Fabulaphobia - The Fear of Hiring a Storyteller

I have been a storyteller for thirty-two years. This is the only job I've had as a grown-up person. I get to travel the world and share stories with audiences of all ages. I love it.

One of the things that I have had to deal with over the course of my career is the fact that lots of people have no idea what a storyteller is or what one does. Sometimes I get quite frustrated by that.



If you've followed my blog for any period of time, you know I lose my cool every now and then.

If not, here are some links to some of my more colorful rants.


When Is A Storyteller Not A Storyteller?

When Administrators Attack!

They'll Never Sit That Long!


At the beginning of my career, I would go into high schools or middle schools and the principal would freak out.

Principal:  "Where is your stuff?"

Me: "What do you mean?"

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Principal: "Don't you have music or drums or something?"

Me: "No."

Principal: "No?"

Me: "No."

Principal: "What are you going to do?"

Me: "I am going to stand in front of your students and talk for forty-five minutes."

You could see the steel trap closing around their brain. All they are thinking is, "When I find out who invited this person to our school, I am going to skin them alive."

When the show was over, they would walk up to me dumbfounded and ask that question many an artist has gotten, "How did you do that?"

I suppose I thought that a day would come when that would not happen. A day would come when people understood what storytelling was, and understood why it connects with audiences.

Alas, it is not to be.

Last week I was in a number of schools. A few of them were K-2 schools. I had a principal sit right at the edge of the stage facing the kids because she thought she was going to have to jump on the stage and save me after about ten minutes. She was amazed k-2 students would sit for forty-five minutes.

Last week, I had a middle school administrator inform me that if she didn't like my content, or I started to lose the audience, she had no compunction about jumping onto the stage and stopping the show. I did three. She didn't have to stop any of them. She was amazed.

In honor of this nonsense, I have decided to coin a new term.


Fabulaphobia - (n) (fAb-yew-la-foe-be-ya) - the fear of hiring storytellers.

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There are still many schools and venues that are convinced storytelling will never work with an audience.

I fight this by sending schools in-depth information about how storytelling affects literacy, language acquisition, and vocabulary. I stress the fact that it improves language skills, communication both verbal and non-verbal, and it boosts confidence.

Still, people are worried that kids won't like it.

I am in residence for a second grade this week. The teachers are amazed at how much fun the kids are having working on kinetic writing and visualizations skills.

The teachers tell me that their curriculum no longer allows for the kinds of crafts kids used to do. Their imaginations are suffering because they don't spend enough time in unstructured play.

As I was leaving school today, the arts council board representative who sat in on my class said she was amazed at the way I was tying storytelling in with higher-level brain function as it relates to literacy.

I explained how the exercises worked and why I was doing them.

She said: "Somebody should do studies on how arts interact with the brain."

I replied: "We have lots of studies."

I left it there. sigh.

I have been in a number of schools over the last few weeks that were frustrating, but it hasn't been all annoyance. One school in particular sticks out for me.

It is a school with a heavy immigrant population. The ESL teacher deals with twenty-one languages. The kids sat in front of me in all of their multi-hued glory. They looked like America to me. Some girls had hijabs, some wore unicorn horns, some had cornrows, others had multihued thatch. The boys had everything from afros to shaved heads and much of their hair was multicolored and multi-length. They were every possible shade of brown from dark to light.

I turned to the administrator and said, "This gives me hope. At some point, these children will be in charge. They will grow up knowing what it is to have to become a polyglot to speak to their friends. They will grow up with kids from across the world. They will grow up understanding that everybody is "us" and that there is no single skin color or religion that makes a person "other".

The teacher smiled. "That's the most hopeful thing I've heard in a long time."

"Good," I said.

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Then, I told them stories and we rocked the house.

For schools that do not suffer from fabulaphobia, the world is an amazing place.

Happy Telling!

What To Do With a Squirrelly Audience? Some Techniques For Young Audiences

Squirrelly Audience? (source)

Every now and then you get a young audience that has no interest in sitting still. They squirm, giggle, and play with their neighbors. They are clearly unfocused and not in a space for some telling.

They are usually pretty easy to spot the moment you come into the room. There is a restlessness with them that you can feel.





There are lots of possible reasons that they are squirrelly.

Halloween Trivia?

- Are they excited because you are really near a holiday of some kind and they can barely hold themselves together?

- Have they just gotten back from a holiday and they are still feeling loose?

- Is this the first assembly of the year and they need to learn/relearn proper behavior?

- Is this a school that rarely gets assemblies and they have little experience with being an audience?


