Kaats'

Kaats' is the hero of the Tlingit bear-husband narrative, recorded by Swanton at Sitka in 1904 as tale 19 of Tlingit Myths and Texts. While hunting, Kaats' was drawn into the den of a brown bear and taken as husband by the bear woman, who bore him children; when he later returned among people, she forbade him any dealings with his human wife and children, and he hunted daily to feed his bear family. At last he disobeyed her injunction and was killed by his own bear children. The Dauenhauers published J. B. Fawcett's Tlingit-language telling, noting the story's standing among brown-bear crest traditions of the Teikweidí; the narrative is commemorated in totem art such as the Kaats' pole at Saxman.

Domains

• bears

Powers

• to live among the brown bears as the husband of a bear woman and father of bear children

Sources

• The hunter who was taken into the den of a brown bear, married the bear woman and fathered bear children, and was killed by them when he broke his bear wife's injunction; the ancestral hero of Tlingit brown-bear crest tradition.: Swanton, John R., Tlingit Myths and Texts, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 39 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909) (secondary); Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, and Richard Dauenhauer (eds.), Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives, Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature 1 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987) (secondary)