In the past
couple of years a number of video plays or playets have been published on You Tube, most of them featuring child
actors and narrators. This re-enforces
the popular belief that The Blind Man and the Loon is basically a children’s story,
a position I try to argue against in my book, at least in Native oral
tradition.
One of
these dramatizations was produced and uploaded on October 18, 2012, by The
Anchorage School District in Anchorage, Alaska, with students from Williwaw
Elementary School. Not all of the
students appear to be Native, but many of them are undoubtedly from ethnic
minorities. The Loon Story is a video play introduced and produced by Teresa
Lois Lowrey (Sagacey), a Tanaina woman identified as a Cultural Artist who
designed the masks used in the play.
The script for
the play is based on the variant of the tale recorded in Bill Vaudrin’s book, Tanaina Tales of Alaska (1981). I taught with Vaudrin at the old Anchorage
Community College back in the early 1970s.
Vaudrin spent a lot of time living and recording English variants of
traditional Tanaina Indian tales in the remote villages of Pedro Bay and
Nondalton. The production capitalizes on
the fact that Anchorage is also part of the Tanaina homeland. Unlike several of the others discussed below,
this production retains the wicked wife’s two betrayals (leaving him to starve
and offering him water bugs). However,
at the end she is merely banished not killed. There is no revenge by the blind
man.
The
extensive credits for this video include Candace Rysdyk, drama teacher, with
music from David Maracle’s album Spirit
Flutes. (Never mind that the Tanaina have no flute music tradition). Costumes for the children were provided by
the Anchorage School District Indian Education Program Title VII, and the
videography credits go to ASD-TV’s Stephen Kennedy with three technical
assistants. Based on the number of
people involved, many of them professionals, this video appears to have been a
complex and expensive production.
The actors
are all elementary school students and seem to be second and third
graders. The co-narrators of the play
are Dianna and Renei. The film is
approximately fourteen minutes long, consisting of a 2 minute lead-in by
Lowrey, 9 minutes of drama, and 3 minutes of curtain calls and credits. To date it has received 695 views.
A second You Tube video is narrated by an
anonymous girl known only as LM9985.
This video is much less sophisticated and lasts only 2 minutes. It consists of a slide show using photos
borrowed from other web sites (appropriately credited), accompanied by a music
track. It is called Blind Boy (Why Narwhals Have Tusks). The video was posted in January 2011 and has
been viewed 813 times as of this posting.
No source is given, but it is clearly derived from variants found in
Group B (Eastern Canada) of my book. The
video’s young producer gives her source as the Handbook of Native American Mythology (2004) by Dawn E. Bastian and
Judy K. Mitchell.
A third You Tube video was uploaded by a young
boy about eleven or twelve years old named Dino Rinco. He is apparently a Canadian with Australian
connections. His self-produced video, The Blind Boy and the Loon, is 7 minutes
and 14 seconds long and consists of Dino reading a narrative script to the
camera from his bedroom, with bunk beds in the background. The script, which is invisible to the
viewer, appears to be posted on a bulletin board or easel in front of Dino. The
video was posted on September 25, 2012.
How the Loon got It's Necklace Readers Theatre represents the most recent video incarnation of the story. It is just 3 minutes and 50 seconds long and
consists of a reading by five fourth and fifth grade students lined up in front
of a blackboard in school. Each student reader
has a typescript with selected parts to read.
The videographer is apparently a Canadian school teacher known as Mr.
Noad. This script is heavily redacted,
having no female betrayal and no element of revenge. The only actors in the story are the blind
man, his son, and the loon. It was uploaded on October 29, 2013. Of the four videos, this is the least
sophisticated, and it has received just 47 views.
Based on
these works, the popularity of The Blind Man and the Loon among children and
school teachers seems undiminished. Of
course, if you take out all the betrayals and violence in the oral tradition,
then it becomes quite a different story.
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