"Stories to Tell" -- Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo

Cheyenne, Wyoming Tribune-Eagle ^ | 07-27-04 | Lowell, Jessica

[Theodore R.]

Stories to tell She just doesn't talk - she collects

By Jessica Lowell rep5@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle

CHEYENNE - Eldrena Douma welcomes you with a smile and an open face.

She wants to know you: what your name is, what it means, where you are from and what your stories are.

It's an occupational hazard. Douma is a storyteller. Everywhere she goes, she collects stories from others and works on her own to tell.

During Cheyenne Frontier Days, Douma - which means Singing as You Go - is telling her stories twice a day in the Indian Village.

If you ask her how many stories she knows, she just laughs. "Oh, I don't know. So many that I forget some. Well," she says after thinking a moment, "I don't forget them, I forget to tell them."

Some of them come from her Laguna Tewa Hopi culture, and some come from other friends of other tribes who send them to her because they might be the kind of stories she tells.

Douma views stories as a venue of getting from one thing to another.

When she was an early elementary school teacher, she used stories to help children who had trouble with math or English. When she stopped teaching, stories became the path she followed to a different calling.

"Museums would invite me to tell stories, and libraries wanted me to tell stories," she says. From there, other groups, including writers groups, wanted her to come. One of her stories has been published in a collection.

Stories, she tells you, are powerful in all kinds of ways. They always have a lesson. If you want to learn something from her stories, you will. Like the story of Crawfish and Fox. A race was to determine whether fox could drink from the water where Crawfish lived. Crawfish tried to outsmart fox by clamping on to his tail as he ran.

On the third race, Fox caught on, and he ate Crawfish. He never had to ask permission to drink the water again.

"You have to be careful how you play a game. If you follow the rules," she says, "all will be well. If you cheat, you don't know what's going to happen."

She also draws from her own life and from universal themes, like the story of how she overcame her fear of the dark.

Douma tells her stories dressed in traditional dress, sitting on the covered stage in the middle of the Indian Village. Her concession to the large area and the competing noise from the rodeo arena, the free entertainment and the passing airplanes and helicopters is the microphone she wears.

As she tells stories, she gives you the sense that they are living stories, not something that she delivers by rote, because that's not how she learned them.

"I learned them just by observation and by being around people who told stories, even just informally. I had curiosity about relatives who traveled or were in the military or boarding school or worked," she says, and the stories told her what it was like in the land beyond the reservation where she grew up.

"It naturally allowed me to ask questions," she says. "And with that, I bring part of who I am."

Everywhere she travels, she finds stories. Her two daughters and son are involved in sports, basketball and baseball respectively, so that gives them lots of stories to tell.

Her kids are good writers, she says. When she reads the stories they write for school projects, she's impressed by them, but she won't know if they're storytellers until they have kids of their own and start telling them stories.

When country singer Randy Travis performed Sunday night, she says, he told a story about a song that reminded him of his grandfather.

"Because he said that, it gave more meaning to the song, and that allows us to relate to the song," she says.

Douma carries with her a narrow white plastic file box, where she keeps her ideas for the stories she's working on.

One of the ideas came to her at Frontier Days several years ago. It was inspired by an Indian dance and child who was watching the dance.

She may not tell the story this week or this year, but maybe next year.

"It hasn't really come full circle yet, but it's there."

[SoDak]

I won't make it out to Frontier Days this year, but I will make it to Days Of '76 in Deadwood, hopefully tomorrow, for rodeo and a little gambling perhaps.