A Different Kind of Horror: Native American Storyteller comes to CMU for night of horror stories

She has opened for the likes of Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, and brought her scariest stories to Central Michigan University as part of Shapeshifters and Stone Monsters: Spooky Stories from Native America.

A member of the Cherokee Nation, Ross is proud to continue the storytelling traditions of her people, and will share horror stories with a CMU audience.

"Stories are living beings, and I believe they live on the breath of the teller," Ross said.

Central Michigan Life sat down with Ross to talk about her unique brand of storytelling.

Q: This is definitely not your first time telling stories. You've spoken all over the country and opened for speakers such as Maya Angelou. How do you select stories to tell?

Ross: I began telling stories when I was very young. I love stories. My grandmother was a storyteller and I think I inherited my love of stories and histories from her. And for, gosh almost 40 years I've been telling stories for a living. I go to schools, libraries, festivals, conferences, theaters, museums and I'm really thrilled to be here at Central Michigan for residency as scholar I'll be doing classroom visits, the evening performance Thursday night, I'm doing a thing over at the Cultural Center for the Saginaw-Chippewas Conference of Tribal Archivists and Librarians.

Traditional stories are a huge part of native culture and they're something that once you become involved as a storyteller, you realize what responsibilities your have both to your own history and your own traditions and a contemporary community today. For 30 years, I've been part of that community and I've been very, very blessed to be able to have the opportunity to do what I do. I just love stories.

Q: Why do these horror stories, resonate with you? Why do you enjoy telling them?

Ross: (laughs) Well, they're fun! The thing about being a storyteller, you really need to love stories. The thing for me about telling them is I get to hear them for myself again, and I love to tell them. There's a great deal of joy in that interaction with an audience and seeing them experience the story for the first time, seeing their response is very gratifying. In native tradition, stories are native beings, and I believe they live on the breath of the teller. You send the story out and the people who are listening, they are creating their own story in their imagination as they hear the story you're telling. And so with their focused attention, that's an energy that comes back to you. You put that energy into a story and it comes back to you in the care and the attention and the listening the audience is doing. You create this really wonderful dynamic in terms of an exchange between the performer and the audience and the story. It's really quite magic. Not like a magic trick that is done the same way every time because every audience is different, where you are as the storyteller on a day to day basis might be a little different. It's created anew every time you have the opportunity to participate in that process of telling and being connected with your listeners in what I believe is a very special way.

Q: What makes the genre of horror stories that you're going to be telling, and you have told, unique from other stories the audience may have heard?

Ross: They're scary. They're scary and we all love to be scared. Our imagination is a safe place, and I'm absolutely certain that not a single listener will walk away from the Kiva and make their way through the parking lot and encounter any of these situations in real time, you know? But in our imagination is the place we can explore our fears, we can explore the things we're not really sure of. So those stories are very special to me. I'm someone who has a reputation who likes to tell the spooky stories. But they're just a part of my overall repertoire of stories I tell. We came up with the idea of doing-since I was going to arrive on campus the week before Halloween- when we were putting together the list of things I would be doing as part of the Denizen visiting scholar program. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to tell scary stories for Halloween.

Q: What were some differences between the programs you spoke at at CMU?

Ross: The really good stuff, the really scary stories. One time, when I was doing two programs for a museum back when I lived in Texas, I live in Oklahoma now in the Cherokee Nation. The museum has set up two different programs, one for K through third grade and one for fifth, sixth, older kids. Two kindergarten kids hid in the back of the room because they wanted to hear the really scary stories and about halfway through one of the Cherokee stories I was telling about a witch, a stone monster named Spearfinger who has this foot-and-a-half-long sharp point on her finger and she hides it under a shawl. She shape shifts, she looks like an old lady until she pulls out that finger and she will jab you in the side and jerk out your liver and eat it. And I got right to that point in the story and the top of a storage box in the back of the room flew open! Two little boys jumped out and said,"we've gotta get out of here!" and ran. So I've been very careful every since that experience to make sure the material for younger kids-because they just can't handle the intensity of some of the scary and horrifying stories. So when one of the professors I know here wanted to bring her small children I said 'well do, and I'll make sure the first half of the show is gentle and not too scary.' I'll save the really scary stories for the second half. We'll do about forty minutes, take an intermission and then do the second half.

Q: Of these many stories, which one resonates the most with you? Is there any one story that made you really fall in love with storytelling?

Ross: The first stories that I heard when I was a child, besides family stories and stories  of Cherokee history, and in my particular case because of who my family is, they were many times the same. What I learned about Cherokee history came to me through stories. The history stories and stories of our Trickster Rabbit. There were a lot of stories about rabbit, those are especially for young people. They teach, they're teaching stories. I really loved them but on some levels as an adult as someone who has been telling stories for almost 40 years professionally, the creation myths are stories that have a sacred power that is al their own. And I don't know any native storyteller who doesn't find that deeply engaging on a personal level. We feel the power and the responsibility for taking care of these stories as they should be. So, that's kind of like asking a mother 'who's your favorite child?' They all have something special to offer the world, something about them that makes them worth the care and the time you spend to tell them in a good way.

Q: Sometimes how a story is told can change the way it's perceived. What are some of the nuances of storytelling that you've learned?

Ross: One of the things I think is the most important, the story, the most important thing I learned is that stories are living beings. You are a vehicle for the story not the other way around. You don't make the story serve your particular ideas of what a performer is. Your job is to let the story take from you what it needs to live effectively, to be heard in a way that the lesson of that story, the meaning of that story, reaches and touches your listeners. And the story knows more about that really than you do. 

As you grow in develop as a teller, you have certain skills with your voice, certain skills with timing, certain skills with your selection of words, the words that you choose to use in the story. And all of those are good skills but if you let the story grow and develop naturally as you tell it many, many times the story will kind of guide you in what you need to do to make it effective. You lend your skills to the story. It will guide you, it will sort of grow. 

I think the best stories I tell are the stories that I have known for many, many years and have become comfortable in a relationship to that story. I know that I have given it the best of my abilities, I have let it develop and draw from me the best way to tell it.