Last summer I had the pleasure of listening to Dovie Thomason at two storytelling fesitvals, both Beyond the Border and Festival at the Edge. Dovie is a Native American storyteller, whose background is Lakota Sioux and Apache. She told stories about the animal people (for in the old days animals were people just as much as humans are), origin stories, and other tales. What surrpised me most was my reaction to the origin stories. They were, of course, fascinating, well-told, of mythical interest,and many other related adjectives. But what I felt most srongly, which surprised and almost shocked me, is that these were TRUE stories.
Dovie was told lots of stories by her grandmother.She thought that she was a favoured grandchild bwcause of this. It was only much later that she realised that the tales were intended to teach her. She would be told the stories when she was naughty, thoughtless, inconsiderate, and the like. Other, better-behaved, children did not need teaching and so were not told stories.
This made me wonder what would happen to the stories if there were no naughty children. Fortunately that will never happen.
