Reddit mentions of Nine Visits to the Mythworld: Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, Vol. 2)

Actually … the oral literatures of the Northwest Coast natives (several distinct cultures, but sharing this) are very interesting to look at from a software-y perspective. They were intellectual badasses, and it’s a shame that their work is almost forgotten now when we’re reading Plato and Euclid and Homer on the land where they lived. Quick examples:

• In Nine Visits to the Mythworld, or maybe one of his other translations of Haida myths, Robert Bringhurst makes some great points about how the stories were, in a broad sense, fractal. Often a myth has a couple distinctive themes (like a particular number or emotion) which appear both openly and subtly all through the story. This is fun to look at from a computational perspective; it makes you think about how the stories are encoded in memory as a fairly small set of features, then produced in slightly different forms in each performance.
  
  
• Russel Barsh’s Coast Salish Property Law: An Alternative Paradigm for Environmental Relationships is a legal perspective on how these cultures handled ownership of abstractions. Some of it is remarkably like WIPO IP law; some of it is remarkably different. And of course potlatch-style gift economies have already been compared with the open-source model.
  
  
• Just for one example of practical ingenuity, some of the ways used to catch salmon were incredibly clever. They were even creating favorable habitat for prey fish to lure salmon to particular coves year after year. All their foodstock management was practical and long-term; there’s a grain of truth to the patronizing “lol they were in tune with nature” comments you sometimes hear. I know some people who are trying to get some of these systems back in place, but it may be too late.
  
  Here’s something that really did my head in. The glaciers left the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age, about ten thousand years ago. At that time it was basically sand and scoured rock: no soil, no nothin’, and with new topology. But the earliest Coast Salish artifacts are from pretty much the same time. In other words, since this land was last reset by geology, its natural state has been to be inhabited and managed by the Coast Salish.