The Sacred Breath: The art of Native American storytelling

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Something happens when a person hears the words once upon a time, a long time ago. They shift into a different state of consciousness. Their senses activate. Their breath changes.

That exchange of breath between listener and storyteller, said Roger Fernandes, an artist, storyteller, and educator of the Lower Elwha S’Klallum tribe, is called the Sacred Breath.

“Essentially, the sacred breath is what you breathe out when you’re speaking, and the audience breathes it in and gives it life. Stories are living things.”

Fernandes didn’t start out as a storyteller. He grew up hundreds of miles away from the Lower Elwha S’Kallum reservation. He wanted to be an artist.

However, the Indian Education Act of 1974 went into effect shortly after he graduated college, so he applied and took a job at Highline Schools. There, amidst his young students, the power of storytelling took hold.

“If you look at Native children in public schools, they tend to struggle,” Fernandes explains. But it’s not for lack of potential—studies showed Native children entering Kindergarten were bright, sociable, eager to learn.”

One semester, Fernandes accompanied a Native storyteller around the school, classroom to classroom. He heard the same stories 10, 20 times, and thought about all the research that showed children learn through story, fantasy, and play.

“All at once, my path became clear. That’s what I’m going to do,” he recalls. “I’m going to tell Native stories to Native children. I am going to tell them the stories of their ancestors.” And that’s what he did for the next forty years.

Finding meaning
Oral storytelling is fundamental to many Native American cultures.

The Salishan languages in the Pacific Northwest were spoken languages, so oral storytelling served as a connective tissue, binding cultural values, history, tradition, and philosophy into an art that is both entertaining and educational.

Most traditional oral stories are open for interpretation. According to Mary Jane Topash, a member of the Tulalip Tribe and assistant director for cultural initiatives at Seattle’s Burke Museum, each story offers many takeaways, and listeners’ interpretations change over time, as they grow up.

“I got to listen to traditional stories as a child, but as I got older, I realized some of the stories I had heard over and over again started to mean something different,” Topash says. “It’s the same story [you’ve] heard dozens of times, but the understanding changes.”

Many traditional stories are origin stories meant to elucidate how the world came into existence. Instead of avoiding heavy philosophical questions, Fernandes embraces them—and so do his young listeners.

“Some of these stories talk about existential stuff—about the meaning of the universe and the meaning of life. But little kids love that kind of conversation, and they’re anxious to have it,” he says. The tradition of oral storytelling offers children perspective on the world in which they live.

Many Coast Salish tribes even share certain stories, although each culture has its own version.

Cynthia LaPlant, a member of the Puyallup Tribe, teaches at the Grandview Early Learning Center, where she first started learning the Coast Salish language Lushootseed as a student almost twenty years ago.

The story of Lady Louse, for example, is told in Tulalip, Puyallup, and other Coast Salish tribes. LaPlant says the story “is different for each tribe, but the essence is the same because the storytelling tradition means each story is unique.”

Stories evolve as time goes on, she says. “Nothing is set in stone, and you’re not supposed to correct people. It’s one of my favorite things about the language.”

Indigenous storytelling in the age of TikTok
The intersection of oral storytelling and modern technology is both exhilarating and discouraging.

Thanks to the Internet, young adults like LaPlant can share and discover stories from all over the country. In fact, LaPlant discovered storytelling nights on Facebook Live before attending in-person storytelling events.

Technology also enables parents and caregivers to introduce storytelling to small children through digital media. Jill LaPointe, of the Upper Skagit/Nooksack, is the senior director of the Indigenous Peoples Institute at Seattle University and director at Lushootseed Research, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and sustaining the Lushootseed language and culture.

One evening LaPointe and her husband were listening to an audio recording of her favorite storyteller, Johnny Moses. Her grandson, just five years old, came into the room, sat down, and listened—mesmerized—to the entire story.

“It totally amazed us,” says LaPointe. But still, she worried something was missing through virtual storytelling.

Historically, the winter months were a sacred time when Indigenous families and communities would spend hours telling stories and building relationships, explains LaPointe.

“The storytellers that I was brought up with would often pause and wait for the audience to say ‘habu,’ which kind of means ‘I’m engaged,’” she says. “It was a relationship.”

Topash agrees.

“Hearing a story in the longhouse, surrounded by family and community—you can’t get that on paper or on a screen,” she said.

“These days, technology is so powerful that people watch entire ‘live’ performances on tiny screens—and they may not even know what they are missing.”

Read More: https://www.seattleschild.com/roger-fer ... rytelling/