Some traditional Indigenous stories can only be uttered during the wintertime.
A member of the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC, has been workshopping a new collaboration that’ll bring old creation tales to life through the art of shadow puppetry, and KJZZ got a sneak peek ahead of Saturday’s special showing.
Former GRIC Lt. Gov. Robert “Bobby” Stone will be one of three O’odham performers sharing traditional stories by the fireside in the Sonoran Desert at the Chandler-based Huhugam Heritage Center.
This outdoor annual gathering inside the ball pit amphitheater is called Ho’ok A’aga, or “the story about the old woman,” according to his translation.
“We didn’t paint our gourds, now I put a lot of Hohokam designs on them,” he added. “This one I made back in the ‘90s that I’ve been singing with, so this is my original one that has thousands of songs in it.”
Until then, Stone is firmly grasping the dried out rib of a saguaro cactus, shaking a handmade gourd rattle with all of his might. He’s been rehearsing inside a former Spanish Colonial style church in downtown Phoenix — home to the Great Arizona Puppet Theater for nearly three decades.
“What we’re doing here is we’re building a puppet altar since we’re in a church,” said Jeffrey Lazos Fern, the nonprofit’s executive director. “So eventually all those puppets will go almost to roofline.”
The performing arts center has partnered with Navajos and Hopis to elevate their stories through the ancient art of puppetry, but less so for O’odham voices.
“We’re on O’odham land,” Fern emphasized. “They’ve been living here for thousands of years, and we want to open our space and our art form, and this is what we’re doing with Robert today.”
Stone and Fern met one afternoon last month to prep for the upcoming performance with Lisa Marie Pirro, a scenic designer and shadow artist with the Great Arizona Puppet Theater.
“I think it’s — just a somewhat unlikely pairing to be able to try new things and keep old traditions,” Pirro said, “and I think that’s just a great way to do it, through the arts.”
They practiced playing music to simulating fire.
“Because it flickers, and it’s also your light source,” she added. “Any shadow that you put in front of the fire is gonna automatically have a shimmer to it, it’s going to slightly move even if you’re holding it still. And so, it almost breathes its own kinda life.”
Unlike physical puppets, Pirro explained she isn’t limited by size when it comes to casting shadows onto a fabric screen. Right now, her templates are sketched and cut from sheets of black construction paper — until the final puppets are fashioned out of leather or rawhide.
One shadow puppet’s face belongs to Jeved Makai or Earth Medicine Man, an essential character in the Akimel O’odham creation story that Stone will soon recite, both in his native tongue and English.
“Earth Medicine Man stands up,” he said. “He has a rock and then he breaks them up in pieces and throws them up into the air to be stars.”
Stone hopes to share that tale, along with the cloud story.
“The other is about him coming up again,” he added, “but this time, he just brings up dirt. And again, he breaks those into pieces and throws them up and those will be clouds.”
These stories have been told for generations.
“We still do that to this day, with the fire and then the storytelling is like chapters of a book, basically,” Stone elaborated. “They say it takes four nights to tell the whole creation story. Nowadays, we just do it for a few hours.”
That’s partly due to language loss.
Stone mentioned the storytelling is also about preserving a language on the brink of disappearing. With some 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, all but 15 or so Indigenous ones are expected to go extinct by 2050.
UNESCO defines a language as endangered when there are less than 10,000 speakers left. The Endangered Language Project estimates fewer than 15,000 O’odham speakers are scattered across southern Arizona and northern Sonora.
“They hardly know our language,” added Stone. “They know a few words, but they want to learn. I’m real traditional, because that’s how I was raised.”
He first learned to speak O’odham before English. At 69 years old, Stone is trying to keep the tradition going, while teaching language and culture to students at the Casa Blanca Community School in Bapchule.
“But then when it comes to our songs, our language, storytelling, all that, Gila River and most tribes, are real protective, because [of] the way the modern world is now,” said Stone. “We’re a world of big economy, you know, the mighty dollar, so our songs can be taken and used, exploited, the same thing, our language.”
None of the performances will be recorded.
Stone had to get permission from another elder to narrate these stories publicly for Natives and non-Natives alike. Shirley Jackson is director of the Huhugam Heritage Center and insists not recording is a sign of deference.
“I’m not fluent, but I have that ear for it, and I think O’odham audiences love hearing it, definitely learn from it,” she said. “People will be visiting our lands, our community. It takes away from your experience, and it’s also just a form of respect.”
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