Reading Notes: Alaskan Legends, Part B

Two stories stood out to me in this set of readings: "The Land of the Dead" and "The Ghost Land." I'm so pleasantly surprised to find what are basically a set of ghost stories here. So spooky.

The Land of the Dead is an Eskimo story about a woman who dies and is put in a "grave box," but is woken up by her grandfather, who tells her she is not dead. She visits a village of dog shades, where she is whipped like a dog, either because she is a shade herself, or because she appears to be a dog to them. Either way, this is an aesop about being kind to dogs and not beating them. Next, she comes to a river made of tears from people who weep for the dead, which is about as heavy metal as you can get. Excellent setting for a ghost story. After she crosses the river, she ends up in a village on the other side, the "land of the shades." She meets her grandmother, who tells her that her grandfather led her here because "the last person thought of by a dying person hurries away to show the road to the new shade." The very last line drops this on us: "Thoughts are heard in the land of the shades." Ghostly whispers for the living, maybe?

This would make a fantastic horror story or ghost story. It could be Sixth Sense-esque, where the girl wakes up without any memory of how she ended up in a grave box/coffin, and comes across these fantastical locations. She would only realize she's dead once she came to the village of the shades. Maybe, taking the final line of the reading into account, she could hear people's thoughts, too.

The Ghost Land is a Tlingit legend similar to the above. A man's wife dies and he grieves endlessly. The only way he can deal with it is to walk--so he walks for days and nights on end on the "Death Trail." He eventually comes to a lake and calls to the village on the other side. They seem not to hear him, but notice his presence, saying, "Some one has come up from Dreamland. Go and bring him over." He finds his wife there, who warns him not to eat any food the villagers there give him. She returns with him to their home village, but nobody can see the wife. That night, when the husband goes to sleep, he passes away too, and they return to the ghost land together.

This story has several "otherworld" or "reverse world" elements, the most obvious of which is that the people from the two villages are not able to mix. It's interesting that in the ghost land, the living village and its world is referred to as "dreamland." This makes it seem like death is just a progression to another type of life, not an afterlife in the traditional sense. Just a graduation to a different village across the lake you could find by following the Death Trail.

Sources:
Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry

Image:
"Death Canyon Trail" via Wikimedia Commons