When my publisher offered to release a new edition of Raven Stole the Moon, which had been out of print for many years, I was pleased but somewhat nervous: Would I look back at my first novel, written thirteen years ago, and feel the need to rewrite vast portions of it?
Fortunately, the answer was no. Other than restoring the sequence of the first two chapters to the order I had originally intended, I found the only changes I wanted to make were to cut much of the vulgarity in the first edition. (I don’t know why, when I was thirty-one, I found cursing such a crucial form of expression. Perhaps now that my children are older, I’d prefer they have a gentler view of their old dad . . .)
In preparing the manuscript for this edition, I did laugh out loud at the absurdity of certain things—a world without cell phones? No Internet? It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that 1996 was really the threshold of the digital revolution. We seemed so proud of our technology back then, though now a phone the size of a credit card has more memory than a room full of Pentium PCs. I didn’t update these technology issues, however, as I felt that Raven Stole the Moon benefits from retaining the innocence of the pre-digital era.
I would like to make a brief comment on the use of my Tlingit heritage in this novel:
My mother was born in Wrangell, Alaska; my grandmother was born in Point Ellis. My great-grandmother, a full-blooded Tlingit, lived in Klawock, though her place of birth is unknown. I was not born in Alaska; nor was I raised with any Tlingit culture in my household; still, my blood quantum is verified, I am registered with the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, and I am a Sealaska shareholder. Simply put, I am a Tlingit more by blood than by culture.
Because of the policies of the United States government regarding Alaskan natives, there is a generation or more of Tlingit who were deprived of their cultural ties. This is not to say that Tlingit culture no longer exists; there are many Tlingit who have maintained the wonderful tradition of language, ceremony, and art that, with the help of the Internet, is spreading to younger generations of Tlingit who may have lost touch with their past.
I am not an authority on Tlingit theology, and my ideas of certain rituals and ideas as portrayed in this novel are based on reading I have done and by listening to the stories my uncles and aunts told me when I was young; Alaskans are famous storytellers, and my uncles and aunts were no exception. I apologize if the liberties I have taken cause offense.
There are many books available for anyone interested in a more traditional account of Tlingit myths and legends, such as Shamans and Kushtakas and Heroes and Heroines in Tlingit-Haida Legend, both by Mary Giraudo Beck; and Tlingit Myths and Texts, a collection of native stories recorded by John R. Swanton.
My objective in writing this book was to tell a compelling story, like those I heard when I was a kid at the campfire with my extended family. Those stories sent chills down my spine, raised the hair on my neck, and yet made me crave the next camping trip when I could hear them again. With that in mind, I want to acknowledge the greatest narrative influences in my life: my mother, Yolanda Ferguson Stein, and her siblings: Billie, Margaret, Jean, Hall, Valentine, Robin, Steele, and Thorne.
Garth Stein
Seattle, 2009