- Are you in a school with students who speak lots of different languages and many of the kids don't understand you?


You start the storytelling, and you can tell that only part of the audience is listening.

I faced such a group this morning. There were almost four hundred Kindergarten, first, and second graders on the floor in the gym.

They really wanted to be at recess, running up and down the halls, or possibly in gym class. Instead, they were in a space where they normally got to run around and play, but they were sitting together for something different.


How do you deal with an audience that starts like this for whatever reason?


Suggestion 1 - Use The Pack To Overwhelm The Individual

I make sure that the stories I am presenting are VERY interactive.

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Young audiences have various abilities when it comes to listening silently.

Group participation tends to make even the daydreamers pay attention just so they can say the silly things, do the gestures, and be part of the group.

That goes a long way in gathering up the wanderers to become part of the telling community.




Suggestion 2 - You Can Use Some Simple Disciplinary Practices

If I see lots of poking or playing with each other before I begin, I call the behavior out upfront.

-Okay, everybody, let's keep your hands to yourself. If you play with your neighbor or forget your assembly behavior I will have you go and sit next to your teacher.

I try to catch the eye of the disruptor as I tell. I also try to give them a chance to make better choices.

Most of the time I don't have to move anyone, but sometimes I do. I ask them to go and sit by their teacher. I only do this with students who are so disruptive they are causing a small circle of distraction.

Today I ended up moving three kids. The rest of the audience calmed down after that.

Suggestion 3 - Give Them A Wiggle Break

My pre-k through second-grade set has a built-in wiggle break.

The stretch break involves the whole body so that each kid can participate to the best of their ability. There is an upper and lower body activity. I encourage the teachers to get into it as well.

I get them to march, breathe, stretch, dance about and follow visual and audio cues. I try to make it fun.


Sometimes the answer is that your young audience has not dealt with storytelling and doesn't really know what is expected of them.

Novice listeners might need some basic storytelling training.
You consume music and dance differently than sitting and listening to the spoken word without a book. Engaging their imagination without puppetry, costumes, or music could be a new experience for them.

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The first story might be a little rocky, but with a little exposure, they crack the code.

Picking great stories helps!


Suggestion 4 - Make Sure You Offer Different Levels of Listening, Participation, and Action During The Performance.

When choosing stories for a wiggly audience, I look for tales that have lots of participation both physical and vocal.

I recommend stories that incorporate intensity, silence, and non-pedestrian sound for different levels of involvement. It is amazing how quickly they look up if you go completely silent! These are great techniques to catch their attention.

Hand gestures, call and response, physical cues, voices, rhythms, rhymes, and repetition are all good choices. Oh, and don't forget that three minute or so wiggle break! It will make all the difference.

Good Luck!

Strap in and enjoy the ride!

Happy Telling!

At Jonesboro!

I'll be back to posting next week after the National Festival in Jonesboro, TN.

















































































Happy Telling!

DW

Cultural Misappropriation is a Continuous, Evolving Battlefield: Being An Ally

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There are no easy answers here. That should be obvious.

There isn't any easy way to talk about this subject.

Over the last five weeks, I've realized that covering cultural appropriation in five posts is pretty foolish.

Still, you work with what you've got.

I've tried to start this post for several days, and each time it has gotten too long and I didn't get to the point.

So, I'm going to put the point of the post at the beginning. I know, that's backward. That way if the post gets long, I'll just cut the rambling nonsense.

How To Be An Ally In Your Own Work!

1. Do the research. Find out what you can about a story.

2. If your story comes out of a marginalized culture, find storytellers - you notice I have suggested going to more than one person - and find out whether or not it is okay for you to tell that story. They might be fine with it so long as you give proper context or credit. They might not.

3. Pay attention to how you introduce the story. Are there elements of the story that seem odd or unusual. Find out more about them.

4. Find variants of the story. Compare them.

5. Be aware of the language. How are you talking about the story? How are you describing the people? Are you offering context by the people who told the story or the people who told about the people who told the story?

6. If you are working with a story from history, find the story's origin. There are historical anecdotes and references that were made up by the "victors" but do not come out of the cultures about which they are told. Don't spread colonializing, degrading nonsense in the guise of history.

Pocahantas?

For instance: How many people actually know who Pocahantas was? How much of what we were taught about her is accurate and how much of it comes out of John Smith's complete misunderstanding of what was going on around him?



I was trying to find images of this young woman. She died at the age of twenty or twenty-one. This is supposedly a good likeness of her. I don't know.


As for the other images I've seen, they are either romanticized images of her or images of other women who people thought were her.

How do you tell this story? What exactly do you tell?





