Announcing Folklore in a Box!
The Fall 2014 Folklore in a Box is ready! Inside, you will find: a storybook for kids that tells a favorite Tlingit trickster tale about how light came to the world, a mask-making kit that can begin an exploration of trickster tales from different cultures, a how-to...
Chinese Moon Festival — This Weekend
This weekend, September 6-8, is the Chinese Moon Festival. This is a fun celebration to share with your kids. They get to learn about another culture and have fun in the process. Our formal American holidays don't include celebrations of the harvest. It might be...
Canning Party: Fun! + Hard Work: Everyday Traditions and (Social) Change
Harvest time is coming. The tomatoes, beans, zucchini and cukes are ready, and I have to pick them and do something with them – can them, freeze them, cook with them. I’ve been researching harvest traditions for the first Folklore in a Box, on sale in a...
The Kam Wah Chung Chinese Heritage Museum in John Day, OR
My family recently went on a fun camping trip to the Painted Hills and John Day River. We stopped in one of the coolest little museums I’ve seen in a long time, the Kam Wah Chung Museum in John Day. There is a really informative interpretive center, but the amazing...
A Story for a Trip Up the Gorge
With summer road trips coming up, I keep thinking of local native American creation stories that I heard as a kid and have retold to my kids. Now, I am not Native American – I’m an Italian, Swedish, English, German mutt, but these are stories I must have heard in...
Summer Solstice — Kids’ Craft
Here's a little summer solstice craft for kids to kick off summer vacation. You could put one on your front door or make a few and hang them from the ceiling in a play room or bedroom, or make a garland out of them. You only need: scissors, glue, tape, different...
Summer Solstice
On a much lighter note than my last post, it's summer solstice this weekend! Solstice is the time to have a party, a bonfire, a feast and dancing. The key themes we often find in solstice celebrations make easy sense – fire, dancing, fertility, feast, festival –...
School Shootings: the Story of the White Deer
I have a student in one of my classes who has been working with gender issues and ideologies for a few terms, through three different classes that she has taken with me. Her name is Rachel Fan, and she is in an Intro to Folklore class now and is rewriting a folktale...
Rainy Day Girls
The rain came back again at the end of May, and all the Oregon girls in my daughter’s kindergarten class got colds. I found the song "Rainy Day Girls" sung by early Oregon pioneers in an article by the famous folklorist, Barre Toelken. It is sung to the tune of...
If You Blow Your Top, You Get Shorter – Oregon’s Three Sisters
When I was a kid, I remember hearing a Native American story about Oregon's Three Sisters, and The Husband– in central Oregon. It stuck with me, and I told it to my kids on a trip to Bend from Portland. We had been talking a lot about myths and how they are both true...