Quawteaht is the creator and primordial ancestor recorded by early observers of the Nuu-chah-nulth, a first being who existed before all others and gave the land and its people their beginning. In the accounts collected by Gilbert Malcolm Sproat he stands as the highest deity of the Nootka, associated with the origin of the country and with the deer and other creatures of the early world. Sources differ on whether Quawteaht is a being distinct from the transformer Kwatyat or an older ethnographic spelling of the same figure; in either reading he embodies the primordial, world-founding aspect of Nuu-chah-nulth cosmology as against the later wandering, form-fixing exploits of the transformer.