Something almost as old as mankind itself
We have returned from being in Tucson for a few days and while there we spent many hours one day at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. But this is no dusty place with fossilised remains behind glass cabinets. No, the Desert
Museum is an honest attempt to give visitors an insight into the complex and beautiful world of a desert. As the Musuem’s web site puts it,
The mission of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is to inspire people to live in harmony with the natural world by fostering love, appreciation, and understanding of the Sonoran Desert.
That particular evening the programme mentioned an hour’s storytelling by the Native American Gerard Tsonakwa.
Tsonakwa is a member of the Abenaki tribe who live in the Algonquin area of Ontario, Canada. Originally an active participant in Native American politics and a published author as well, Tsonakwa showed that evening the power and mystery of storytelling.
It’s only in recent times, relatively speaking, that books have been widely available (the book as we know it today dates from the fifteenth century) and in the last hundred years the art of passing information to others through storytelling has practically disappeared.
But listening to Gerard Tsonakwa speak to a packed auditorium in the Warden Oasis Theatre at the Desert Museum was compelling, to say the least. Compelling because sitting in a group listening to an ‘elder’ tell the secrets of life and the universe seemed to resonate with very deep memories of long time ago.
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 