyat Lived on Earth: An Examination of Nuu-chah-nulth Culture History.' M.A. thesis, Simon Fraser University. (secondary)
• Kwatyat carved the land and gave beings their forms; oral tradition credits him with shaping features such as the Sproat Lake petroglyphs.: Sproat, Gilbert Malcolm. Scenes and Studies of Savage Life. London: Smith, Elder, 1868. (primary)