Are there more rules of thumb for dealing with this difficult subject?

I have no doubt.

Do I have any idea what they might be?

Not a bit. I suppose I could keep coming up with them, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be helpful to anyone. Myself included.

Was I an idiot to try to tackle this huge topic in five blog posts?

Yes, most assuredly.

As I talk to people do I realize that there is so much more to say, learn, and do??

Yes. Definitely.

Could I write posts about this for the next couple of months and expand on the topic in never-ending spirals?

Yes.

Do I have any interest in doing that?

Absolutely not.

You might ask:

If this is such a difficult subject, you didn't want to write it, and it involves a never-ending conversation, why did you do this?

Good question.

I've had some conversations with other people from marginalized cultures and discovered many of us have the same thought about this subject:

We Are Tired!

We feel like we keep coming up against people who get upset when we don't tell them what they want to hear about cultural appropriation. What they want to hear seems to be, "Do what you want."
If you don't say that, they argue you blue trying to tell you why they can do whatever they want.

We need allies. We need people to care enough to do the work themselves. We need people to understand why it is important.

All of us, whether or not we are from marginalized cultures, can learn to be better in the way we use language and images to share thoughts and stories.

My blinders are as debilitating as yours. I am as unable to see what I can't see as you are unable to see what you can't see. In so many ways we are the semi-blind leading the semi-blind. If we work at this together, all of us will see better.

This gets into another topic that could take months: Privilege.

I'm not even going to touch that.

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To everyone who is an ally out there, thank you! 
To everyone who wants to be an ally, thank you!
Let us keep on keeping on.

Talk to me.
I'll talk to you.
Let's learn this as a community.



Happy Telling!



Part 1 - Cultural Misapproriationis A Better Term: Some Thoughts
Part 2 The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility
Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?

Cultural Misappropriation Through Ignorance: How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough? Part 4

This is the classic version of the Ants and the Grasshopper. The grasshopper mocks the ants and plays and has a good time while they work. When the winter comes, the grasshopper is cold. He goes to the ants and asks for help.

They say, "You spent all summer playing and singing. You should have worked. Go find somewhere else if anyone will let you in!"

The grasshopper is left to die in the winter.

The moral: If you do not work, you will not eat.

That is not quite the story I grew up with. I had a version on a record. It was a long story about a single ant and a grasshopper who become friends despite the grasshopper's negligent ways. At the end of the story, Andy, our rogue ant, convinces the ant colony to allow the grasshopper to enter, and the queen gives up her throne and lets Andy run the colony.

I have no idea what the moral of that story was, but it always rubbed me the wrong way.

I'm not a fan of changing the point of a story. When it comes to this tale, however, I have no trouble changing the nature of what it means to "work".

In the version I tell, the grasshopper spends the summer perfecting his music skills. He shares that music with everyone and they enjoy it - all except the ants. They berate him for being lazy. The grasshopper shrugs it off and says, "I'll work later."

It gets cold. All of the animals the grasshopper has played for are either gone or hibernating. He goes to the ants. They bring him into the anthill.

The queen is amused. She reminds him that he has always said he will work "later". She announces that later has come and sets him to work while the ants enjoy a leisurely winter

In the evenings, the grasshopper plays for everyone. They soon discover a love of the grasshopper's work.

In the spring he leaves. The ants request that he return in the winter. His music was the delight of their colony.

Why did I change it like this? Easy. Anyone who has ever mastered an instrument will tell you that is VERY hard work. Aside from that, art is an important part of life. We need to remember that.




I have a vested interest in looking at the arts as work. It is a totally selfish reworking of that story and I don't apologize for it!

Is this cultural appropriation?

I don't think so. The heart of the story remains the same. If you don't work, you don't eat. The Grasshopper works hard during the winter, and he also sings for his supper. That is work, as any artist will tell you.

We know a great deal about Aesop's Fables. They are African tales that were brought to the western world through an enslaved man named Aesop via Ancient Greece.

We understand the background for these stories, and we get what these fables are for and what they are meant to do. We know their origin, and we can discuss them as well as the changes we make and why.

I tell stories from cultures from all over the world. That doesn't mean I tell all the stories I've heard or all the ones I know.

If I don't know enough, I stay away from a tale.

There is this one story I heard years ago. It is called Pambe Delish. I have no idea if that is the best way to spell it.

 I love it. It is hysterical. It has an "oh my gosh!" at the end of it, and it is participatory. It is everything I love in a great folktale.

I don't perform it. In fact, the only place I do tell it is in workshops as an example of a story that I don't tell.

