The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

involved teachers like Arnold and Reed who interacted with the Káruk community as
equals. They taught English and Christianity, certainly, but they also studied Araráhi and
promoted Indian dances. This second trend was finally able to hold its own out in the
open with the one of assimilation beginning in the 1960s, and seems to have constructed
a myth of its own to counter that of Manifest Destiny. This myth I’ve coined that “of the
Indian Renaissance” as I haven’t heard or read it discussed elsewhere as such. It is an
identity-constituting narrative that has been told as part of American Indian revivalist
movements like that of the Delaware Prophet or the Ghost Dance, and is being told again
now. It casts American colonization as the root of all evil in Indian country, an evil that
can only be driven out be holding true to ancestral ways, especially ancestral spiritual
ways. In practice, this myth can mean many different things to many different people. For
what it’s worth, this thesis is one way it can be told. Perhaps more complicated than it
can be sometimes (not all white people are bad, and colonial institutions can be claimed
and/or subverted by indigenous forces), but the core story that colonization has had an
adverse impact on indigenous people who are finding healing in the revival of ancestral
practices is the same. My hope is that this telling of the story, as it regards the
relationship between Káruk education and storytelling, can help us learn how to continue
to improve these two interrelated fields for ourselves and our descendants yet to come.
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