American Studies

Whispers of the Ancients: Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in Our Time by Tamarack Song and Moses (Amik) Beaver

Whispers of the Ancients: Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in Our Time

Tamarack Song and Moses (Amik) Beaver

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Stunning Aboriginal artwork combines with the provocative storytelling of Tamarack Song to renew, in all their traditional splendor, these exceptional legends from around the world.

Entertaining yet profound, laced with tenderness and grief, passion and irony—it's all here. You will find yourself back in the time when your wizened elders told stories around a glowing hearth. Magically, the monsters, heroes, and shapeshifters would come alive and open doorways to the mysteries of life.

Like a nest, each legend is mindfully woven to hold a precious life within. You will find an able guide for your journey, who is also a teacher and a healer. With themes common to every era of the human experience, these legends continue to be as relevant today as when our native ancestors first crafted them.

Told in a manner that makes them easily accessible to all ages, these stories speak to each person at their own level of comprehension and need.

Whispers retells traditional Indian stories and legends—what the author calls healing stories, soul journeys, and heroes' quests—in beautifully written prose and amazing paintings by an Ojibwe artist, which together bring storytelling's visionary tradition alive. The narratives are preceded by a series of essays that illuminate the spiritual and archetypal aspects of the stories.

As a young hitchhiker on a quest for wisdom, Tamarack Song chanced upon Native elders across the country whose stories inspired him to become a lifelong student of Native lifeway. He has sought out the stories of the North African and Central Asian tribal peoples from whom he is descended, and he has listened to the tales of indigenous people from the tundra to the tropics, from the outback to his own backyard. Through storytelling and writing, Tamarack shares his life experience and family heritage. His books include the groundbreaking Journey to the Ancestral Self, and along with Patch Adams, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, he has contributed to Lois Einhorn's Forgiveness and Child Abuse. He is also a counselor, wilderness skills teacher, and rites of passage guide, and has founded the Teaching Drum Outdoor School (www.teachingdrum.org).

Tamarack lives in the Nicolet National Forest near Three Lakes, Wisconsin with his mate, Minawaanigozikwe (Woman-of-Joy, aka Lety) and their son Wabibineshi (Morning-Bird, aka Rabin).

Moses (Amik) Beaver is an Ojibwe artist from the isolated fly-in community of Nibinamik (Summer Beaver), Ontario, three hundred miles north of Lake Superior. The power and spirit of his celebrated artwork comes from growing up in the old clan way: speaking the native language, trapping, and helping his people. His paintings are unique expressions of traditional bold Woodlands style, embedded with symbolic figures and set in the natural splendor of his homeland. Because stories hold the history, values, and spirituality of a people, his work contributes to the resilience of indigenous culture and provides a medium for all people to understand Native world view.

Spring 2010
272 pages