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.