Why not?

1) I have no idea where this story came from - somewhere in Africa doesn't tell me near enough!

2) I have no idea if this story has been altered in some way before I heard it such that it doesn't accurately reflect some original story

3) I have no idea if this story is exemplary of its place, or if it is a tale retold by someone else

4) I don't know exactly what this story means in the culture out of which it came

5) I think I would have to give way too much background about the tale and put the audience in a particular mood or place in order to receive the story.

6) I have no idea why the main character would do this thing that she does. I don't quite get how the relationships are supposed to work.

7) The images, ideas, moral judgements, and choices an audience would have to make in order to digest this story are framed not by the people in the story, but by our own eyes, ears and experiences. I cannot offer a different way to look at it because I don't know what that would be.

There are a number of stories like this in my repertoire.

Sometimes I never learn enough to tell a story.

How did I come up with the list of why I will or won't tell a story? It is a combination of feeling uncomfortable with some tales combined with an encounter I had with the fabulous Anne Shimojima.

Anne Shimojima

Anne was in a workshop I was conducting about crafting. I gave everyone a copy of a story and I had them read it. Afterward, I did some inappropriate editing.







ex.

"She has a beloved pig, but this animal isn't a pet in the way we understand it, so let's change it to a dog."

I went through the story taking it apart and swapping out different images and ideas. Finally, Anne couldn't take it anymore.

"You can't do that!" She was outraged. "You can't just change this story! That was her beloved pig! How can you decide to just yank the heart out of this tale?"

It was her emotion that struck me. It wasn't just that what I was doing was wrong, it struck at the very heart of WHY it was wrong.

Up to that point in my new career, I always looked at this process as an intellectual exercise. My rule of thumb at that point was simply - If you have to rearrange a story drastically in order to convey it to your audience, pick a different tale or just write one of your own.

This rule of thumb came about because I encountered a piece of theatre where someone rewrote the Little Red Hen to be something that was completely antithetical to the point of the tale. I was uncomfortable, but couldn't pinpoint why. After seeing the play, I made sure that as I crafted, I always kept the point of the story front and center.

Anne's response to my rework revealed what I couldn't quite articulate about the process. It wasn't just about misusing the story, It was committing a kind of cultural sin against the tale.

It made me think: Where is the line? When does the story get so skewed it is no longer true to the spirit of the tale? How do you know if you have reached that line? Crossed it?


Rule Of Thumb: If you have to alter a story drastically in order to share it with an audience...find something else to tell. You are on shaky ground and most likely engaging in appropriation. What may seem like an unimportant detail in a story may very well mean something to the people who created it. Removing signposts is a huge problem.

but, but, but stories are supposed to be able to grow and change! Right?

Many folktales are universal. In other words, they could happen anywhere to anyone in any place. That's why you can slip characters in and out of the tales and nobody has any idea where they originated. Some tales, however, have universal themes, but they are very indicative of the culture out of which they come.

If you are not a part of that culture, don't get some elements of the tale, or you don't really understand some of the things in the tale...You probably shouldn't be telling it.

So, how do you know?

It comes back to that annoying word: RESEARCH

1) How many versions of this tale can you find?
2) How are they similar?
3) What elements carry over from tale to tale?
4) What elements are different?
5) What do the differences tell you about the fluid parts of the tale?
6) Do all of the versions have the same ultimate point? Why or why not?




One last thing to consider.

There is a difference between stories outsiders tell about a people as opposed to the stories people tell about themselves.

Make sure that the tale you are telling is actually a story of those people as opposed to about them.

If it is about them, you should be careful. It means that someone else filtered that story through their own eyes and biases. The only way to know this is to do the work.

Happy Telling!

Part 1 - Cultural Misapproriationis A Better Term: Some Thoughts
Part 2 The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility
Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?

Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator Part 3

Helen Bannerman

In  1899, a Scottish woman named Helen Bannerman published a little book for her children. Her husband was a physician and officer who worked in the Indian Medical Services. At that time, India was part of the British Empire. Helen's book was set in India and involved a fantasy about a child overcoming a dangerous situation. In 1900, the book was published in America.

The story concerned a boy who was out walking in his fine clothes when he was accosted by a team of tigers. The little boy climbs a tree, but the tigers will not go away. The boy ends up throwing his fine clothes and parasol down to the tigers. The tigers fight amongst themselves and then run around the tree until they turn into ghee - which is clarified butter. The boy climbs down, gets dressed, and takes the delicious ghee home to his mother. She makes pancakes for everyone.




That's a fun story.

