Listening to Raven's Children: An Outsider's Impressions of Native Storytelling in Alaska

Abstract

In May of 1987 I spent two weeks in Alaska under the sponsorship of the Institute of Alaska Native Arts (IANA). An organization supported by both state and federal funding, the purpose of IANA is to foster, preserve and present art works of all kinds by the Native peoples of Alaska. Storytelling and creative writing are among those art forms and as a writer, literary editor, and professional storyteller of American Indian ancestry, IANA wanted to have me work with both Natives and non-Natives throughout the state during my brief stay. As many people know, the area of Alaska is equal to 1/3 of the entire lower 48 states, so going from one end of Alaska to another, from Juneau to Fairbanks to Nome to Barrow to Anchorage, meant covering thousands of miles. It also meant, in the case of some native storytellers such as Grace Slwooko of St. Lawrence Island (which is within sight of the Russian mainland), flying people in to attend the workshops which were offered by Nora Dauenhauer; a Tlingit poet, translator, and scholar from Juneau, and myself. Fortunately, the days are long in late May the sun shining brightly long after midnight in the northern part of the state so our days there were longer than they would have been in any other part of the United States. It was fortunate, for there was a great deal to learn for me about Alaskan storytelling traditions and the current, very healthy state of storytelling in Alaska. I only scratched the surface, but like the iceberg which is 9/10 under water, that surface was vast in itself. A special 1986 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review (Volume 4, Numbers 3 & 4) which was devoted to Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers and Orators is must reading for anyone interested in Alaskan oral traditions and it is worth quoting from. In their preface, Nora Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer and Gary Holthaus point out that Twenty distinct languages are spoken among the indigenous people. The languages can be roughly divided between the Eskimo-Aleut speakers and those who speak Na-Dene, the Athabascan languages which are closely related to the Navajo of the American southwest. (Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Native people in Alaska are American Indian, not Eskimo.) As William Schneider, who directs the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska, explains in his Some Considerations About the Oral Tradition and Writing, those languages have strong oral traditions still existing and For today s elders, the oral tradition remains the primary source of knowledge. Further because they have been discontented with outsiders who came in, collected stories and then interpreted them incorrectly more and more contemporary Alsakan natives are doing their own collecting, translating, and telling of the tales from their own traditions. With that small bit of background and limited space to describe the wealth of experiences those two weeks offered, let me make a few quick points and mention a few names. In each of the five cities where we offered workshops, we encountered native storytellers. Only one of those storytellers, Martha Baron, had attended a storytelling gathering outside of Alaska. Yet that conference which she attended last year in Florida to learn about storytelling and not to perform, resulted in her getting many offers of