Native American Animal Stories

The Papago Indians of the American Southwest say butterflies were created to gladden the hearts of children and chase away thoughts of aging and death. How the Butterflies Came to Be is one of twenty-four Native American tales included in Native American Animal Stories. The stories, coming from Mohawk, Hopi, Yaqui, Haida, and other cultures, demonstrate the power of animals in Native American traditions. Parents, teachers, and children will delight in lovingly told stories about "our relations, the animals." The stories come to life through magical illustrations by Mohawk artists John Kahionhes Fadden and David Fadden."The stories in this book present some of the basic perspectives that Native North American parents, aunts, and uncles use to teach the young. They are phrased in terms that modern youngsters can understand and appreciate... They enable us to understand that while birds and animals appear to be similar in thought processes to humans, that is simply the way we represent them in our stories. But other creatures do have thought processes, emotions, and personal relationships...We must carefully accord these other creatures the respect that they deserve and the right to live

A citizen of the Nulhegan Abenaki Nation, Joseph Bruchac has authored over 170 books in numerous genres and his poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in hundreds of publications from American Poetry Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Parabola, and National Geographic to Junior Scholastic and Highlights for Children. His ground-breaking book Keepers of the Earth (co-authored with Michael Caduto), which uses traditional Native American stories to teach about science, has sold over a million copies and been adopted in schools throughout the United States and Canada.

A graduate of Cornell University, he received his Master's Degree in Literature from Syracuse University and his Ph.D. from the Union Institute (Ohio).

His numerous awards include a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, a CCLM Editors Fellowship, a NYS CAPS Writing Fellowship, the Hope S. Dean Memorial Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers.

A traditional Native musician and storyteller, he has performed throughout the United States and abroad, including as a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival, the Sierra Storytelling Festival, and the British Storytelling Festival.

His experiences include 3 years of teaching in Ghana and 8 years of running a college program inside a maximum security prison for Skidmore College. He has also been studying and teaching various martial arts for over four decades and holds black belts in Pentjak-silat and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. With his two sons James and Jesse, he runs the Ndakinna Education Center which offers programs in traditional Native survival skills, outdoor awareness, storytelling, and Abenaki language on their 90-acre nature preserve in the Adirondack mountain foothills near Saratoga Springs, NY.