When it was first published, the western world praised the tale as a positive book for children about black people. Most children's books of the time showed black people as brutish, violent, and stupid.

This black child defeated tigers.

The name of the book? Little Black Sambo.

Sambo is depicted as a pickaninny. This is a racial stereotype of a black child who is associated with idiocy and violence. It was a dehumanizing way to think of black children. The fact that he defeated tigers was considered a step forward.

Why did Bannerman pick the name "Sambo"?

It would surprise nobody to know that the word "sambo" is an ethnic slur that means you have "Indian Blood". That's how the English referred to this group of "lesser" people in their empire.

"Black Sambo" was also a slur. It meant that not only was your blood of Indian origin, there was also some African somewhere in you.

Anyone reading the book at the time understood that the hero of the tale was an "other" in the way the white Europeans thought of others. The idea that somebody black would either read this book or have some thought about how they were being depicted didn't cross anybody's mind.

Most people in the dominant culture of the western world had absolutely no problem with ethnic slurs. In fact, they didn't think of them as slurs. They thought of them as the truth. The language was created to make sure that those who deserved to be held higher in esteem got to determine what the lesser people were going to be called. Otherwise, how could you make sure they knew they were lesser?

In the late 1800s, none of this was problematic. It was an accepted way to think about this story, those people, and how society worked. It was lauded as a more humanizing depiction of blacks.

I spent a morning learning about Little Black Sambo. I had no interest in it before I started my research, but now I am fascinated!

1) I was told Little Black Sambo was based on an Indian Folktale. It is not. It came fully formed from Bannerman's head.

2) Bannerman misappropriated things from two different cultures to create this tale.

3) People have been trying to save this story for some reason for a couple of generations. I'm not really sure why.

4) Bannerman wrote a number of these little stories, and except for one, all of them start with "Little Black" and then a name. I am almost interested in finding out more about these other "Little Black" books.

5) Why was she so hot to write these odd books with African Americans engaging with animals and items native to India? Did she know any black children? What was her motivation other than amusing her children? Did she have any motivation?

6) This story should be used not to talk about the racist pictures (they are really bad), but to talk about what happens when you just throw things together without giving the slightest thought to the people or cultures from which they are misappropriated.

7) To be fair to the society that spawned Little Black Sambo, what did a white, privileged woman know about black people? Besides, she was championing a better image of black folks, right? She didn't mean any harm, right?


Cultural appropriation was not a thing in the 1800s. If you doubt it, go into a British museum. They spent the 1800s pillaging every culture they came across without a shred of concern!

The Great Maya Angelou

How many Little Black Sambo moments have you had? How many times have you blithely walked down a road and into a buzz saw you didn't even know was there?

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I was lucky enough to see Dovie Thomason tell when I was still in my tender years as a storyteller. I don't recall just where, but I know it was in the first five years. She said something that set me back on my heels.

"I am telling these tales, but you do not have permission to tell these tales."

I sat there in confusion for a handful of minutes before she started telling the stories. As she told them, I saw them as they were; beautiful, powerful, personal, and hers. They belonged to her at some level that they could not belong to me. I was fascinated.

So, I insinuated myself next to her at some meal and proceeded to ask about her stories. I received what has got to be the most eye-opening lecture about stories I had ever had. That woman took me to school. By the time she was done with me that afternoon, everything looked very different.

I made some decisions about what I would and would not incorporate in my work. I made some decisions about how I would go about collecting stories, and I would be really careful about stories that were an active part of any religion whether I belonged to it or not.

So. All solved, right?  No.

I keep learning more about cultures, ideas, people, and subjects. I discover that there are tales I should purge or learn something about before I go further. I learn that some words no longer work or apply. I learn that often I have had a backward idea about a thing in history and I have to rethink a whole bunch of ideas and assumptions.

I learn, and learn, and learn and re-imagine, and re-imagine, and re-imagine.

What have I learned?


1) You are human. You can't know everything, so learn when someone points something out to you. They could be right. They could be wrong. Look into it.

2) When you encounter new information, consider it. Look into it. It might be right. It might be wrong. You won't know until you investigate.

3) You are human, failable and forgivable. If you get it wrong, correct it. Don't keep committing the same foul over and over.

4) Don't be afraid to learn. Don't be afraid to be wrong.

5) Adjust. The best thing about folklore is that it travels and speaks to people. See how many versions of the story you can find. If you discover that this tale comes in many versions, either create your own based on the elements of the story or pick a version that does not have serious cultural issues.


You have only the language you know in which to tell a story. When you are telling it, you could be using images and language to talk about a culture that is insulting, belittling, and damaging.

