fairy-tales

my dear daughter,  your sister says there was blood on your reindeer skin this morning. when you were instructed, the elders told you that this is the blood of your other umbilical cord, with which you were previously attached when you were a child. It's torn. Now it's time to break away from your family. Now you have been born a second time, but your mother is different: not the one who nurtured you and loved you like all her other children, but one who is out in nature far from our village on...

The Haida people of British Columbia have a beautiful story about the origins of land and water. When the Great Spirit created all things, he became very tired and lay down to sleep for a long, long time. But many of the things, though created, were still mixed together and strangely bound together. A lot of things were not yet clear in terms of form and function and there was still no designated place for all the many animals on our mother earth, because everything was still a great primordial...

The Dogon live in the southern part of Mali on the bluffs of a rugged old dry riverbed that once fed water to the Niger, back when the Sahara was green and the oases were home to animals such as hippos and crocodiles. Today the area around Bandiagara is almost dry as a straw. The small rivulet, which carries a little water during the rare rains, allows the cultivation of millet, sorghum and, above all, tasty small onions, with which the Dogon trade a little even in good times. Some of their...

A griot ------ High up under the eaves of millet straw that covered the simple mud huts of Burkina Faso sat a spider in its intricately woven web. It was no ordinary spider, because whenever an insect got caught in its web, it spoke soothingly to the little animal, which wanted to free itself from the chains with all its strength and with panic fear of inevitable death. She calmly told him clever and instructive stories that she had heard from other crawling creatures and that she had woven...