Bailey - The Dwarf Named Luck - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Since I knew I was going to be on the road more than home during May, I chose two stories each from my most recent book acquisitions.  Today I continue with Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's The Torch of Courage book.  Besides creating her own original tales, such as the Newbery Award-winning, Miss Hickory, I find her anthologies, whether her own original stories, stories she re-told, or stories by another author but unchanged tend to tell and read well.

Encyclopedia.com notes her "predilection for combining instruction and entertainment" -- and I would add she has that rare gift of doing it without becoming preachy. 

This anthology is not well known.  That doesn't mean it's any less up to Bailey's standards.  There is a continuity to the stories as the theme of courage for each of her tales and every story is by her.  I can't be sure about the original owner's last name, but he was named Robert and the book shows it was much-loved and read often.  I find myself fantasizing how the theme of courage was important to him.  The boy's signature (in pencil) looks to be about that of a fourth grader.  For readers in a different area from the U.S., I'd guess he was about nine years old, but found value for many years beyond when he first received it.

I hope you, too, will find it of value.  Both last week's story and this are Bailey originals, but this one was published earlier.

Both this story and last week's "Stout-Heart and the Dragon" involved journeys.  For a while I am happy I'm not journeying.  Whether you are on a journey or home, may you have good reading and Keep the Public in Public Domain!
*******************

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 regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
          - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Bailey - Stout-Heart and the Dragon - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Back when I ordered Tlingit Myths And Texts, I also found an anthology by  Carolyn Sherwin Bailey.  I've always found her work, both original stories and collections of stories by others, to be quite tellable.  Not sure if "tellable" is a word beyond the storytelling world, but it is a credit to her that I already have posted her work 13 times before this and I have many of her books, both in the Public Domain and not yet.  The book was clearly the personal property of a young boy from long ago.  The cover has separated from the text, but, other than his writing his name in pencil and it clearly being read often and loved, it's in good condition.  The title story, The Torch of Courage, is set in the winter, so I want to save it for another time.  The title page and cover are the book's only illustrations.  With all the current excitement with the Game of Thrones series, I thought the present was a great time for a dragon tale.  I'm fond of dragon stories anyway, so it grabbed my attention right away.  All the stories in the book require courage on the part of someone, so let's open with a dragon drawing scary enough to worry our hero, Stout-Heart, who already has the challenge of an orthopedic handicap.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

It seems somehow appropriate that Stout-Heart, who also probably was called crooked and ugly, found the truth about the dragon.  Since there are no illustrations in the book, I went looking to see if I could find a dragon-shaped tree in real life.  There's a plum tree in Vietnam that supposedly is, but I just don't see the dragon in it even though others do.  Instead I found this tree that would need to be seen closer, but definitely looks like a dragon.  It's in the ancient abandoned city of Chellah within the capital city of Morocco .

Found on https://laughingsquid.com/a-tree-shaped-like-a-dragon-in-rabat-morocco/

Today's story was the second to the end of the book, The Torch of Courage.  Next week's story is the final tale and also requires courage.  (I wonder if that was why the original owner treasured this book?).
*******************

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 regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Swanton - The Sky Country - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Where do we go when we die?  It's a question common to all cultures.

Beyond that, respect for the dead is a problem that arises when dealing with old cemeteries.  Indigenous grave sites have been particularly prone over the centuries to being destroyed or disturbed.  While that is not what happens in today's story, real life for Tlingit storyteller, Bob Sam, and also for a school in Alaska give us real life stories of how to reinter and honor our ancestors.  Those stories follow today's tale respectfully gathered in 1904 by John R. Swanton for the Bureau of American Ethnology where he worked for forty years.  Swanton was not only the president of the American Anthropological Association, but also at times editor of their journal, American Anthropologist.  His work was especially sensitive to Native American religious and spiritual beliefs.

Last week's stories dealt with someone dealing with losing their friends to death, but that is nothing compared to the loss of a mate.  Today's story doesn't say the man's wife died, but the abstracts at the end of Tlingit Myths and Texts says more directly it is how she "was taken away from him."  It's important to remember the myths and stories were transcribed exactly as the storyteller told it.  In the mind of this storyteller  he assumed we already should understand what being "taken away" means.  In this story it's also implied the dead go to somewhere in the sky.  Similarly many believe heaven or the after life is somewhere up above us.  What's different in this story is the man in his "half crazy" state tries to follow her and wanders until he goes to where she is in "The Sky Country."