You wouldn't be doing this on purpose. The language you are using was created by the dominant culture. That culture often uses language to discriminate against the surrounding cultures by naming and categorizing the people.

It is a difference so slight you might not even realize it.

For instance -

When referring to the state of bondage African Americans lived in prior to the abolishment of slavery, it is more accurate to refer to the people as "enslaved"  as opposed to "slaves"

Enslaved is something someone has wrongly done to you.
Slave is a thing you are.

When referring to the state of people who are here in America without paperwork it is more accurate to call them "undocumented" than "illegal"

Undocumented refers to the status of your paperwork. There are all sorts of people in this country who were invited to America who are undocumented. Migrant workers are a good example of that.

Illegal suggests that there are two types of people: Legal and illegal. If you are illegal, you are lesser. You deserve less. You can be treated as less. Your needs and concerns are less.


What about this story?

Welfare Queen!

Think about the way our society tells stories about people. What language do we use when we want to dehumanize? What language do we use when we want to make people sound scary or dangerous? What language do we use to throw blame away from ourselves and onto victims or oppressed people?


Language is a tricky thing.

Stories can always be used to spread darkness. Sometimes this happens completely by accident.

Our presuppositions are invisible to us unless we hunt them down.

Happy Hunting


Part 1 - Cultural Misapproriationis A Better Term: Some Thoughts
Part 2 The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility
Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?

The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility - Part 2

In 1946, Walt Disney released Song of The South.


Apparently, Disney paid Joel Chandler Harris' family ten thousand dollars for the rights to the Brer Rabbit stories in 1939.

This movie with the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah song has gone missing from the American landscape.







I can honestly say that I do not recall much about this movie. I remember this song. I remember some of the animated stories, but I don't recall anything of the plot.


I read the plot of this movie on Wikipedia and I was really amused.

This movie was about a little white boy who is helped by the black characters in the movie both animated and real to deal with his problems on the plantation. This is not shocking. Who was making movies for and about black folks in 1946? Most films that had black characters were full of racial stereotypes and very specific images of what white people thought black people were like. How many black screenwriters were around in 1946? Heck. A big chunk of the nation was still segregated.

All the same, I can see why Disney was attracted to the Brer Rabbit tales.

Folktales exist because the folk need them. Their messages are universal and they run through our lives and touch us in lots of ways.

I have no doubt you have heard a story from another culture that touches you or moves you. You've read books or watched films from other cultures that touch you or move you. You've encountered festivals, practices, or celebrations that speak to you.

If I had my way, Jolabokaflod would be a major American tradition and we would do it four times a year.

The Christmas Eve Book Flood

Come to think of it, my family members often end up spending part of Christmas Day like this because one thing my family definitely does is give each other books.

I am considering instituting this in our household officially now that I am no longer dealing with really little children from various siblings.

That's neither here nor there.

The point is, there are stories and traditions that appeal to all of us for different reasons.


The issue with the Song of The South is not that Disney decided to use the stories that Joel Chandler Harris heard in his childhood to make that movie. The issue is that Disney had absolutely no idea what those stories were about or what they were used for in their own culture. Joel Chandler Harris probably didn't know either. Not because he didn't know the stories, but it is unlikely any of the black folks who told them to him would have let him into the deeper secrets behind the stories.

In the first clip, Brer Fox and Brer Bear are shown as lumbering, foolish stereotypical sounding African Americans. If Disney had any understanding of what these stories were about, that fox and bear would have been presented as extremely foolish southern white characters.

All of Brer Rabbit's stories were about how important it was for enslaved Africans to be smarter, more resilient, stronger, and more determined than the enslavers all around them. Brer Rabbit is the only trickster who cannot be ultimately caught and punished. He is the only one who always walks free after thinking his way out of trouble. Fighting makes things worse. Thinking solves everything. Being cunning keeps you alive.

One would not guess that is the point of the Brer tales from Song of The South.

When you remove the people who created the stories from the equation of sharing the stories, tales can lose their purpose and power. It can even make the characters who are behaving in certain ways seem immoral, stupid, or mean. If the question, "Why are they doing that?" comes up at the end of a tale, and you don't know the answer, then something has gone awry in the telling.

Even though the stories can mean different things to different people, it is important to understand why they were told.

When you take a story out of its context, tell it without understanding the why of the tale, you make the people who told that tale invisible.

You mask the purpose of those tales.

You make their voices silent.

You cover up their need.

You ignore their truth.

You transfer potential wealth out of a community. Wealth in the form of both money and cultural richness.

