Case file · Folklore / legend
Kóoshdaa Káa, the land-otter people (Tlingit)
In Tlingit tradition the Kóoshdaa Káa, 'land-otter men', rescue or capture people lost at sea or in the woods, and can turn them into land-otter people unless a shaman saves them.
1909 CE · 57.05, -135.33 · status: legend
The account
Anthropologist John R. Swanton recorded such stories at Sitka and Wrangell in 1904 and published them in 'Tlingit Myths and Texts' (1909); Frederica de Laguna documented the belief among the Yakutat Tlingit in 'Under Mount Saint Elias' (1972). Land otters were also a source of shamans' power.
The sceptical view
Popular writers turned these beings into a shapeshifting 'Kushtaka' cryptid; within Tlingit culture they belong to a moral and spiritual world, not to monster hunting.