Nika Bartoo-Smith
Underscore Native News + ICT
Caskey Russell, an enrolled member of the Tlingit Nation (Eagle / Kooyu Kwáan) of Alaska, is a father, a professor and a musician.
Russell currently teaches Indigenous studies and literature at Fairhaven College at Western Washington University, where he also attended for his undergraduate and masters degrees.
This September, Russell published his debut novel, “The Door on The Sea.” The epic fantasy is a sort of coming of age story about Elān, a young book-lover. He must embark on a journey to save his people, the Aaní, from the shape-shifting Kóoshdakáa, who are enslaving Indigenous tribes across the region. The novel is the first in a trilogy, with book two set to publish in September 2026, and book three in September 2027.
The book began as a bedtime story for his young boys, who were both homesick while Russel was on sabbatical with his family in New Zealand in 2013.
“Tired of Tolkien worship and European mythmaking, tired of nightly tears, I found an hour almost every day to write a half page or so about a young warrior from the Flicker House off to battle the infamous Kóoshdakáa of Tlingit myth, the very same shapeshifters my grandmother scared me with as a child,” Russell writes on his website, describing the novel.
Russell’s grandmother, Teew, was born and raised in Heenya Kwáan (Klawock, Alaska). Her family comes from the Kóon Hít (Flicker House) of the Naasteidi Kooyu Kwáan on the eagle/wolf side of the Tlingit Nation. This is the basis for the village where the main character, Elān, comes from.
Russell joined Underscore Native News + ICT via Zoom from his classroom at Fairhaven College, in Bellingham, Washington. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Underscore Native News + ICT: You mention on your website how the initial ideas for this novel were born in Aeotearoa, and began as a bedtime story that your sons helped add to. Tell me more about that time and your inspiration.
Caskey Russell: In 2013 I [took] a sabbatical at the University of Wyoming. I was really excited. And I was going to take my whole family. My boys were in first and fifth grade, and they were not so excited. We left in January, right after New Year’s 2013 and we flew into Auckland. After a day or two the novelty wore off and they were ready to come home.
There were quite a few nights of scenes of crying. I remember sitting around the dinner table and they’re inconsolable, just crying, and they said something like, “We don’t like this house.” And my youngest one said, “And they don’t drive on the right side of the road here.”
The Hobbit movie had just come out, and I would take them to the Hobbit movie at night, and that’s the only thing that seemed to kind of pacify them. We watched the film for about the fifth time. We rented the Lord of the Rings series, and watched that.
So I was sitting in my office at the university, and thought, “I am going to write a book. I’m just going to start writing something Hobbit-like, based on some of the Tlingit tradition I heard growing up and from my grandmother, and then I’m going to read it to them, and I’m just going to create this to try to entertain them, and then also get their feedback.”
I wrote a few pages, read it to them, and immediately they were like, “Oh, we want to be part of this. We want to be characters.” And so I said, “What kind of character do you want to be?”
They told me the characters they wanted. One wanted to be a middle aged warrior. And then Chet wanted to be this armored wolf because he brought a stuffed animal that’s kind of like it was a dog, but it has the Tlingit name Wolf. So I wrote them in there, I combined their first name as middle names.
Every day I’d write a page or two at the university, and at night, I’d read it to them. So it became a ritual. For like two months, they wanted to hear these stories, and I took all their notes. And then after about two months, they found some good friends and got acclimated, and so we missed a couple nightly readings, and then just kind of fell off.
Then in the pandemic, I found the novel [on my computer]. I opened it up and it was like 80 pages. I thought,“I got plenty of time during the pandemic, let me try to finish this thing.” So I finished it over the pandemic.
UNN + ICT: Tell me more about your grandmother and how she influenced this story?
CR: Growing up, I heard a lot of stories from her, especially around the campfire on the beach, stories about Raven. Those were always memorable, and they’re often very humorous. He was a complete contrarian. The stories I remembered were often involving him lying and having gluttony.
And then I remember the Kóoshdakáa stories she would tell, which are shape shifters in Tlingit. Even when I was living with her after college in my mid 20s, I remember she would hear like a dog howling outside or something at night, and she’d say, “Don’t go out. The Kóoshdakáa is out there.” The dogs can sense the Kóoshdakáa, which in the novel, the wolf can [also sense].
Living with my grandparents, being very close to them, hearing about growing up in the village, all influenced the story. My grandmother was born in 1916 in Heenya Kwáan (Klawock, Alaska). [She stayed there until [her] 30s [when] she came down to Bellingham to go to school. The Bureau of Indian Affairs sent her and a few other Alaskan Natives to go to school, in fact, here at Western Washington University, to become a teacher.
I never really learned Tlingit when I was a kid, but I know some phrases. So the stories, the language, hearing her stories growing up and just who she was, all kind of inspired me.
