Keithahn - Boy Who Ate Too Much - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Do you know what is the third most used language in the U.S.?  (No fair peeking!)  Oh the answers I get when I ask kids that question!

It's American Sign Language.  Such a useful, beautiful language and fun to use with storytelling.  I often start a program with a story told in voice and sign as it's a great way to get an audience of all ages participating.  Yes, for ASL purists, telling in voice and sign tends toward the Pidgin English part of the signing continuum because English word order is used.  It's also a great way to expose people to sign language.

I often find people interested in learning more about signing, whether for Baby Sign which fosters language and communication waaaay earlier than waiting for oral communication, or to help communicate with the hearing impaired. 

As a result I offer everything from one-time programs up through a series such as I've been doing for two years now at the Warren Civic Center Library.  This past week I ended our session with today's fun tall tale that is Public Domain in a different way.

Usually I feature stories dating before 1923, but this comes from a different category.  I like to point out the U.S.Government Printing Office is paid for by our taxes.  Edward L. Keithahn was the curator and librarian for the Alaska Historical Museum and Library who collected these stories from the Shishmaref school children for the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs.  His volume, Igloo Tales, was dedicated as "a slight remembrance of the happy years spent among them."  As might be expected there is a lot of "porquoi" stories telling how things came to be, but my favorites are the ones closer to their roots on the playground, today's story and another called "The Story of a Head."  Definitely tall tales.

The book includes many illustrations by Shishmaref native artist, George Aden Ahgupuk, whose own story of how he became an artist is in the book, too, and quite interesting.  Here's the story with illustration and then I'll say a bit more following it.

I've been telling this story in voice and sign for so long I also ought to credit its shaping to two other storytellers whose books I own and enjoy.  In her wonderful book for audience participation, Twenty Tellable Tales, Margaret Read MacDonald titles the story "A Whale of a Tale" and credits several sources including Keithahn and also the version by Jean Cothran in The Magic Calabash: Folk Tales from America's Islands and Alaska.  She also mentions another version by Maggie Lind of Bethel, Alaska that I've not heard nor use, along with Lind's statement that "the tale is widely known."

So as you do your taxes, maybe the USGPO  will make you a bit happier when it offers stories.  Storyteller Donald Davis as a young man earning his first paycheck was told to choose something he wanted to think about his taxes going towards and supporting.  He chose the National Parks and visits them as he travels with storytelling.  If you're not ready to go to any of Alaska's many national parks, monuments, or historic sites -- even though Denali is currently warmer than here in southeast Michigan -- then travel in a story.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories. 

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.    

There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I recommended it earlier and want to continue to do so.  Have fun discovering even more stories!

Ransome - Little Daughter of the Snow - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Have been saying "at least our weather isn't Boston!" a lot.  Sometimes it helps to remind yourself things could be worse.  As I write this it's Thursday at mid-day and our temperature has finally bounced up to zero with plenty of wind gusts on our "bunny slope of a hill" to create sub-zero wind chills.  Unfortunately places even less prepared for this weather are shivering, too.  I'm a fan of Weather Underground or Wunderground.com for long-range forecasts, not only here, but around the world. 

Looking around the world I see:

Miami on Thursday has a low of 38 and even Havana went to 50,

while Anchorage goes to up to 35 and down to 21 (and will even reach the 40s this weekend),

looking for Siberian weather, Vorkuta, Russia has both 15 high and 15 low, feeling like 14 with snow showers.

By the way, the Weather Underground has a page on "Global Warming Causes and Climate Change Facts" tucked away on its site.  

Earlier this month I posted a Cuban story to warm up reading here.  Siberia generally is noted for its brutal weather, so that was the type of weather Arthur Ransome was describing in a story posted here almost a year ago, Frost, and a "killing cold" it was, too.  (That post also tells more about Ransome.)  Today's story is worth enjoying over hot chocolate after making a snowman or girl.

Today's story opens with the "frame" of Old Peter telling to little Vanya and Maroosia, giving hints of ways to tailor it to your listeners.  Watch for Frost to put in a cameo appearance near the end.

It's worth noting not every Public Domain book is available online or even by interlibrary loan.  On the back cover I saw advertised A Book of Teddy Bears; Brown Bears, White Bears, Gruff Bears, Kind Bears, He-Bears, She-Bears & Very Little Furry Bears edited by Elizabeth Teague.  The description sounds charming, but the only way to find it is to buy it from a bookseller, online or otherwise.  Hmmmm.

Guess there's plenty of reason to keep posting . . . so stay warm and stay reading.

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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories. 

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.    

There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I recommended it earlier and want to continue to do so.  Have fun discovering even more stories!

Love Your Craft

I've waited a whole year to post this Valentine.

Love Your Craft

Love that rush you feel when you kick off a new project.  That tingle down your spine.  That glint in your eye.

Love when you push yourself further, faster - not because you have to, but because you want to find those edges and stretch  the boundaries of what is possible.

Love learning new things about your work and this world and yourself.