While the problem of handling old cemeteries appears sometimes in the news, the issue of Native American remains has become recognized more often in recent times than in the days when remains went to museums and universities or were simply dug up and built over.  I mentioned earlier Bob Sam has been involved in this.  A Seattle Times article details how he is working far from Alaska with the U.S. Army War College to exhume and rebury the bodies of 14 Alaskan students who died at the site which used to be the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

(The old practice of forcing Indian students to abandon their culture by moving them to boarding schools is another highly sensitive issue in Native American history.  For here in Michigan I strongly recommend The Tree That Never Dies: Oral History of the Michigan Indians by Pamela J. Dobson.  That link lets you buy a Google copy or you may be able to borrow it through your library.)

There's much more than just the Carlisle Indian School to Sam's mission.  A 2010 article from the Juneau Empire looked back at his then 26 years of work "researching and remembering the 'forgotten places' of Southeast Alaska."

Another Juneau Empire article tells how in 1956 a Tlingit burial ground was paved over for a highway and school, but now a "Memorial pays respect to Tlingit burial ground."  The poster opening today's blog article dates back to the start of that memorial.  An earlier article tells more about the scope of the grant funding the memorial, and looked ahead to last year's further stage in the memorial.

Tlingit elder Paul Marks presents the Sayéik Sacred Site Memorial on Friday, Nov. 23, 2018. The memorial, placed at Sayéik Gastineau Community School, is a tribute to the people who were buried in the Tlingit burial ground that was paved over for the road and school. (Alex McCarthy | Juneau Empire)

As Michigan's Odawa elder, who has also gone on "the Long Walk", Simon Otto, would say: Walk in peace.
*******************

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.  

Swanton - 2 Tlingit tales - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

 recording for B.A.E. of a Blackfoot chief

For the next several weeks I expect to be quite busy, so I want to work ahead.  Public Domain stories from two recent acquisitions let me easily offer storytelling here.  I'm a fan of Better World Books for their prices, selection, environmental responsibility, and funding world literacy.  There always seems to be a sale on their horizon, some better than others, and recently I went prowling.  More and more the books I want are being replaced by reprint publishing.  Unfortunately not all do a faithful job, so when I found used original editions of Tlingit Myths and Texts by John R. Swanton for the Bureau of American Ethnology , (later B.A.E. fully merged with the Smithsonian Institution), I bought it and a little known book by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey -- who was always a dependable author and anthologist.

While I have some books of Alaskan folklore, the Tlingit people weren't as familiar to me as some of the other people of the Northwest coast of the U.S. and Canada.  Besides Alaska, the Tlingit also are among Canada's First Nations. There's an excellent site, Native Languages of the Americas, a HUGE effort by Orrin Lewis, who is Cherokee with a dash of Muskogee, aided by Laura Redish, that works to protect and preserve Native American languages and culture.  I suggest starting there with the Facts for Kids: Tlingit Indians for an easy but thorough overview.  From there, the adult page of Tlingit Indian Culture and History is a page of link resources if you want even more.

Another page, unrelated to Orrin's site, you might check for an overview is The Indians of American Northwest Coast.  It covers the entire coastal area, starting with the Columbia River (which forms most of the border between Oregon and Washington).  The article comes from  http://www.historynotes.info/ .  The site never explains its origin nor provide its sources, but the article shows the variety of the many cultures indigenous to the northwestern coast of our two countries.  The site itself seems to provide depth to a wide assortment of historical topics, as well as genealogical articles and historical book reviews.

The B.A.E. stories were collected in Alaska's Sitka and Wrangell in 1904.  Each area opens with a lengthy cycle of stories about the Northwest's trickster figure, Raven, who is always interesting, but I chose today's stories because here in Michigan winter is trying to end and bears are starting to wake up.  I'm going to give two versions of the same story, first the shorter Sitka tale and then the other from Wrangell.

Tlingit man outside a traditional house and totem pole

The back of the book gives abstracts of each story and adds something not in the story, but probably implied in footnote "b": Since that time the Grass people have owned Iceberg House.

So far, nowhere in the book have I found anything more about the "Grass people."

The other footnote tells us to: See story 64.  It's the Wrangell version, which is a little longer and more fleshed out.

Next week I have a story from Wrangell that might interest adults following this year's Library Summer Reading Program's astronomical theme.  After that I'll give two stories from the Carolyn Sherwin Bailey book I purchased with this Bureau of American Ethnology book.

In the meantime I don't advise inviting any bears into your house.  They might think you are the feast.

*******************

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 regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 
           - Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!