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Overview
Chief Mountain’s Asi-hwi’l begins with starving sisters meeting beside a river. The supernatural Ho’uX, translated Good-luck, joins the unmarried sister and supplies fish and game. Their son receives the name Asi-hwi’l, Going-across-the-mountains. His father equips him with extraordinary snowshoes that let him travel up cliffs, a staff with a goat-horn point, and two little dogs carried in bags. Calling the dogs Red and Spotted and striking them makes them grow large; they frighten mountain goats from opposite sides of a slope and can afterward become small again.
Asi-hwi’l meets Large-ears, whose long mittens bring down goats when clapped. The hunters demonstrate their abilities peacefully. In another encounter a sky being sends a servant covered with ashes, who looks like a white bear. Asi-hwi’l follows the figure up a cliff but cannot enter its house. The narrative supplies the disguise explicitly, so this figure is not simply classified as a polar bear.
After marriage in Tsimshian country, the successful hunter is abandoned on a sea-lion rock by jealous brothers-in-law. His father’s whistle arrests the rising water. A Mouse grandmother shelters him and brings him to the sea-lion chief, who is ill from a harpoon lodged inside him. Asi-hwi’l bargains for transport, removes the weapon, and is enclosed in a vessel made from sea-lion intestines. Wind carries it to land.
To avenge his abandonment he carves killer whales. Red-cedar examples fail and become logs; yellow-cedar ones also fail. Yew figures finally become living whales that break his enemies’ canoes. He returns to his wife. The animated whales and the sea-lion rescue remain within this complete household-and-journey account, rather than being multiplied into aliases or equated with every regional killer-whale tradition.
Origins & earliest records
Franz Boas, Tsimshian Texts, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 27 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902). Recorded at Kinkolith, at the Nass River’s mouth, in November–December 1894. Boas’s introduction, dated June 1899, names Philip, Moses, Chief Mountain and Moody as the collection’s narrators. The volume prints the language it calls Nîsqa’E alongside English translation; individual story headings identify their tellers.
Records & interpretation
Chief Mountain’s English supplement, Asi-hwi’l, pp.225–229, read in full. Introduction p.5 identifies the Nass River recording context; the supplement names this teller. Colonial-era transcription and English translation mediate the account.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Tsimshian Texts: Nass River Dialect
Asi-hwi’l, pp.225–229; Chief Mountain attribution and introduction p.5.
Family & connections
A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- Primary textBoas 1902 original Nass River collectionResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
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