Love serving others and sharing your gift, your passion, your expertise.

Love bringing your ideas to life.

Love making it happen and getting things done.

Love that exact moment when that thing that only existed inside your mind and heart finally manifests in the outside world for everyone else to experience.

Love finishing and then diving back in again.

Love that sense of satisfaction when your head hits the pillow after a long, hard day.

Love that smile on your face when you're purposely on purpose.

You are living the dream.  You are doing what you were born to do.  That is love.

I saw that last year on the local Motor City Connect website of networking in metro Detroit.  It's by 

Charlie Wollberg who calls himself "founding partner and chief troublemaker"at Curve Detroit.  I've never had the pleasure of meeting Charlie, but applaud this Valentine to all of us dedicated to our calling in life, be it storytelling, librarianship, teaching, history, WHATEVER!

I suspect you will feel the same way, but also there will be times you need the reminder.  Thank you, Charlie!

Stoddard - Where the Sun and Moon Came From - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Doesn't a trip to the Caribbean sound great in the midst of North America stuck in winter?  Maybe that's why the current news about negotiations between Cuba and the United States holds special attraction, even if the idea holds many problems.  At the same time measles is in the news and has a surprising connection.  I own Florence Jackson Stoddard's As Old as the Moon.  Its subtitle convinced me to buy it: Cuban Legends: Folklore of the Antillas.  It didn't hurt that the book was published in 1909. But the book has problems as old as the clash between Spaniards and the indigenous populations of the area.  This includes measles as one of many diseases that helped wipe out a population even Columbus described favorably:

They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will...they took great delight in pleasing us..They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal...Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people...They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.

^{(quoted by} Sale Kirkpatrick in The Conquest of Paradise on p. 100.)

There's a problem this hints at, but perhaps you want to hop into the warmth of the story dating back to the Great Flood first.

Illustrator unknown, frontispiece 

Cacique means Chieftan / Behique means Shaman, the wisest in the Taino tribe

I love to tell nature Pourquois tales about how things came to be, including astronomical stories about the sun and moon.  This story is followed by the book's title story, "Old as the Moon."  I prefer this story and will think about it with the current full moon, especially since the weather usually gets worse in the waning moon.

Travel the Caribbean region (wishful thinking in the depths of this winter) and you mainly will find stories newer than Stoddard presented.  I love the Dominican Republic and the wonderful people there, so I've asked especially there, but like Stoddard, the oldest stories come from only fragments by the original inhabitants.  Dominicans have a great fragment talking about the people whose feet were on backwards to lead pursuers astray. 

The best known of those native people were the Taino and, as usual, it's worth a quick read at Wikipedia to start knowing more.  Additionally Taino Symbology can be seen and the same gallery offers additional history for the people whose name means "Good and Noble."   A Smithsonian article and Caribbean blog, Repeating Islands, say recent DNA studies, starting with one in Puerto Rico in 2003 showed  that while Spanish weapons, enslavement, and especially disease reduced their numbers by 95% and extinction was widely believed, such things as intermarriage with the Spanish retained mixed DNA from the matrilineal line along with a surprising amount of cultural tradition.  The "Taino People were the predominant inhabitants of what are now Cuba, Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  Some of the Arawak-speaking tribes of Florida could also have been related to the Taino." The danger is using, as Stoddard did, such fragments and thinking this qualifies as actual folklore.  Unfortunately this is the closest I've come, so far, to anything safely Public Domain for that region.  I'm uncertain about the copyright coverage of some of Harold Courlander's Haitian collections (a Library of Congress search seems to show some original copyrights were never renewed), but I would never present them in print as his name became known beyond the world of folklore for successfully suing Alex Hailey for copyright infringement when writing Roots.

While doing a bit of research on Courlander, I learned he made what doctoral candidate Daniya Dawe called an "eclectic definition of folklore as a treasury of social values and literary creations out of human experience (if not residue)."  Stoddard groups her stories chronologically by pre-Conquest, the Conquest Period (15th - 16th century), and Slave Myths of the Spanish Period (16th - 19th century).  My concern is with that subtitle, "Cuban Legends: Folklore of the Antillas." Is it folklore or her skillful embarking on crafting stories from the barest of fragments like those tales about the feet that faced backwards?

I'm not sure we can say such feet are part of human experience (possibly the wish to evade pursuers qualifies?), but more probably it fits Courlander's "treasury of social values and literary creations" from his A Treasury of African Folklore which Dawe says: extends beyond the 'verbal art' or 'oral literature' to include other cultural categories.

Wish I had some warm sand to take my own footprints right now.  Instead I must turn to Michigan's Anishinaabe explanation from Nanabashoo that without our winter's snow our trees, bushes and other plants would die.  From the snows of Petoskey, Odawa elder, Simon Otto, shared that explanation in his book, Grandmother Moon Speaks, and as he concludes all his stories: Walk in Peace.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories. 

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.    

There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I recommended it earlier and want to continue to do so.  Have fun discovering even more stories!