UNN + ICT: What research went into the book for you?
CR: My dissertation was on the Tlingit tribe. Having grown up in the city and having not grown up in Klawock, Alaska, I had the feeling that I was missing out because I’d hear my grandmother and my great uncles talk about Klawock in a very special way. So I decided to have my dissertation focus on stuff I wanted to learn about the Tlingit Tribe. I focused on civil rights, education, language, carving, storytelling, and a poet named Nora Marks Dauenhauer. I would say I have been researching the novel since my 20s, since writing the dissertation.
UNN + ICT: Tell me about your foul-mouthed, somewhat frustrating, yet ultimately very wise, raven character.
CR: I loved writing him because in the beginning I talked about Raven the same way my grandmother did, to get us to laugh and think at the same time and be the contrarian that he was in a lot of the stories I heard growing up. So writing him was fun.
The key to him, his character, is in that very first paragraph or two: salmon. So if you’re wondering about Raven’s motivation, it’s the salmon. That’ll become explicit in book two and then in Book Three. But he doesn’t care much for humans at all. His main motivation is the health of salmon. He’s obsessed with eating salmon, and so to protect the salmon, you have to protect the land. You have to protect the rivers. You have to protect everything, right? Whatever he can do to get humans to protect their rivers, his rivers, as he sees it, and thereby protect the salmon runs he will do.
UNN + ICT: For most of this story, the characters are on an epic journey in a canoe. Did you grow up canoeing?
CR: I grew up boating and fishing, I was obsessed. I can even remember the first salmon I caught and how that was a big deal coming back, and my grandmother making me cut it up. And my grandmother made the best, what we called growing up Indian barbecue salmon, kind of slow smoked salmon over coals. And kind of like Raven my favorite food ever is salmon.
The canoe I kind of dreamed up. I was over in Maori country in New Zealand and canoeing, like with the Pacific Northwest, is big out there. So I kind of dreamt up a canoe with my boys: two big outriggers where you could store stuff and keep water in it, and attached to it, a big canoe with netting on the side. And my sons drew it, and that was kind of fun, and we imagined what it would be like. And the Maori word for canoe is waka, so I just named it after the Maori word, waka.
UNN + ICT: Are there particular messages or lessons that you hope people will learn from this book?
CR: One of the things I was worried about, I think this is on my website too, is how should I try to make it authentic to Tlingit culture? What do I do when you have two young boys demanding that their stuffed animals [be] in it, that there be pubs like we went to in Hobbiton when we visited the film set? And they wanted metal weapons and they wanted armor. I kind of jettisoned early on this notion that I should try to be authentic to Tlingit culture circa 1700s.
So I jettisoned the notion of trying to be authentic and I put it in a completely speculative world and universe, and then I could have metal armor and swords, and then all these fantasy elements and alien tech, like the dzanti.
So I think the message would be one, there’s a place to try to be as authentic as possible and understand what that means. But there’s also a place for opening up a whole new world and new storytelling and new inventions and new speculative fiction based on the spirit of Tlingit culture.
And then, of course, the Koosh are an allegory for Europeans coming. They come in through the door with this tech. We find out who had a hand in helping the Koosh come into the world in books two and three. But they come in, they take over, they enslave some Indigenous tribes and force them to make their boats so they can go out and travel around. So that’s kind of the allegory for colonization there.
UNN + ICT: So this book began as a bed time story for your, at the time, young boys. Now that it is fully written and published, what feedback have you received from them about the book?
CR: When they were kids, they gave me a whole host of things they wanted to see in the novel: pubs, metal weapons, swords. And they’re the ones that talked about having bear humans who watch out for the bears. Because one of the boys asked me, “Who is protecting bears when they hibernate? Aren’t they vulnerable?” That kind of led to these bear cousins that protect them in the forest. I thought that was a brilliant idea, an island of bears, dangerous bears that don’t like humans.
The one thing I didn’t put in there that they wanted was laser firing shrimp. I said no. My youngest son has said he refuses to read the novel until I put laser shrimp in there. Of course, he’s kind of joking, but I’m not sure what he thinks of it. I don’t think the oldest one has read anything beyond what I read to him in New Zealand, so I’m not sure what their take on it is, although, when they do read it, they’re going to see there’s a lot of easter eggs for them. It’ll be interesting to see what the boys think. I hope they enjoy it.
UNN + ICT: What else do you want people to know about you and this book?
CR: My website had that line where I’m worried that people don’t like me using Tlingit culture in non traditional ways or non authentic ways. Hopefully people kind of leap into the salmon stream of the fantastic with me. I meant it to not misappropriate or denigrate tradition or authenticity or anything like that, but just to open up a new avenue of storytelling, storytelling in the spirit of Tlingit culture, but also in the spirit of speculative and fantasy fiction.
This story is co-published by Underscore Native News and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.