As we focus this month on traditional story telling presented orally by Solomon Ratt, it has been a pleasure to watch the creation of yet another powerful resource in Cree cultural literacy. Dr Kevin Brousseau (author of “Kepin’s Cree Language Blog.“) has very recently begun collecting, indexing, transcribing and transliterating Cree myths, presenting them in blog form,as Index of Cree Mythology (found at: creemyths.wordpress.com). You can learn more about this evolving project on his “About” page.
As Kevin himself commented on FaceBook earlier this week:
When we speak of Cree culture we often focus on language and bush skills, such as hunting, fishing, and trapping. Stories are often left out of the discussion, despite their importance in defining who we are, where we come from, what our traditional beliefs are, all while providing wisdom and understanding. Of course, stories also help us maintain our highly complex language.
Compiling our traditional stories and making them available for all has been a plan of mine for nearly a decade and I’m glad some of you have taken interest in my recent posts. Since I’ve started work on the Index of Cree Mythology last month I have indexed 57 tropes or story-types and posted 52 fully readable stories. There are hundreds of stories left to sift through.
I’ve been working a little on the Index everyday, but I will be regrettably slowing down to focus on more pressing issues at the moment. Keep checking in on the Index and share the website with your family and friends. I will post new additions there from time to time and will hopefully get back to it on a daily basis in a few months.Not only will Solomon Ratt’s oral and text renditions eventually be added to Kevin’s collection, they will also be indexed using the same system, so they can find their place in the index beside other renditions of the same stories, recorded in other locations across the Cree language continuum.
If Sol’s storytelling has left you hungry for more, Kevin’s new Index of Cree Mythology is a great place to find it.
