On a dark winter night in Miami, dozens of citizens of the Shawnee Tribe and friends of the community gathered to eat and listen to stories —many of them learning Shawnee tales for the first time about the stars and Earth.
Joel Barnes, the Director of the Shawnee Tribe's language immersion program, said he spent most of his life without ever hearing these stories. After talking with a Shawnee elder, he noted neither of them could remember a time when the community got together to share these accounts.
“To my knowledge, I don't think they've ever been told since we've been here to Oklahoma,” Barnes said.
The lasting impacts of colonization, forced removal and assimilation were designed to ensure these stories never were told.
But now, thanks to events like this, they can be passed down as initially intended.
“We just want to make sure that we get these little winter stories out there so those kids can start learning about it, and that way help preserve those stories,” Barnes said.
About 75 years ago, Shawnee storytellers recounted these tales to Carl Voegelin, a linguist and anthropologist at the University of Indiana.
Anastasia Miller-Youst, whose Shawnee name is piyeckawe'si, is the Linguist for the Shawnee Language Department. She listened to their recordings and read Voegelin’s transcriptions as she helped organize the gathering on Saturday.
Miller-Youst also told the story about petakine'fi no'ki m'kwa (rabbit and bear) in Shawnee and English, like all storytellers who participated.
She and Barnes noted the event is a testament to how far the Shawnee Tribe’s language department has come.
“We're able to do this because we have a really strong community of teachers and also what we call apprentices in our programs,” Miller-Youst said. “Everybody telling a story tonight has taught the Shawnee language over the past few years, so that's what has allowed us to build a community of people who can tell these stories because they're not the easiest to tell.”
She said these stories were part of the curriculum. Once the department noticed the success of this storytelling exercise, Miller-Youst said they knew they needed to host an event that would give the stories a platform to be expressed in the community.
“Being able to share these Shawnee stories is the most important thing at the end of the day, and just being able to be together,” Miller-Youst said. “And that's always what we're trying to do, is just build community and be together and speak the language.”
Barnes recalled about 200 fluent speakers as a kid, and the number has drastically dwindled. He said he can count on one hand how many fluent Shawnee speakers he knows, expressing the critical importance of language revitalization.
“All the Shawnee people, not just people in our tribe— the Absentees, the Easterns— have a right to be able to have access and learn that language,” Barnes said. “Nobody can take that away from us.”
He hopes this event catalyzes a continued tradition for generations to come.
This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.
