06 February 2009
Teaching the Art of Being Human
Ancient Indigenous Storytelling Thrives
By Lea Terhune
The indigenous peoples that first inhabited the Americas held their literature in memory to be transmitted orally, and members of surviving indigenous nations still do.
Lea Terhune is managing editor for this eJournal USA.
Before there was writing, there were stories. Over millennia, stories descended through generations, in families and communities -- stories that captured the values and legends of diverse societies. Gifted storytellers committed hundreds of tales and verses to memory, and they were highly honored as entertainers and teachers who inspired, instilled values, and guided behavior.
Writing was invented, and many stories transmitted orally were written down, but storytellers continued to enthrall traditional communities around the world. Even the 20th-century technological revolution, which brought radio, television, the Internet, and digital media, did not silence storytellers.
Indigenous Americans have a rich oral tradition among their many distinct tribes, or nations, who inhabited North and South America well before the first European explorer appeared. Today these stories, preserved within their communities, reach broader audiences thanks to storytellers like Sunny Dooley and Dovie Thomason. Dooley, a Navajo, or Diné, and Thomason, of Lakota and Kiowa Apache ancestry, sat down together to discuss storytelling in the 21st century after performances at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Dooley is a strict interpreter of Navajo tradition, who, following her chanter grandfather’s advice, tells stories only where she is invited and does not advertise. Steeped in tribal culture while growing up on the Arizona Navajo reservation, her first language is Diné. Navajos, now the largest Indian nation in the United States, were seminomadic and pastoral. Thomason was born into Great Plains Indian nations, the Lakota, whose livelihoods revolved around the buffalo hunt before the herds were decimated, and Kiowa Apache, who were legendary, fierce warriors.
Oral traditions differ among tribes, but the goals are similar. “There are hundreds of native nations, and each nation and tribe has their specific purpose for stories,” Sunny Dooley says, and for Navajos, “Stories are utilized as part of informing, teaching a person how to be human.” The story’s spiritual dimension makes it integral to all Navajo ceremonies, where it’s used “to heal, it’s used to teach, it’s used to entertain, and it really gives you a point of origin,” Dooley adds.
Dovie Thomason represents several indigenous traditions. Besides her birth heritage, she has been adopted into Pueblo and “borrowed by the Iroquois because they needed a storyteller.” She agrees with Dooley. Among Thomason’s traditions, “pretty much everything that Sunny said about the purpose and point of storytelling is similar. We need to be taught and reminded how to be humans; we need a blueprint, some sort of map and direction for how to make choices and decisions,” she adds.
Stories as Teachers
Stories aid parenting and “keeping certain ways of being human alive within a community,” Thomason says. Describing Lakota and Kiowa Apache esteem for independence and individuality, she recalls her grandmother, from whom she learned many stories in her repertoire. “She said she told me stories so I could be free. And I think that may partly be mirroring her late-19th-, early-20th-century experience that stories were the way of teaching self-restraint, self-control,” without trying to dictate behavior. “The idea of having to control another person’s behavior is not taboo but it’s just uncomfortable, it’s inappropriate,” Thomason adds.
Stories are used to teach the value of responsibility and self-restraint. Sacred clown characters, like Coyote, Iktomi, or Raccoon, provide cautionary tales about the consequences of bad behavior and the benefits of doing the right thing. Coyote and Iktomi “teach that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should,” Thomason says. The stories make a person think, “I can do that. Should I? Well, maybe not.” It is “respectful rather than confrontational” or controlling. Stories illuminate shortcomings while allowing an offender to make choices. Thomason explains, “The person can look at the story and say was I the bird? Who was I? Why was that story being told to me?”
Both Thomason and Dooley recall having to listen to stories, sometimes for hours, after some childhood infraction. Dooley says storytelling teaches “the goodness of all life. It tells you which firewood you can collect to burn in your home for heat. It tells you what particular animals are appropriate to harvest, to eat. And I think, too, it makes you very aware of the environment.”
Sunny Dooley and Dovie Thomason began storytelling within their tribal communities. When they broadened their audience, they were faced with a dilemma: how to handle sacred and professional storytelling. “You almost have to separate yourself from the cultural, ceremonial telling of stories and then go to this other side where there is the profession of storytelling,” Dooley says. Navajo ritual stories do not change, nor are new ones created. Some have “gone extinct” -- “there are not as many of them as there used to be, but there are still plenty to be told.” Navajo stories are long, usually taking days to tell, a challenge to interpret for short performances. New stories are created in what Dooley calls the “professional” sphere. “In that particular genre, new stories are being told and they are told in all media, not just the verbal.” She says her own contributions “are personal stories of growing up in a bicultural world,” adding, “I think that people from all nations who are indigenous to their countries can relate to that,” because of their experience of the “European conquest story.” Indigenous cultures survived colonization. Dooley says that colonial legacies “are political systems that have kind of eroded our cultural integrity. And I think stories are reclaiming that integrity.”
