'Fantastic'
First Hané storytelling festival draws large, enthusiastic crowd

Choctaw storyteller Tim Tingle performs during the Hané Festival at First United Methodist Church on Friday. The festival featured three native storytellers and a musician telling the tales of their people. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Native American storytelling is not dead. It's just taken another form.

That was made clear this weekend when Sunny Dooley, a professional Navajo storyteller, joined with storytellers from two other tribes and held the first of what she plans are annual storytelling festivals.

"The response was fantastic," she said. Native and non-natives ranging from 6 years old all the way up to 82 attended all or part of the three-day Hané Festival at the First United Methodist Church. The festival easily drew more tHané 250 people during the three days.

Storytelling is as much a part of the Navajo culture as mutton stew and frybread, but in recent decades it seemed on its way to becoming a lost art as young children began spending time in front of their televisions and computers and stopped listening to the Creation Story and other stories that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Dooley said that she began realizing just how much of a lost art it was becoming when she went to a senior citizen home in Tohatchi several years ago and began telling the stories to Navajo senior citizens, many of whom said they had never heard the stories before because they were raised in boarding schools.

Joining her at the festival this year was Eldrena Douma, who is of Laguna and Tewa/Hopi descent, and Tim Tingle, who is Choctaw.

Although the Navajo stories are, of course, in Navajo, the story telling was in a variety of languages, mostly English with Navajo, Tewa and Choctaw words and phrases intertwined.

"There are some Navajo words that just don't translate into English," said Dooley. "There's no amount of words you can use in English to convey the meaning. You can try until you're purple in the face, but you can't do it. But your Navajo audience will get it."

She's been telling Navajo stories since 1982 and doing it professionally for about the past 12 top 13 years and she has learned, after countless storytelling sessions in places like Texas, Oklahoma and New York, just how to relate to audiences and tell the stories in a way that makes them relevant, no matter what type of culture one was raised in.

While she goes to storytelling festivals all over the country, she said there have been no festivals devoted solely to native storytelling in this area, and she decided several months ago to see if some form of festival could be started here in Gallup during the President Day's Weekend to show people the beauty and enjoyment of sitting down and hearing the stories of the past.

"You know that saying 'If you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere,' " she said, explaining why she wanted have a storytelling festival in Gallup. "Gallup is a tough town; so, I think if you can make it here in Gallup, you can make it anywhere."

There are probably some who wondered why she decided to have the event in a church, given the negative attitude of many Navajos to Christian practices in the past, including attempts to stifle Navajo culture.

But things are changing and the attitude of many Christian religions to Navajo culture has undergone a tremendous change, which can be shown by the fact that not only did the people putting on the festival think a Christian setting was a perfect venue for the festival, but also the church welcomed the opportunity to sponsor it.

"I think what this shows is that we are all human and I think that's what these stories are all about," she said.