Day 3

We began with a "storytellers' fire." This is an activity I often use as a way to create a mood and mentality for listening to stories. Here it is on bliptv:

I told the story of Raven Brings Light. You can find another version of the story in Coles, "The Raven Brings Light", page 719. Adding to the metaphor of Sky Woman's Basket, we now have the image of Raven's boxes containing light. Combining them as a metaphor for the storyteller, we have the challenge of seeing into the mysterious "basket" of the story and releasing whatever "light" we find there.

I made a connection between the Tlingit region of Raven and the Hawaiian region of Maui by noting that I learned in Hawaii that ocean canoes were made from trees that washed ashore from the NW coast of N. America. Tim asked if that was true, so I checked a map of Pacific Ocean currents. As you can see below, the currents move clockwise from north to south. Hawaii is north of the equatorial current and in a good position to get flotsam from British Columbia!

(As a side note: in recent years the idea that North America was first inhabited by nomadic hunter-gatherers crossing a land bridge across the Bering Straits has been hotly debated. If Polynesians could have made there way to Hawaii from Asia, why couldn't they have gone all the way to North, Central, or South America? Dates for the earliest human presence in South America keep getting pushed back making it harder to conceive of land migration from Alaska. See "Red Earth, White Lies" by Vine Deloria, Jr. for an interesting arguement against the land bridge theory.)

We discussed the story of "How Maui Fished Up The Great Island" (Coles, pg. 599) and found many interesting symbolic possibilities. Here are a few:
* The ancestress half-living and half-dead suggests a relationship with the past
* That he fashions a hook from the jaw-bone of his ancestress suggests the power of the past combined with the power of speech. Note that he chants as he fishes in order to bring up land.
* The paradox of being treated as "lazy" and "shiftless" yet at the same time being inventive suggests that creative personality type: does not fit convention, generates new possibilities, yet may have a day-dreaming style.

There was much more. Please add in your thoughts with comments. Here is a link to more variations of The Legends of Maui.

Some principles we noted:
*To understand a story, we compare it with other stories we already know. Example: Diana discussed the way that Maui and his brothers compare with Mary and Martha from the bible.
* The principle of silence: what is already understood, goes without saying. Hence we will find that stories leave out details that the original listeners may have supplied. Thus, Maui's journey to his ancestress seems very expedient. Yet the journey may have involved much more in the way of ritual and custom that is not reported because it "goes without saying" for members of the original culture.

We watched the youtube performance of a hula chant depicting Maui's Creation. On February 16 we will be joined by a hula instructor and get a first hand experience of this traditional form.
We discussed the use of "containers" for narrative such as highly codified dance forms in Hawaiian hula or totem carvings in the Pacific Northwest.

We watched most of the movie "Remembering The End of The World" depicting the efforts of astronomer, David Talbott, to find a coherent pattern in world mythology and determine what celestial events they may depict. Talbott was inspired by the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and determined that "Velikovsky's key" was pattern recognition. Such pattern recognition is useful for our work in storytelling. Talbott concludes from his research that the ancient astronomers observed a radical realignment of the solar system. For more on his theories go to www.kronia.com.