Thomason, likewise, has had a “split experience,” balancing traditional and professional storytelling. Certain stories she never tells outside the community. She worries that the assumption that tribal stories are folklore, and therefore public domain to be freely appropriated for storytelling, can distort sacred traditions. “Crossing into the professional, that became very important because I saw a lot of the destruction and damage, well-intentioned or even mindlessly being done to storytelling, that was taking place in that profession” Thomason says. She thinks creating new stories may be necessary. “I’m really involved with a number of tellers globally, indigenous tellers looking at the need for new stories. The 21st century is managing to throw some new behaviors at us that we have no stories to address,” she says, giving two examples: “children killing each other” in gang violence and what she calls “the hurry-up sickness … we are multitasking, we are doing so much. … People never moved so fast. We need stories to make us wise about this.”
Restoring Harmony
Traditional storytelling is seasonal. Thomason recalls something an elder said to her: “The world is upside down. We follow the seasons, yet this world we live in … doesn’t. There was a time when it would become cold, we stopped. Now we put the chains on, we put [the car] in four-wheel drive. We just leave three hours early to go to work. We don’t have that quiet time in the teepee. We don’t have that down time in the wikiup, where all winter is a sleeping, still time of reflection.” (The teepee and wikiup are types of indigenous American shelters.)
Thomason continues, “So in the world that’s upside down, do we have to look at our traditions, do we have to look at our worlds? Where do we adapt? Where is it dangerous to? Where do we change? Where do we not?” Traditional stories should remain unchanged,” she says. “The bones cannot be altered. The weight of the story, the size of the story can be altered, they expand and contract, things are adaptive … but there has to be consensus about what’s a reasonable adaptation,” Thomason concludes.
Storytelling reclaims lost harmony. Navajo stories and ceremonies “restore the harmony so once again you are at that blessed state of being in harmony with all of creation,” Dooley says. “So our stories sort of run the gamut of order to disorder back to order. And within those parameters, we exist.”
Both women bristle at the term “multicultural” being applied to American Indians. “We are not a minority, plain and simple. We are sovereign nations with unique legal status; we are indigenous, which puts us in a global, international framework of law and relationships that get lost when we become the ‘Native Americans,’” Thomason says, adding, “I’d like us to just join the world and start using the term indigenous or be specific.” Being a descendant of the First Nations, whose presence goes back thousands of years, is different from other, recent émigré experiences, she says.
Sunny Dooley concurs: “This whole idea of multiculturalism kind of hit and I just thought, ‘Whose culture?’” She says of her encounters with other non-Anglo/European cultures, “You go into the jungle of Africa; our rich cultures are so similar. There’s not very much ‘multi’ about it. It’s like, I know my story, they know their story. They’re similar, or alike.”
Stories require time for reflection, deficient in the modern world. Dooley questions “if people will begin to really listen again. Because I really do believe that you need times of quiet.” Thomason adds, “To speak and speak articulately and well, without notes, and to carry things in your mind, requires periods of silence and stillness to be able to develop that, and it requires an audience of listeners that can sustain silence and stillness and attention and listen.” She adds, “We’ve neglected the old knowing, speaking and listening.”
More positively, now scholars “aren’t talking about us like we’re extinct, or primitive or backward, and [they] see the rich gift of our oral traditions alongside all of the world’s literature,” says Thomason. Dooley, who uses a fine, patterned Navajo basket as a performance prop, says the attitude that something “is only valid if it is written” irks her. She uses her basket “because there is nothing written on this basket. There’s a design incorporated into it and this design doesn’t change. But it’s just as valid as anybody’s written history.”
Dooley has published poetry and Thomason writes songs and children’s books that draw on traditional tribal tales. But their primary vocation is making the personal contact they both feel is a crucial part of the storytelling process, necessary for it to have the greatest impact. The American Indian museum showcased the abilities of Dooley and Thomason to memorably engage audiences by personalizing time-honored teaching tales. Their performances were enthusiastically reciprocated by applause from adults and delighted squeals from the many children present, who were enthralled by adventures of Coyote and Iktomi, or the story of how corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, beans, and chocolate came from indigenous American cultures to become comfort foods for the world.
Audio: Mice Make Peace