Tlingit society is characterized by ownership and reciprocity. Songs, stories, designs, personal names, and land are considered the real property of particular clans. The form and content of oral tradition are set in a context of reciprocity of "balance." The two moieties (or divisions) of the Tlingit people, Eagle and Raven, balance each other. Their members address love songs and most oratory to each other, and in host-guest relationships at feasts share in each other’s joy and work to remove each other’s' grief. A song or speech must be answered- not competitively, but only that it not "wander aimlessly." Speeches and stories contain thematically balanced interaction of the physical and spiritual, the living and departed, humans and animals, people and land.

The major Tlingit oral genres are songs, oratory, and narrative. Narratives include instructive and humorous Raven stories, and clan crest or shaman spirit acquisition legends. Folktales- defined as deliberate fiction -are conspicuously absent in Tlingit oral tradition, as are some forms popular in the European tradition, such as ballad, narrative verse, and epics in metrical forms. Instead, Alaskan traditions are characterized by a variety of repetitions and share an aesthetic different from that of composed and published literature.