Tales of Creation and Beyond
by Gayle Ross
In 1989, I sat in my cousin’s living room talking with Hickory Starr,
the principal chief of the Redbird Smith Nighthawk Keetoowah Stomp Dance
Ground. We were taking a break from a weekend of activities commemorating
the 150th anniversary of the end of The Trail of Tears. I had just told
a Cherokee story at the tribal museum about Possum and Turtle, and Hickory
was saying in his quiet way that he believed that the rhythmic syllables
of the stomp dance songs might be the ancient language once spoken by all
the creatures living in the beginning days of the world. I looked at him
and for the briefest of moments, his eyes met mine. “It’s good you tell
those old stories,” he said. “If the earth does not hear the creation story,
she might forget to create herself.” Hickory passed to the Nightland several
years ago, but his memory and his words are with me still.
In The Telling of the World, a breathtakingly beautiful anthology by
Nez Perce/Osage writer and editor W. S. Penn, the vibrant world of traditional
and contemporary Native American storytelling lives in print. Gathering
stories from over 40 tribes from the Alabama to the Zuni, and grouping
them according to seven themes, Penn leads the reader on a rich and satisfying
journey from the days of creation through the stages of human experience,
culminating in death and the possible worlds beyond.
Significantly, Penn has included both traditional stories told in a
familiar narrative style as well as the works of current Indian writers,
some of whom fashion an ancient story into narrative poetry and contemporary
fiction. Four of Penn’s own stories are included here, my favorite being
“Albert Hummingbird Meets Death,” in which an old man has a roadside encounter
with Death, who is decked out in turquoise and drives a conversion van.
It is a wickedly funny piece, as is Peter Blue Cloud’s “Coyote’s Anthro,”
the story of a modern anthropologist’s nighttime visit from Coyote, who
is just trying to help him see a little better what he is looking at. All
too often, non-Indian people tend to see Native American culture only in
terms of the past, and by including such gifted Indian writers and storytellers
as Peter Blue Cloud, Lee Francis, Simon Ortiz, Jenny Leading Cloud, Leonard
Crow Dog and others, Penn demonstrates ably that Native American storytelling,
like Indian culture itself, is alive and well. Living and breathing, growing
and changing, it is very much a part of our modern world.
Also significant is the fact that, for the most part, the voices heard
here are Indian voices. The few non-Indian writers, such as Richard Erdoes
and Jarold Ramsey, have spent so many years in the Indian community that
they can speak well from within the culture.
Many stories which were collected at the turn of the century have been
retranslated and reevaluated in terms of the original languages and story
structures. In his preface, Penn describes the painstaking work of the
new translators and transcribers who check and recheck their translations
with Native tellers. In this way, many of these old stories speak with
a truer voice, without the inevitable Eurocentric bias which seems to permeate
the writings of even the best-hearted 19th-century ethnologist or folklorist.
The book also includes many wonderful Indian stories that are all too often
left out of anthologies because of subject matter which may be deemed inappropriate
in the larger society but is dealt with frankly and matter-of-factly in
Indian culture. Like sex. Right next to the hauntingly beautiful Lakota
story of the courtship flute, you will find the hilarious Ponca-Otoe story
of “Teeth in the Wrong Places.” You need both to see the whole picture.
As Penn notes in his preface, The Telling of the World is really two
books living comfortably within the same cover. Just as the stories demonstrate
the rich diversity found in Native America, the art chosen to illustrate
them conveys the same message. The paintings and photographs of carvings
and masks provide a feast for the eyes in the same way the stories do for
the mind and heart. One might choose to purchase this book as a story collection
or an art book, but either way, it will be a good choice.
Penn tells the reader that he refused to use the word “myth” in the
title of this book because of the connotations attached to that word. I
too deplore the fact that the word “myth” has become, in modern usage,
a synonym for “lie.” To me, it is the height of arrogance for people to
assume that the set of spiritual stories they hold sacred are the “true”
ones and all others are superstition. The very sacredness of story lies
in the ability to create worlds, “real” and “unreal,” “seen” and “unseen.”
As a very wise person once said, “All stories are true, even the ones that
never happened.”
Gayle Ross is a Cherokee storyteller and writer. She
was a featured speaker in the 1996 Fall Festival of Children’s Books at
the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
