The Ownership of Tales

Who owns a story?  Does it belong to the teller of the tale, or the listener?

It's a very difficult question, because stories are powerful.  They transform the teller and the listener.

A reader must give himself to the tale.  They must be willing to, to quote Sartre, give “the gift of his whole person, with his passions, prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual temperament, and his scale of values.” To listen with half an ear, to not not pay attention, is a betrayal of both the tale and the teller.  

Listening with that level of intensity transforms the listener.  It requires the listener to absorb the tale, to integrate it into his or her own values, and to emerge from the other side as a changed individual.  

It is the duty of the teller of the tale to share the tale, revealing the truth of the story and connecting people together.  

All stories are true, especially when they contradict each other.  For example, hunting and fishing stories teach the listener about the seasons, and what is the best time to follow the salmon and when should a person hunt and how they should care for what they have hunted.  Tales about journeys teach the landscape.  Every teller shares the most important aspects of the story to themselves and their listener.  But when a story is taken out of context, they lose some truth.  

While everyone can agree that the ethics of storytelling are important, what is this in a blog called Tales from the Tlingit?

Every Nation has its own rules about stores, every Nation has stories that are sacred and telling them out of context is profane.  This idea might be strange to members of a religion who hand their sacred texts out to strangers on street corners.  But as storytellers, it is our duty to respect the story.

To the Tlingit and Haida, the tales belong to the clan. There were three major phratries, the Yehl (Raven), Goch (Wolf), and Nehadi (Eagle).  After the 1836 Smallpox Epidemic, the Nehadi survivors joined with the Goch, and in modern times they are considered to be the same clan.  Within each phratry, there are clans, and each clan is made up of extended families.  Some stories belong to the family, some to the clan, and some to the phratry as a whole.  

 Some clans will share their tales; the most notable is, of course, the Raven whose cycle of tales describe the creation of the world.  But for most, the tales of their clan are very private, and they belong to the people.

In this blog, we will only focus on the stories which are considered to be public and shared - namely, the Raven Cycle, the Salmon Chief, and a few others.  The primary source for these stories is the turn of the century folklorist J. R. Swanton.


For additional reading, please look at:
Debbie Reese's article about the importance of honest tales in children's literature, which can be found at:  http://www.csun.edu/~bashforth/305_PDF/305_FinalProj/305FP_Race/NativeAmFolktales_Caution_Jan07_LA.pdf
And Daniel Taylor's article on the ethics of the folklorist, which can be found at:
http://www.leaderu.com/marshill/mhr03/story1.html