It's our choice to pass on oral traditions

Would we consider our parents more oral than ourselves because they are the ones closer to the oral traditions of our ancestors than we are? And they are the ones that can either keep or delete our past traditions that have been pasted on for generations? If they don't care then we don't have a chance of keeping our traditions alive. Do we blame our parents or do we demand from them the stories that we are inclined to hear? Are we even inclined to the stories or are we just a capsule for another story?

We as individuals have the ability to pass on or not pass on stories that we hear. It is a conscious decision that we make to either keep or not keep our oral traditions that our family has kept. When we create our families of our own we then have the ability to make our own traditions for our off springs to pass on. We can use the traditions that our families have used from the past or we can create our own. It is the decision of the parent to keep past in the present as well as past in the past.

So when you become or if you already are a parent remember it is your choice to pass on oral traditions that your parents passed on to you.

dream group

the dream presentation was difficult because the lights were off but it made me focus not on the person speaking but the actual words. The presentation was more oral than the rest of the group presentations, because of the focus they forced on the class through the darkness. Words create more meaning when the visual is gone, just how Zach talked about his high school English Teacher turning off the lights and it emphasising each point he had made. It make the listener focus on the actual oral part of the presentation because that is all that there is. I think it was a good connection to the idea of dreams, though at times i got confused because I was awake from my 4 cups of coffee, i still really enjoyed listening to each voice bring me closer to the other world as they dove deeper into the world of dreams without having to put me to sleep.

Sex and the City...a modern day Myth?

I know this might be far fetch, and some might get offended by this, but Sex and the City is one of the largest myths for women today.

We as women want to be Carrie Bradshaw, with our Manolo Blahnik stilettos, our Chennel handbags, cute sun dresses, and too many guys to count wanting to sleep with us, all while living in the most expensive city in the world. Oh and not to mention having four girlfriends that go out to lunch or some meal during the day everyday.

The life they live is what millions of woman want and desire to obtain. We have created this myth for women that help us cop with our ordinary lives, dreaming of the day Big will pull up in his limousine get down on one knee, and pull out that enormous rock.

In someway the sexy foursome of Sex and the City are our modern day goddesses. Possessing the power to control millions of women, while seducing a countless amount of men.

But hey it's entertaining and that's what myths are now a days...for some cultures...and i for one am a believer of the myth that one day I too will have an apartment on the Upper East Side. HAHA just kidding.

For all you skiiers and snowboarders...Coyote makes Mt. Hood

www.oregonlive.com
Coyote makes Mt. Hood
Torsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianFor Kathryn Jones Harrison, it started with Coyote and Grizzly.

"During Kathryn Jones Harrison's 84 years, she's seen the Grand Ronde tribe terminated, then restored. She's raised 10 children, served on the tribal council on the reservation east of Lincoln City for 22 years and today helps hold the memory and oral traditions -- of the merged Umpqua, Kalapuya, Chasta, Rogue River and Molalla tribes -- by telling stories.

"I'm really proud to be here to tell you a Coyote story about Mount Hood and something about my people, the Molallas. This story is called Coyote and Grizzly."

Coyote was busy putting together earth and rock and making a big mountain, which later became Mount Hood. So Grizzly comes along and he says, "What are you doing and where will you be going?"

Coyote says, "Oh, I'll be going yonder."

Grizzly says, "What will you do there?"

Coyote says, "I will be making the world."

Grizzly says, "So who told you to do that? We should fight over that."

Coyote says, "No, we should swallow things."

Grizzly keeps saying, "No, we should fight."

But Coyote sticks to his guns and says, "Well then, we might as well swallow all these stones fast and get busy."

Grizzly says, "OK, right away. Let's get to it and swallow stones. How many are we going to swallow?"

Coyote says, "Let's start with five. Go ahead, you go first."

So Grizzly looks at the hot stones and swallows five, one after another. He looks at Coyote and says, "Now it's your turn."

Coyote being the trickster, instead of swallowing hot stones, he swallows five strawberries. He doesn't have any trouble so he tells Grizzly, "Now you need to swallow all those stones."

And Grizzly swallows those hot stones, lots of burning hot stones. He gets burned out of his whole life and he dies.

And so Coyote thinks, "What will I do now? What's best for me? I'll go. I'll never come back here and the world will go on."

But he takes Grizzly, skins and cuts his body into quite a few pieces, and throws the pieces everywhere. He takes the heart and throws it over to Molalla country and says, "These people here, they will all be good hunters. They will not be worthless low-class people. They will be always on the hunt and that will be their way."

"That is the end of the Coyote and Grizzly story.

"And I have two sons who were always good hunters for my family, so I guess it's true.""

Group Presentations

I think the creation of images in the oral tradition is one of the most important parts to remembering a story. The teller creates a memory theater for his or her audience internalizing each memorable point to the story. Group six i felt did an excellent job of recreating an image in my mind to help me picture each individual story as the teller engaged the audience.

portmanteau

a new form of the classic game of scrabble is all about stacking the words making layer upon layers of words, a game specifically for portmanteaus if you will.

Test

I tend to not do well on written tests. For some reason or another my mind shuts parts off and even with my studying I seem to miss more questions than I hoped to miss. My dad always tells me I just didn't try hard enough, and that if I really studied than I would get the A. So I spent hours studying for tests in high school and failed to ever get that A. It was only test grades that did not reflect my work in the class until I started to take Spanish and my tests were based around speech. The oral test i aced and the written tests i frequently bombed. Perhaps all of us that are not good test takers have a closer connection to the oral culture than we think, and we need to get back to our roots, and demand more oral tests rather than these tedious written tests that could be interpreted in more ways than one.