The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

were selected from received oral and anthropological literature, forming a synthesis of
classic methods of transmission with new, literary ones introduced by white academics
writing about our people. My personal reading of the audience reaction was that
rhizomatic or episodic approaches are largely lost on an audience accustomed to
climactic plot structures like those seen on TV. So, whereas traditional storytelling can
weave an assortment of stories linked thematically, but not causally; audiences today
expect a clear progression of events, each necessitating the ones after it, culminating in a
climactic point of dramatic tension.
The second piece, Coyote Hunts the Sun, relied on more literary sources from
across the continent, but still concerned moments of contact between indigenous and
colonial societies. Structurally, it fell somewhere between the free-flowing Stories of Our
People and Law & Order: SVU. It didn’t lose the audience like Stories of Our People
seemed to do, but it did challenge them with an episodic structure. It also experimented
with competing storytelling: two storytellers telling the same story in different ways. The
source material was culled from books like Bright’s Karok Language and Kroeber and
Gifford’s Karuk Myths, as well Black Hawk’s Autobiography. Its reliance on oral
testimony was minimal compared to Stories of Our People. A staging in the Fall
Semester of 2011 for the purposes of workshopping the piece showed me that I have a
long ways to go before Coyote Hunts the Sun is finished.
In thinking about what stories I’m going to tell the students in Portland during their
summer session, it became clear to me that the indigenous myth Coyote Hunts the Sun is
a useful format for telling whatever stories I want to about America. In its college campus
incarnation, the stories were those of colonialism. If I tell it to the grade-schoolers, and I
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