Читать книгу American Environmental History - Группа авторов - Страница 34

When Raven created humans, he first used rock for the raw materials, and people never died. But this was too easy so he recreated them, using dust instead. In this way humans became mortal, as they remain today.

How does humanity fit into the world of nature and the scheme of living things? For the Koyukon, humans and animals are clearly and qualitatively separated. Only the human possesses a soul (nukk’ubidza, “eye flutterer”), which people say is different from the animals’ spirits. I never understood the differences, except that the human soul seems less vengeful and it alone enjoys immortality in a special place after death. The distinction between animals and people is less sharply drawn than in Western thought – the human organism, after all, was created by an animal’s power.

The Koyukon seem to conceptualize humans and animals as very similar beings. This derives not so much from the animal nature of humans as from the human nature of animals. I noted earlier, for example, that today’s animals once belonged to an essentially human society, and that transmutations between human and animal form were common. One of my Koyukon teachers said, however, that after the Distant Time people and animals became completely separate and unrelated.

Animals still possess qualities that Westerners consider exclusively human, though – they have a range of emotions, they have distinct personalities, they communicate among themselves, and they understand human behavior and language. They are constantly aware of what people say and do, and their presiding spirits are easily offended by disrespectful behavior. The interaction here is very intense, and the two orders of being coexist far more closely than in our own tradition. But animals do not use human language among themselves. They communicate with sounds which are considered their own form of language.

The closeness of animals to humans is reinforced by the fact that some animals are given funeral rituals following the basic form of those held for people, only on a smaller scale …. In these cases, at least, animal spirits are placated much as human souls are after death.

Most interesting of all is animal behavior interpreted to be religious. “Even animals have their taboos,” a woman once told me. From her grandfather, she learned that gestating female beavers will not eat bark from the fork of a branch, because it is apparently tabooed for them. The late Chief Henry had told her of seeing a brown bear kill a ground squirrel, then tear out its heart, lungs, and windpipe and leave them on a rock. Again, the organs must have been taboo (hutłaanee) ….