When Sky Woman falls from a hole in the sky, Turtle offers her his back as a place to live and build the Earth, also known as the Great Turtle Island.Ĭreation stories describe how rain came to be and why a species of tree grows a certain way. Magical corn replicates to feed an entire village, while tricksters like Fox get their comeuppance. Bear Woman shape-shifts into human form and adopts a young boy lost in the forest, teaching him how to recognize a focused hunter. Monstrous flying heads zoom through the forest, representing Nature’s destructive forces – and humans’ negative traits. The Haudenosaunee traditionally told these tales only in the winter, around fires in longhouses that sheltered 60 to 80 people. He claps his hands once and says, “This story happened a long time ago, back when the Great Turtle Island was new.” Now Ground always starts his stories in the same way. “By the end of that summer, I knew I wanted to find a way to use the stories to educate people positively about Native Americans,” he says. “Being able to take classes to learn more about Native American history and culture, I was also learning about myself and who I was.”Īfter his freshman year, he worked for the summer as a park aide at Ganondagan, a state park dedicated to Seneca culture in Victor, New York, where he began to tell stories with Marion Miller, a Seneca storyteller. ![]() It was instructive for me, as a Native person,” Ground says. Surrounded by other Native American students, he began to explore his identity as a Turtle Clan member of the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee (pronounced Ho-di-no-SO-ni) Confederacy of six sovereign nations. Perry Ground ’91 performs at the Saratoga Native American Festival in Saratoga, New York, in 2015.Īs a freshman, Ground participated in Cornell’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, through which students study and contribute to the building of Indigenous nations and communities. Like many young people, he struggled to define his identity. He and his sister were the only Native American kids at their school. “I feel like I grew up in a very Italian household, as opposed to a Native American household,” he says. After his parents divorced, his mother married a man of Italian descent. Ground grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, only occasionally visiting his father’s Tonawanda Seneca reservation and the Onondaga Reservation where his mother was born. He can really read an audience and understand that he’s getting across to them in a way that not many storytellers can. “He brings the relationship of the modern world to the past. “I would call him a new traditionalist,” says Joseph Bruchac ’64, a Nulhegan Abenaki author and storyteller in Greenfield Center, New York, who has known Ground for three decades. “The most important thing to me is that the audience goes away happy, and that they have a positive impression of Native Americans.” “A lot of what I’m doing is taking these old written versions from the late 1800s, early 1900s, with Victorian-style language, and bringing them into a modern setting that is accessible and understandable,” Ground says. Minett Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. ![]() For the 2021-22 academic year, he is the Frederick H. He’s performed in schools throughout New York state, at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and in Belgium, Croatia and Serbia. ![]() Ground now travels around the world performing traditional stories of the Haudenosaunee (sometimes called Iroquois) Confederacy, adapting them to the present while keeping their ancient spirit alive. I realized, in that moment, how powerful these stories could be.” This is a way to teach in a positive way, to draw people in so that they are included and want to learn more. “I saw the reaction from all the students: They were captivated by it,” Ground says. This replica of the Hiawatha belt, the national belt of the Haudenosaunee, tells the story of five nations joining together in peace to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
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