Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Stories of the Distant Time often portray the animal-people as having distinctive personalities, and this affects the way a species is regarded today. Often these personalities can be known only through the stories, because the animals do not visibly express them any longer. People sometimes have strong positive or negative feelings about particular species because of the way they are portrayed in the stories.

The sucker fish, for example, was a great thief in the Distant Time and so it is not well thought of. One man told me he could never bring himself to eat this fish, knowing what it had been and fearing that it would make a thief of him:

Even in springtime, sometimes we run short of food. But if we catch a sucker in the net, I just can’t eat him.

People will sometimes characterize someone by referring to an animal’s personality. In fact, Jetté … writes that Yukon River Koyukon may inquire about a person by asking, “What animal is he?” Someone known as a thief may be described as “just like a sucker fish.” When a person talks big, promises a lot but accomplishes little, or gets ahead by trickery, he or she is said to be “just like a raven.” Although Raven is the creator, he is portrayed in the stories as a lazy trickster who usually finds a way to get ahead by the efforts of others. The Koyukon have a kind of jocular respect for ravens, mocking their personality but still awed by their spirit power.

When I asked about relatedness among animals, people usually answered with reference to their social behavior and personality. For example, a Distant Time story reveals that bears and porcupines are cousins, and people cite as proof their occasional sharing of a den. When relatedness is not mentioned in a story it may be revealed by a tendency to “get along.” Muskrats and beavers often live close together and they eat the same kinds of plants, so they are considered relatives. Wolves may kill a loose dog, which shows that the two are not related.

Animal relationships are also shown by shared characteristics, but usually not those chosen by Western taxonomists. One story of the Distant Time says that all the smaller animals were related as sisters who lived together in an underground house. These included red squirrel, mink, fox, several owl species, short-tailed weasel, ptarmigan, and others. Another related group includes the four water mammals: otter, mink, beaver, and muskrat. Stories also reveal that the raven is mink’s uncle. And in obviously paired species, the larger is considered the older brother to the smaller – brown bear to the black bear, for example, and flicker to the woodpecker.

The Koyukon people conceptualize a natural order, but its structure and foundation are quite different from our own. No one described to me a system of phylogeny or biological interrelatedness, but I did not probe this matter exhaustively and may have failed to ask the right questions. Such a system might exist, or perhaps the world’s makeup is sufficiently explained in the stories.