FALLS VILLAGE — Staff, residents, guests, and members of the local community—many toting small children—gathered around a bonfire by the lakeshore of the Isabella Freedman Center on Sunday, Oct. 8, to listen to Darlene Kascak, a traditional Schaghticoke storyteller, share Mahican stories of the land.
“I don’t read these stories in a book,” said Kascak, who is the education director for the Institute of Native American Studies in Washington. “I sit down with an elder, and that elder gives me the story as a gift,” she said. “Then it is my job to guard that story, keep it safe, and pass it down to the next generation.”
At Isabella Freedman, the Jewish retreat center outside of Falls Village, the story-telling session was a new addition to the rituals that honor a less-observed holiday called Simchat Torah, or “joy of the Torah.” Following on the heels of Sukkot, the weeklong Jewish harvest festival, Simchat Torah marks the annual completion and restarting of the Torah (in contemporary Judaic practice, the Torah is read more or less consecutively over the course of a single year).
“Sukkot is a Jewish celebration of land and harvest and abundance,” said Adamah Farm Director Janna Siller, who organized the event with Kascak. During a period that honors the land, she said, it felt important to acknowledge those who stewarded the land before the dispossession of the colonial period.
“We want to integrate into that [celebration] the awareness that this land that we’re living on is a place that was once inhabited very differently,” Siller said. “We don’t want to just layer our stories on top of a land that already has stories.”
On Oct. 8, Isabella Freedman’s campus was still dotted with sukkahs, the delicate, temporary shelters that observers dine under during Sukkot. The structures are supposed to be so fragile that they will topple in a strong breeze, and so transparent that the stars are visible through the roofing.
Kascak looked at home standing by the bonfire with her audience gathered around her, some in fleeces, some in Yarmulkes, perching on concentric benches and nestling in beach chairs.
Her stories—how the chipmunk got his stripes, how the rabbit got his ears, how the owl got his big, staring eyes—were kid-friendly, with clear internal logics, and clear delineations of right and wrong. They seemed to take place in a gentle time before humans walked the Earth; mistakes were funny, or silly, and explained the peculiarities of each native animal.
“The thing we have to protect is the lesson woven into that story,” she said. “How we get there—we all have our own style. But we have to keep true to that lesson.”
Some of these stories, said Kascak, have been told for 1,200 years. They’ve been adapted down the generations: new languages, new landscapes, new socio-cultural backgrounds.
“Learn the stories of your culture,” she entreated the over-12 crowd. “It’s a wonderful way to teach your kids.” (The children in question were rapt—particularly when asked to imitate the wolf puppies who tried to teach themselves to dance by standing against tree-trunks.)
Kascak’s stories seemed to be almost exclusively about the vital need for respect—for other beings, for others’ bodies, for one another’s needs, for one another’s differing, essential natures, and thereby for oneself.
If true respect had been practiced by these woodland creatures, it seemed, things might have turned out differently. Chipmunk could have let Bear go about his business, and eat his berries in peace. Owl could have had patience with Rabbit’s needs. Fox could have had respect for Rabbit’s differences. Turtle could have recognized that the realm of the air was not meant for him but belonged to the birds, and that he had his own realm in the lake, and that that was enough. But in Kascak’s telling, that is not what happened.
In their seats, listeners shivered watching the afternoon sun drain from the land. The lake darkened, the shore grasses flashed red in the ember-colored light, then melted into the wide blue shadow of evening.
Patrick L. Sullivan