Defining a group of people based on your lack of understanding of who they actually are will create misunderstandings.

When Disney took those tales, repurposed them, profited from them to the tune of millions of dollars, and at no point gave any voice to the people who originated those stories, they silenced Brer Rabbit in an odd way.

Nobody has put out another big national Bruh Rabbit project. Why?

Because Disney tainted the idea of Bruh Rabbit. The images they used, the language, the whole plot of the tale is considered racist and insensitive.

Instead of thinking, "Disney did it the wrong way," the Bruh Rabbit tales themselves are now somehow racist and insensitive!

I've seen librarians and teachers get nervous when they realize I'm about to tell one!

I get these questions from people:

Is it okay to tell them?
Is it okay to share them?


I was working with a business that was interested in southern folklore, but they were leery about using even a generic rabbit for fear someone would think it was Brer Rabbit and they would get "in trouble".

There is nothing wrong with telling Brer Rabbit tales.





I go into schools all over the country. I sometimes ask if anyone has ever heard of Brer Rabbit. Hardly any of the children have. Most of the adults haven't heard of him either.

I give the explanation for who he is and what he did. The audiences love the tales. Who wouldn't? They are fabulous!

Here is a good place to start

The reason why Bruh Rabbit stories were told is uncomfortable for some people.

The reason why they persist is that they are wonderful fun and speak to the downtrodden or those treated unjustly. They can certainly be used for that.

Just don't forget why they were told and where they came from. When you are telling these stories, don't let that part of it go. It speaks to a time in our cultural history that still shapes policies and procedures in our nation.




I know there are those reading these words and thinking that I am making too much of this. How can you make a culture invisible by misappropriating their stories? Honestly, one would think stories are everything!

What happens if you effectively misappropriate? Well, you get things like this.

Steve King, a representative of Iowa in 2016 had this to say about non-white non-Christian people.

“I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

I would like to say that this man is alone in this foolishness, but he is not.

The misappropriation of stories and images and ideas distorts them. If the people who have worked to disinherit "others" define how those "others" think, feel, behave, and look at the world, they control how that group can be treated.

This is where stereotypes are born.

What are the images we have gotten historically of people we don't want to think of as decent or worthy human beings? How have we defined them? I won't post any of those images here. You can find them if you like. Distorted images of the Irish, Italians, Jewish people, African Americans, Polish people, Muslims, Hispanics, people from Asia, and homosexuals are still with us and are still being passed around in some communities.

The way we tell stories about people matters.

The way we think about them...or don't think about them also matters.

Ask yourself some questions:

 Are you living on land that was appropriated from an earlier nation?

What First Nation People used to inhabit the lands around where you are now living?

How did those First Nation People live?

Where are their descendants today if there are any?

What are the circumstances around which your land was transferred from First Nation People?

Can you name any scientists that are descended from First Nation People? 

Any innovations that shaped our culture?

Do you know anything about First Nation People who have served in the US government?

To not see someone's stories is to not see their contributions.

To appropriate their stories is to make them invisible.

To make them invisible can impoverish them in the mainstream culture and drive them further away from either being seen or appreciated.

The Storytelling Component:

Why are you telling this story?

Do you know where this story originated or why it originated?

Who are the people behind this tale?

Have you changed the tale to fit a thing you want to say despite the tale saying nothing of the sort? Do you know if you have done this?

Can you truly tell this story and honor the people who told it?

Not every story has a strong cultural lens that needs to be confronted, but some do. Doing your homework helps.

 Next Up: I only know this because I've stepped into wasps nests: Learning From Our Mistakes

Part 1 - Cultural Misapproriationis A Better Term: Some Thoughts

Part 2 - The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility 

Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?

Happy Telling!

Cultural Misappropriation Is A Better Term: Some Thoughts Part 1

Understanding People Means Understanding How They Live

The question of cultural appropriation regularly roils the storytelling community.

I had planned to do one post about this, but it got long. This will be a series.





What is cultural appropriation?

cul·tur·al ap·pro·pri·a·tion

noun

noun: cultural appropriation; plural noun: cultural appropriations

1. the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.

   
   

   
   

To begin with, let us acknowledge the elephant in the room for the United States...

We appropriated the architecture of the Greeks

MUCH OF OUR CULTURE IS MADE UP OF APPROPRIATED PRACTICES, IDEAS, FESTIVALS, HOLIDAYS, AND CELEBRATIONS.

American Christmas? 

 Christmas has gone through some serious changes over the course of American history!  Click on this link to find some fun facts about Christmas                                   

That thing we call Christmas in America today? We stole lots of it from German immigrants.  How much did we steal? Check it out.

source

Even when we are celebrating lovely American things we tend to have culturally diverse elements like fireworks. The world has China to thank for those.

