The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

happy, but those who did not believe in it would stay in the ground and be damned
forever with the whites.” (702) This strong religious element has remained – in 1993,
Bruce King told the Myth of the Indian Renaissance in his play Evening at the
Warbonnet. In it, four characters must lay down their burdens, all connected to
colonization, before they can cross the River that lies between here and the land of the
dead. To do so, they must work with two spirits, Coyote and Loon. This myth is at the
heart of the current revivalist movement in Native America. We are currently bad off,
with broken families, drug and alcohol dependency, rampant unemployment and violence
(so the story goes) because of the ongoing process of colonization. The only way we can
defend ourselves and fix our world is to hold onto our ancestral traditions that have
survived, and revive those that have become dormant.
Fig. 1. A map of Káruk country.
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