The ancient art of words

Before a backdrop of colorful blankets and a large, painted animal skin, Salista Williams, 12, and Aiyanna Brown, 9, danced on a small stage to the accompanying music of the Splac-ta Alla (People of the Valley) Drum Group.

Before a backdrop of colorful blankets and a large, painted animal skin, Salista Williams, 12, and Aiyanna Brown, 9, danced on a small stage to the accompanying music of the Splac-ta Alla (People of the Valley) Drum Group.

Seated in a semi-circle around the stage, an assortment of children quietly watched. As voices joined in with the drums, a man passed by each table in Portland State’s Hoffman Hall with a burning wand of white sage, letting the smoke waft up to each guest in a gesture of purification.

So began the third annual Northwest Indian Storytelling Festival, a three-day event hosted by the Northwest Indian Storyteller’s Association (NISA) in association with Wisdom of the Elders, Inc.

Both the festival and NISA were formed three years ago in an effort to unite storytellers from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, said the event’s coordinator Matthew Bibeau on Sunday. Since then, the group has grown to include storytellers from California up through British Columbia and Alaska.

“Portland is a good centralized location for us,” said Bibeau, a graduate student within the PSU Leadership in Ecology, Culture, and Learning program. “And PSU is a very comfortable fit. They’ve been good to us.”

Storytelling is the preferred medium of passing on history, stories and ideas in Native American culture, Bibeau said. He said that a person telling a story can inflect tone and show certain facial expressions to tell the story the way they want. In writing, it is much easier for people to interpret meaning differently.

“But with a story that’s being told in the first person, it’s a very different experience,” Bibeau said.

The storytelling Friday and Saturday included both traditional stories passed down in an oral tradition, as well as more contemporary stories of the speakers’ memories of their childhoods–or their thoughts on anthropologists and archaeologists-as well as some integrated songs and drumming. Each night’s round of storytelling was accompanied by a silent auction for Native American-themed items such as carved wooden jewelry, statues and paintings, as well as a raffle for similar items.

Sunday morning wrapped up the festival with a storyteller’s symposium and round table. Over coffee and breakfast, storytellers and their apprentices shared a few more tales and discussed the importance of passing on cultural information to the preceding generations. Speakers also touched on the issue of tradition versus technology.

“I had to decide,” Alan Pinkham, a Nez Pierce tribal leader, said before the group, “do I want to write these stories down? When they’re written down, how much of the oral tradition is lost?”

NISA and Wisdom of the Elders, Inc., plan to bring storytellers back to PSU next November, but perhaps only for a day. The rest of the festival is planned for Seattle, in a move that organizers say they hope will bring in a larger group of storytellers.