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Tohono O’odham Chapter 21 Contemporary Storytelling in Tohono O’odham Narrated by Stella Tucker Translated by Phillip Miguel and Colleen M. Fitzgerald Introduction by Colleen M. Fitzgerald and Phillip L. Miguel The Tohono Oodham language is experiencing the rapid decline in numbers of speakers as seen in other indigenous cultures, especially those of the American Southwest. In fact, the American Southwest was identified in recent publications (i.e., Harrison 2007; National Geographic 2007) as a language hotspot, described as an area with high numbers of languages in danger of extinction. As Harrison (2007) and others have noted, language loss correlates with cultural and knowledge loss, and in particular, a loss of the rich verbal arts tradition associated with indigenous cultures. As languages fall out of use into forgetfulness, entire genres of oral tradition – stories, songs, and epics – rapidly approach extinction. Only a small fraction have ever been recorded or set down in books. And the tales captured in books, when no longer spoken, will exist as mere shadows of a once vibrant tradition. We stand to lose volumes: entire worldviews, religious beliefs, creation myths, observations about life, technologies for how to domesticate animals and cultivate plants, histories of migration and settlement, and collective wisdom. And we will lose insight into how humans fine-tune memory to preserve and transmit epic tales. (Harrison 2007: 159) Speakers of the O’odham language are fortunate in that there are a number of recordings of these legends that preserve the original language as told by elders. The storytellers who have 416 this specialized knowledge are dwindling, with it becoming more likely that people kno