Storyteller entertains and educates

Page 8

Tom McCormack draws different traditions together in his tales. He's one of the most accomplished intertribal Native story tellers in the U.S., and he's planning to move to Alberta later this year.

"I like to be giving back and empowering people through these stories," he explains. McCormack incorporates many things into his performance art, which he puts on through libraries and schools, at festivals and even at powwows. He includes talking and singing, sound effects, acting and body movements to tell stories and involve the audiences.

He attended the Dreamspeakers festival in Edmonton, this year, and has performed at other significant festivals in the western states, for children and mixed-age audiences. As well, he presents workshops for teachers, librarians, pre-school staff members, camp counselors and parents.

"In Alberta, I hope to be able to facilitate accessing healing medicine for the tribes' healing people, " he says. "Story telling is vital, not just talking about prevention and treatment, but it goes onto the vision network, which isn't just something real for the Australian Aborigines but for most of the tribes in America, as well."

McCormack is a serious exponent of his art, and a serious student of it. He has a Native American resource list, which includes many of the stories he tells. He is particularly fond of the stories collected by Frank Applegate.

"Applegate's stories are great," he enthuses. "They're alive, and that's something that's very important, and something that's perhaps difficult to achieve the more you study." He admits: "I'm even afraid of archiving rather than living myself."

His work, behind the scenes as it were, involves the authentication of stories as the real Native traditional tales, and discovery or provision of documentation for the pieces. But, story telling is an art, and a calling for McCormack, who is always eager to encourage others to take it up.

He saves considerable scorn for those who would hide all the books in libraries. In one instance, he was researching some tales at a library, only to return a few days later to find that the books, available nowhere else, had been moved to the Smithsonian," or somewhere like that. Somewhere nobody's ever going to be able to see them again."

"Native story telling is a living tradition, with the story tellers understanding and even modifying the stories as they tell them," he explains. "I've been in presentations where the audience included Elders. They've come up to me afterwards and told me that the story they had heard was not the same as the one I'd told, but that the one I'd told was correct. They felt, they understood the correctness of it." There's always a concern that the stories are interpreted correctly, in a true, though not necessarily a by-the-book, way.

"On the one hand, I do this for a living, but there's a paradox in a certain sense," he says. "One of the great things about it is that story telling offers freedom for Native people to make use of greater expression. This is a way of life. It's what we do. You're welcome to join us, to go with it, or not."

It opens up an understanding which can, McCormack hopes, provide serious healing and growth potential for the people involved.

"I was outdoors, and when you sit on a rock where they actually ground the grain, the stories are there. I didn't have time to learn them word-for-word but I knew them. When I told them, I felt that I was able to really reach the kids, to open up the Red River of their hearts and reach, somehow, the very essence of what it is to be story."