Dovie Thomason
Dovie Thomason was shocked. She heard an Estonian storyteller share an origin story of emerging from an egg that mirrored her own, Native American origin story. Suddenly, the world felt “tiny and cozy and friendly.”
“Our common legacies are common,” Thomason said. “Our nature is needing each other. Our nature is interacting. Our nature is to connect, and that’s why we speak. That’s why we write. That’s why we try to create and make art. Storytelling reminds me of that every day.”
Thomason has her own story of origin and growth into a nationally and internationally renowned storyteller. Born in Chicago and relocated to rural Texas. Growing up as “a river fed by many streams,” with her Lakota, Apache and Scottish Traveller ancestry. Award-winning presenter at the Kennedy Center, National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian and countless school auditoriums. Keeping storytelling relevant in the digital age. Known for raising more questions than answers.
And a resident of Lower Paxton Township, where her garden always grows a little extra for the deer, just like her father taught her.
Local Matters
Thomason was born in Chicago but moved to Texas as a child. She is 75 now, so that’s Texas in the 1950s. Her kind was extinct, she was told. Her name wasn’t Christian, so her teacher called her David—until her strapping father, a “blue-eyed thunderstorm of Scottish, Gypsy and Apache,” had a talk with the principal.
“I didn’t like school,” she says in her story, “My Name is Dovie.” “I liked to stay with my grandma.”
Thomason’s grandma Dovie would tell stories over the daily chores of cooking, cleaning, gardening or shelling beans.
“You’re visiting and cooking, and you start telling a story that might have to do with one of the ingredients in the pot and why we have it, or why we cook it this way, or who this was a gift from,” Thomason said. “What the trees thought when they gave us syrup, or how they gave up their leaves to make a home for the creatures, their sacrifice to take care of others. It was always a part of the busyness. It was the soundtrack to the busyness.”
She started as a teacher of refugee and immigrant students in Cleveland during the “rugged, rugged” early 1980s.
“The students came with oral traditions,” Thomason said. “They’d seen lives of disruption that I could imagine and empathize with as a Native person. They deserved so much respect.”
As she told them her stories, she realized that her tales resonated outside the Native American community. Her storytelling spread to other classrooms, assemblies, festivals and colleges. In the 1990s, her passion became her livelihood.
The road to Harrisburg started with meeting Jimmy Little Turtle at a storytelling festival. Little Turtle, the late activist and political insider, built networks centered around the past and present of America’s tribal nations. Her previous research into the Carlisle Indian School had been tinged with academics, but from Little Turtle, she absorbed the oral traditions.
“I like history told by people, not just historians,” she said. “Jimmy knew everything.”
When Little Turtle moved to Florida, he transferred his home in Lower Paxton Township to Thomason. She lives there today, planting urban wildflowers and vegetables.
As her garden grows roots, so does she. In programs for Dauphin County Library System’s celebration of this year’s Native American Heritage month, her stories—told in an amazing vocal range spanning from a grouchy bear’s low growls to a chipmunk’s giggles—explained to children why the chipmunk has stripes. It warms her heart when a child recognizes her in the grocery store as “the story lady.”
“It’s great to be internationally known, but there’s something at this point in my life, this awareness that being local matters,” she says. “Being local is where you’re effective.”
We’re Here
Storytelling puts our lives and histories in context, explains Anthony Buccitelli, Penn State Harrisburg assistant professor of American Studies and director of the Pennsylvania Center for Folklore. It is not a relic of “bygone days,” but a way to educate, share advice and convey a sense of personal or social identity.
“Oral narrative is a fundamental component of human communication,” he said. “It’s something that we do all the time, most of the time not even knowing that we’re doing it. The vast majority of storytelling is done in our day-to-day lives.”
Thomason weaves traditional stories with personal asides, said her friend and Philadelphia-based storyteller Charlotte Blake Alston. For instance, when young Dovie interrupted her grandmother with a question, Grandma would teach patience by starting the story from the beginning.
“It gives the listener a sense of who she—and by ‘she,’ I mean her collective people—is and what matters,” said Alston. “In doing that, she humanizes people. In this culture, we don’t only marginalize people. We almost pretend that they don’t exist and pretend that we don’t have any kind of history that has impacted Indigenous people, but she reminds us, ‘We’re here.’ You get a sense of what American sensibilities and policies have done to Indigenous communities, but she does it without beating people over the head with a sledgehammer.”
My Purpose
Thomason calls herself “a person who stories.”
“It’s like a person who cooks, a person who gardens, a person who shelves,” she said. “I’m a person who stories.”
Pennsylvania is now trying to recover the past through stories with the Indigenous Peoples Cultural and Heritage Initiative, announced in October. The two-year initiative will distribute grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Pennsylvania Tourism Office for experiences giving life to the stories, history and culture of Pennsylvania’s Indigenous heritage.
Currently, Pennsylvania’s Indigenous nations and their rich histories “receive almost no recognition,” Carrie Fischer Lepore, deputy secretary of tourism in the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, told TheBurg.
The project can’t undo the atrocities and exile imposed on the nations “that once called Pennsylvania home,” Lepore said, but it will leverage tourism “to make sure that voices and cultures are heard.”
Through the initiative, the Lehigh University Institute for Indigenous Studies is convening descendants of the tribal nations forced out of colonial Pennsylvania to develop a comprehensive plan for allocating the funds. It is, said Lepore, important that those descendants “decide how to tell their stories.”
“They are not our stories,” she said. “They don’t belong to us. It is their history, it is their culture, and we want to make sure that they are the ones to guide us in how they should be presented.”
And, she added, “History is not always kind, but history is critical to awareness.”
Thomason addresses history’s complexity by adding more complexity. Her story, “The Spirit Survives,” tells of the Carlisle Indian School and the U.S. government campaign to forcefully assimilate Native American children. The story doesn’t end with answers but with a reminder that listeners can no longer say, “I didn’t know.”
Her research into the school became a program after she and her daughter were walking the graveyard of Carlisle Indian School (“Why would a school have a graveyard?” she asks.) Her daughter, then about 10, assumed she would learn the history in high school, but Thomason knew better.
“A storyteller has to make us comfortable with things being complex or ambiguous or unresolved or divergent,” Thomas said. “A storyteller insults her listeners and her community if she tries to make things simple.”
Thomason’s riveting, unapologetic storytelling offers a powerful counterpunch to the school boards and politicians “making it a felony to teach my history and to teach Dovie’s history,” said Alston, whose work includes storytelling in the African tradition.
“Dovie talks about buffalo waste, which is smelly and stinky and horrible when it comes out, but eventually, it dries, and you can pick it up and put it in your basket and use it to light your fires and cook your food,” Alston said. “You can touch and revisit the wounds of the past without creating new ones.”
Thomason hopes storytelling remains a service and doesn’t become “the latest streaming fad.”
She thinks about the Indian School survivors she has known, the ones who “need the speaking of it.” Storytelling is “a responsibility and a commitment to acknowledge how you got here and acknowledge the ones who came before you, because you wouldn’t be you without them.”
“I have great teachers who trusted me with some of the things they knew and learned, and now I’ve got to do something with it,” she said. “That’s my job.”
She interrupted herself.
“No, it’s not my job,” she said. “It’s my purpose.”
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