The Kushtaka

A living Tlingit shapeshifter tradition of the southeast coast

Kóoshdaa káa, usually written Kushtaka, means "land otter man" in Tlingit, and it belongs to a large body of oral literature about the land otter handed down among the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska. The animal itself is abundant in southern Alaska and unsettlingly like us: intelligent, playful, living in families, with its own dwellings and its own ways of talking. In Tlingit tradition that resemblance had a dark explanation. Land otters were held to be the animal form of people who had drowned in the rivers or the sea.

Whether the otters rescued someone or kidnapped them, the victim became one of them, though still able to take human shape, sometimes as an attractive young man or woman, and the new otter roamed the forest hoping to lure others into the water or into madness. In some stories a Kóoshdaa káa imitates a crying baby or a screaming woman to draw people down to the river. In others the otter people find someone lost and freezing and save them by turning them, distracting them all the while with otter-made visions of family and friends, a rescue that is also a loss. Copper, urine, dogs and sometimes fire are said to keep them off. Land otters still stir deep fear and revulsion, especially among older people, and children are warned to trust neither land otters nor strangers. Now and then, though, a land otter remembers its human family and brings it good fortune.

Land otters were also a direct road to a shaman's power, helpers and teachers in many rituals, and shamans' land otter masks merge human and animal features over a human skull. Such spirit beings could be inherited from dead shamans, or could be those shamans themselves, living on in their heirs. In a story John Swanton published in 1909, a land otter person even has a hand in the origins of the Kuwakan, the Deer Dance or Peace Ceremony that let Tlingit communities make peace after a war or a killing, which gave that rite the sanction of one of the great supernatural beings of the Tlingit world.

The Kóoshdaa káa has slipped into modern fiction as well, from Harry D. Colp's account of a miner's encounter at Thomas Bay to William Giraldi's novel Hold the Dark. It remains first of all a Tlingit belief, and a living one.