Lessons of traditional tales still valuable

It surely has been cold in my little town.

The wind kicked up like a fury, blowing frigid air everywhere, including through the cracks in my house. I drove home and carried some items from the car to the house with ungloved hands. I struggled to unlock my door. I thought my fingers would freeze off before I got inside. Is my skin getting thinner and that’s why it felt so cold? I thought back to the early 1960s when I waited for the school bus in the same kind of windy, cold weather wearing miniskirts and slippery shoes. Nylons were the only protection for my freshly shaven legs. The wind would rage down the Glenn Highway, blowing frozen shards of ice that would sandblast the face and body. Some days when I got on the bus my legs were bright red. Good for the circulation, I’ll bet.

Then my thoughts went further back to my Ahtna ancestors, who had to endure this type of weather without a warm house or bus to climb into. How did they survive that cold? Probably most of them didn’t live to be my age unless they were exceptionally hearty.

I was contemplating these things while wandering around a thrift store. I heard a little kid screaming across the building. It just let out one scream after the other. The child wasn’t crying, just yelling. I thought how effective our ancient Ya Ne Dah Ah “Besiin (Owl) Story” would be to quiet that kid down.

“Besiin” was the first story told to very young children in the bygone days. In this legend a little boy wouldn’t shut up so Besiin captured him, took him to his nest and taught him a harsh lesson. Back in those olden times, they couldn’t allow a kid to scream needlessly because it might scare away a moose and the family could starve. As my mother told me, a baby crying sounds a lot like a rabbit caught in a trap, so if a bear hears that sound, he’ll come to check it out, and that could mean danger for the entire family. So the Besiin story worked like a charm, even for my children in these modern times.

I think children 100 years ago had to be strong. When these stories were the main method of teaching, it was during a time when living was survival. If people were weak or too sick, they didn’t make it. But in today’s world, with all the toxic chemicals, it seems we humans are getting more fragile and weak. So when I tell stories like “Besiin” to children in schools, especially the little ones, I don’t tell it scary; I lighten it up a bit.

But don’t children and youths today see more horrible things on the news? What about “Grimm’s Fairy Tales?” Take, for instance, this ending of “The Three Little Men in the Wood:”

“‘The wretch deserves nothing better,’” answered the old woman, ‘than to be taken and put in a barrel stuck full of nails, and rolled down hill into the water.’ ‘Then,’ said the king, ‘you have pronounced your own sentence.’ And he ordered such a barrel to be brought, and the old woman to be put into it with her daughter, and then the top was hammered on and the barrel rolled down hill until it went into the river.”

The first time my son Dimi and I shared a PowerPoint presentation of “Besiin” with a school, we received two anonymous letters from teachers who put a psychological bent on the story, reading into it such things as the message is if you’re hurt, don’t cry out. Well, folks, that wasn’t the message. When a teacher recently asked if any of our Ya Ne Dah Ah stories have good endings, and I told that to my youngest son Alex, he said, “They all have good endings, because they teach kids morals and how to act.”

I appreciated November being Native Heritage Month and it was a busy one for me. I love going into the classrooms (well, not necessarily the 7:30 a.m. classes). So this is a big tsin’aen (thanks) to all the teachers and students who let me share some ancient legends that we call Ya Ne Dah Ah, and also some of the history of this area from the original inhabitants’ perspective.

Patricia Wade is editor of The Chickaloon News.