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Intercultural Storytelling

On November 7th, 2009 Community Outreach sponsored an Intercultural Storytelling event at the Friendly House in NW Portland. Fifty people gathered to hear local folks share stories related to their culture, history, customs, and traditions. Below is a photo slideshow from the Intercultural Storytelling.

Janet Liu: Growing up in Taiwan, Janet remembers “the tropical fruits, pineapples and papayas, mangoes, and sugar cane.” Janet and her family moved to Madison, Wisconsin when she was 10 years old. “We were here just two years, when my father suddenly died…without my father, we had no legal right to be in the U.S. My mother received letter notifying her of our deportation date. She appealed for help.” Eventually they moved to California. “What happened next was a miracle,” shared Janet. “The bill to allow Mrs. Laura Wong and her two children to remain in the U.S. and become legal residents was passed in both the house and the senate! Our family had survived and we had become legal in the U.S.” Janet is proud of the ancient and rich traditions of her heritage and strive to share them with her daughter. I am bicultural. I have the Chinese values for academic excellence and respect to the elders and I am so glad to be an American, to have so much freedom to be myself and to have so much material comfort,” said Janet.

Erik Brakstad: Erik shared the story of his family’s resistance during Nazi occupied Norway during WWII. While Erik was in school he learned about non-violent resistance. “They mentioned the Norwegian teachers.” Erik knew his grandfather was a part of that and wanted to learn more. “From the beginning the Norwegian schools were at the center of the German’s plan to rebuild Norwegian society…they wanted teachers from kindergarten to university to instruct students in Nazi ideology to become firm believers in the New Political Order,” Erik shared. Teachers in Norway resisted this order by sending a letter to express their resistance. “My grandfather wrote one too as did over 90% of the teachers spread all across the country.” The Nazi Party arrested the teachers and Erik’s grandfather was sent to the largest concentration camp in Norway. In a journal that his grandfather kept during his time in the camp, he wrote, “We have to remember the great task we are accomplishing by being here, and doing something for the cause that we think is right and is the reason why we are here. So we just have to take what comes and hope that this isn’t going to last too long. Many prisoners have suffered more than we do and soldiers on the fronts in many ways are worse off than we. Our lives are not more valuable than theirs. There are so many that have made greater sacrifices in this horrible war.” Eventually, the Nazi party gave up and his grandfather was sent back and reunited with his family.

Kanaan Kanaan: Kanaan was born and raised in Amman, Jordan and has lived in Portland since 1994. He spoke about Palestinian traditions. He demonstrated the different types of men’s clothing and how head scarves can be worn depending on the climate and event. “This head scarf protects your head from the heat even though it is wrapped up, so the sweat doesn’t drip in your face.” Kanaan tried on the “dishdasha…my grandfather used to wear it and it looks like a woman’s dress and actually it is not. Men wore this. It is made from different fabrics—usually it is cotton or wool and it protects you from the heat.” Kanaan pointed out that “lots of these women’s dresses are embroidered with red...that is because of the richness of the land.”

Debbie Russell: Debbie Russell is Lady White Hawk of the Cowlitz/Cree Nation. Where do we go to learn the Story when the way we learn the Story is gone? “I wanted to start with that question because our Indian tribe, the Cowlitz tribe which is what I identify with most, is what we call a landless tribe,” shared Debbie. The Cowlitz Nation lost a lot of cultural traditions that are being reclaimed now. “Two years ago was our tribes first official year, tribally sanctioned year” participating in Intertribal Canoe Journey. “It was 400 nautical miles traveled in canoe to honor the way our ancestors did travel. That is how they got around, traded and so forth and for us it’s just a really great opportunity to get out there and be Indians again.” Debbie brought a necklace that her canoe family made for her. While they were out practicing for their Canoe Journey they stopped on a little beach full of agates. “It happened to turn out… my grandmother grew up right there, right above this little beach that we stopped on. I don’t think a canoe had been on that beach in maybe a hundred years and it was really exciting. They had this made for me because it’s my grandma’s little beach. They gave it to me the first sweat I poured.”

Ahmed Iya: Ahmed shared, “Many people don’t even know the name Oromo. Oromos occupy the southern part of Ethiopia, about 40-50 million in Ethiopia and about a million in the northern part of Kenya and about 20-30 thousand or so in Somalia.” For outsiders the distinctions can be confusing because, “these people even though they are Oromo as a group occupy different regions. People who come in think that this is different people group because they have different names. The root, the stem, the father of all these people is Oromo.” Ahmed shared some of the values that govern the Oromos, “a very well organized people, and today they are very good fighters. The one thing, the weakness about them is that they can be too hospitable.” The Oromos have rules for everything. “They don’t have a written language but they have laws for literally everything; up to the ants that go, you have to have a reason to kill it or no reason to kill it. You cannot kill just for nothing. You cannot just go and cut a tree simply because it is there. When you are cutting a tree you have to cut and leave at least two branches, you cannot cut the whole tree down like that. So there is a rule for everything.” Ahmed brought a few objects to share including traditional clothing and milk jugs. “The group makes their own cotton and then they decorate it. Somebody just sits in a meeting and makes all this nicely with his own hands. This is [to wear] in the cold or night or heat or anything. It is always a friend, they sleep with it, they walk with it, and it is everything for them. It is a piece of cloth, beautiful and nice.” The women are valued and “we make a special leather [covering] for them” that is hand made. There are specific containers for the fermented milk that are given as a marriage blessing. “They give it to you saying…may this be a sign that you will have children for you to feed.”

Lucinda Tate: Lucinda Tate is a community activist in N/NE Portland for 35 years and the mother of one. Lucinda shared her experiences of growing up in Montana, as a person of African, Native and European descent. While growing up, Lucinda’s family always had extra people staying at their farm. “When we would sit down to eat we would always have at least three to four to five people that I never saw before sitting at our table eating. I found out as I grew older that the reason for that was that Montana had sunset laws.” Sunset laws stated that people of color couldn’t be in the downtown area after dark or stay at any of the hotels or motels in the area. “My grandparents, who were the first interracial couple that were authorized to live together in Montana, opened up their home to anyone who came to Montana to work and couldn’t live either on the ranch or the farm where they worked or needed a place to stay. So I learned hospitality at a very young age and I also learned about the inequities of our lives as people of color living in, supposedly, a land of freedom.”

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