Most of our cuisine is Americanized food from other parts of the world. Our language is a compilation of grammatical structures and words that we have taken wholesale from other languages.

What could be less American than pizza?
source

Culture is fluid. It moves and changes. Ideas that apply across large swaths of people get incorporated into the main culture. We see something we like that someone else is doing and we start doing it. Influencers make a living getting the people of the world to follow them around and behave as they behave.

influencer

/ˈinflo͝oənsər/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. a person or thing that influences another.

   
   

   
   

   • MARKETING

     a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media.
   • 
     

That is just how it works. That is how it has always worked. There is no other way to explain this outfit.

Nobody just had this look in the closet. Someone purposely did this.

What, you might wonder, does any of that have to do with cultural misappropriation?

Why, if we live in a world where we are constantly bumping up against ideas, cultures, images, and thoughts are some of them not up for grabs?

Easy. It has to do with how those images or ideas interact with our history.

There are two different stories of The United States of America. One is patriotic, it makes your heart swell, and it is the tale of a scrappy nation that built itself on the foundations of liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness!

George Washington

Those are the stories in the history books. Those are the stories that we have mythologized. Our founding president was so honest that he chopped down a cherry tree and when confronted, uttered those well-known words, "I cannot tell a lie!" You know that never happened, right? Good story, though. Larger than life making story. 

Then there is the other story of America. The history that makes some people upset if you start trying to tell it. The history that gets people accused of being unAmerican if they want to learn about it or share it. 

America is a country founded by people who came from other places, dispossessed the people who were already here, butchered them, and appropriated whatever they wanted.

America is a country founded by people who imported people from other lands, enslaved them, reaped the benefit and wealth from them for generations without any compensation, and then systematically oppressed them for generations after the practice of enslavement ended. BTW, this is still an ongoing problem.

America is a country that is built off of the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants with the promise that if they work really hard and struggle, they too can become part of the American collective. In the process of letting them work really hard, some of the richest families in our country exploited them to a criminal degree. BTW, this is still an ongoing problem.

The history of the practical effects of what the country has done to minority cultures has had a profound effect on how we think about, treat, and represent images in the mainstream of our culture.

Because we are a multi-colored, multi-cultural nation we tend to have a very privileged view of other people's stuff.

In other words, we don't have a good idea about what constitutes "not mine". This translates into all sorts of really inappropriate things.

Americans be like:

How come we can do this?

Oktoberfest America!

But not this.

Really Victoria Secret? Really?

This is perfectly fine.

St. Patrick's Day Fun!

This? Absolutely not!

This image comes from an interesting post worth the read: The Al Jolson Story Click here
What is wrong with Blackface? Click the link.

To me, the answer to why some of these images are perfectly fine and some are not is obvious.

What I have discovered is that for some folks it is not.

Ask yourself some simple questions.

Is the image honoring the culture in question or completely divorced from the culture out of which it comes?

Is the image in question celebrating the culture or mocking it?

What significance does the image have to the culture out of which it comes?

Are there any ramifications about this particular image in our culture? Why or why not?

What does the person who is in the image know about the culture they are presenting?

What is the purpose of using the cultural elements in this image? Why was it picked?

Cultural Misappropriation? Storytelling questions:

Where did I get this story?

What do I know about the culture out of which this story came?

What is the significance of this story in that culture?

What other sources for this story do I have?

Is this story sacred to someone?

Is this story so culturally specific that it will lose meaning if it is taken out of its cultural context?

First Rule Of Thumb:

If you are using an item or portraying a cultural image, and you are completely divorced from the actual people for whom that item or image means something such that you might very well be presenting that item or image in a way that is not only inappropriate but bone shakingly insulting to the people for whom it does have meaning...stop. Do not pass go. Do not collect 100$. Stop.

You don't get to decide what another culture finds offensive. You get to learn what is offensive and adjust yourself accordingly. That is your job as a storyteller.

Next:

The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation:

Yeah, it might hurt someone's feelings, but it doesn't actually hurt anyone right! That is absolutely wrong.

Happy Telling!

Part 1 Cultural Misappropriation is A Better Term: Some Thoughts

Part 2 The Cost of Cultural Misappropriation: Invisibility
Part 3 - Cultural Misappropriation Is Easy To Do: The Accidental Appropriator
Part 4 - How Do You Know If You Don't Know Enough?
Part 5 - What Does It Look Like to be an Ally in Your Own Work?