Episode Details

Nine tales continue the Big-Raven cycle of Bogoras's Koryak Texts — Ememqut at the whale thanksgiving, where the Magpie-, Fox- and Raven-Women dance their shame-songs and are answered; Ememqut keeping the old man's rule of the ornamented mortars, and Ila breaking it; Fox-Woman's shame-song at the drum and the children she bore in secret in the open country; the Ermine-People, turned away from Big-Raven's door in one tale and again in the next, who end as true ermine among the caves and caches; Ememqut taken for the kamaks' son, singing his hosts to sleep and bringing their slain man back to life; the shellfish whose detached hood becomes a house and a wife; the dried perch-tails that turn into sons; and Miti, Magpie-Man, and the two thievish magpie children.

Chapters:

00:04 — Ememqut's Whale-Festival

03:40 — Ememqut and Ila

06:04 — Ememqut and Fox-Woman

08:43 — Ermine-People I

09:20 — Ermine-People II

13:18 — Ememqut and the Kamaks

15:09 — Ememqut and Shellfish-Girl

15:45 — Ememqut and the Perches

17:16 — Miti and Magpie-Man

From Koryak Texts (1917) by Waldemar Bogoras — Publications of the American Ethnological Society, Vol. V, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition recordings of 1900–01. Public domain. Fresh English rendering by KacheliTV. In keeping with this shelf's practice, some tales are heard with single beats left out or told in outline, and the register records them all: in Ememqut's Whale-Festival, Raven-Woman's mischief at the dog-skinning is told in outline only — she pecks at the carcass as she holds it, and Yinia-Nawgut lays the carcass aside. In Ermine-People I, the visitors are turned away at Big-Raven's door, and the book's hard word for their reception is not heard. In Ermine-People II, the beatings at the door are heard as turnings-away, and the book's closing accident is not heard — the family climbs clear of the flood, resolves on the caches, and turns into real ermine, as the book's own ending has it. In Ememqut and the Kamaks, the making of Lawa's drum is not described. One tale of the cycle is not heard at all: How Ememqut became a Cannibal, which stands in the book between Ememqut and Ila and Ememqut and Fox-Woman, is excluded whole under this shelf's law and is recorded in the shelf's written exclusion register. Northern Tales gathers the Chukchi, Siberian Eskimo, Koryak, Yukaghir and Even tales from Bogoras's Jesup North Pacific Expedition volumes, in the books' own order.

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