Bird is the Word

Question: I love your post on Central and South American jaguar gods. Could we have one on Native American raven gods?

Sure! Untangling different Ravens is a little more difficult than differentiating between the jaguar gods down south; many of the North American cultures were partly migratory, allowing them to share their gods and religion via diffusion over larger areas than the more static urban cultures of Central America, and the waters were further muddied when European settlement in the Americas forced entire ethnic groups to uproot and move to different territories, introducing their culture in entirely foreign areas. Then, when English-speaking historians and ethnologists recorded the stories of various North American peoples, they tended to ignore the native words for various deities and figures and just record every story as "about Raven", regardless of whether or not those were the same raven gods from the same cultures or whether they were deity stories or folkloric stories, sometimes out of linguistic confusion, sometimes because they didn't think the animistic and polytheistic natives had a formal religion because it didn't look like Christianity, and sometimes out of plan old imperialist inability to tell one group of people from another.

But untangling is what we're here for, right?

So, starting up at the top of the world, we've got Tulungersak, known to the Inuit of Alaska and Canada as Father Raven. He's probably the most dour of the raven gods; he still retains a little of the familiar character of raven as a trickster, especially in stories such as his squabble with Kaglulik over feather designs or his accidental drowning of himself while trying to imitate migratory birds, but overall he's a more somber and fatherly creator figure, in keeping with the general lack of humor among the arctic gods. Depending on the Inuit community you ask, he created the earth, the sky, the sun and stars or humanity; to some, he's the bringer of thunderstorms when angered (often because someone has harmed a raven without cause), and to others he's the being who turns the inhabitable glaciers into solid, livable land. He invented death - by accident, of course, as tricksters do - and can now be called upon by shamans to enrich their trances and harass their spirit companions. If anybody can be said to be a fun time among the Inuit gods, it's Tulungersak: black-feathered party in a reactionary can.

Father Raven, harassing Sedna because he doesn't have very good decision-making capacity

A little bit south the the Pacific Northwest coast from Canada to Oregon, Washington and northern California, and we run into the most famous of raven gods, those that form the major gods of their respective cultures. Nankil'slas, the raven god of the Haida and Tlingit, is widespread in this area and is also a creator god, but he does so through selfish trickster-style shenanigans, as in the story where he grants light to the world because he coveted the beautiful treasures of sun and moon and performed a ridiculous shapechanging caper in order to steal them, and now runs around the sky with them in case anyone might be coveting his shinies.

He will come for your shinies, too.

It's usually a bad idea to fuck around with Nankil'slas, especially since he tends to have very little conscience and react on impulse when he wants something. There was that one time he got an entire community of people killed in an intentional avalanche because he was hungry and wanted to eat some eyeballs. He's not out to get you, he just is really more about his own instant gratification than anything else.

I know you asked about North American, but I gotta bring up Kutkh in this discussion, too, even though he's technically more of an Asian phenomenon. Kutkh is the raven god of the Chukchi, who inhabit northeastern Siberia, but he also appears across the vast Pacific in some strikingly similar myths among Alaskan peoples. Like most raven deities, he's full of ridiculousness and high spirits, which his people believe explains why the landscapes he created are sometimes full of bizarre formations and weird glacial carvings, and often gets into fights with other local gods, usually because they don't properly respect him or have something he wants. (Those raven gods, no respect for personal property.)

Making Kamchatka look crazy, one feather at a time.

There are several other small raven deities, scattered everywhere from California to Ohio to Oklahoma, but those above are the most major and well-known.

Interestingly, while European legends tend to make all corvids sort of interchangeable, not distinguishing too clearly between ravens and crows, Native American religions more often view the two kinds of birds very differently. Raven gods, like the ones above, tend to be the fly-by-night shenanigans-heavy tricksters who blow things up out of greed or confusion and do some great things while also suffering the consequences of their actions. Crow gods, on the other hand - like Angwusnasomtaka, the mother goddess of the Hopi pantheon way south of crazy Raventown - are usually figures more associated with order and stability, bringing evildoers to justice and maintaining the status quo.

We'll be seeing one of these guys in the Inuit pantheon someday not too far off, hopefully!