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A Conversation with Christopher Kientz
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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Christopher Kientz traces his Native ancestry back to the Eastern Cherokee nation of Tennessee and the Dawes Rolls. For the past ten years, Kientz has worked as an independent producer and animator, developing multimedia projects for commercial clients in both Canada and the United States. He has scripted, produced, and directed award-winning video, animation , interactive media, and website projects for numerous clients. Growing up among the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people of New Mexico gave Kientz a great respect for North American Indigenous art and culture. Raven Tales represents the culmination of this interest. Raven Tales is both an animation and production company founded in 2004 by Kientz and Simon James, and the name of a cartoon series, the first six stories with Raven as the central character . In subsequent episodes that shifted from Raven, Kientz and Simon have consulted with First Nations elders to develop stories from respective Indigenous groups. Linda Morra interviewed Kientz via the Internet in November 2007. lm Might we begin with a brief history of the inception of Raven Tales? How did the idea come about? ck I grew up surrounded by fairy tales, either in book form or as told to me by my mother and father. For the most part, these stories were in the usual pan-European tradition. However, since my mother is half-Cherokee , I was also introduced to a number of traditional Native American stories and characters. All of these stories had a profound and lasting effect on me, but the most memorable were always the stories of the Cherokee people, which my mother had told me and which she had learned from 125 linda morra A Conversation with Christopher Kientz her father. Quite a few of these stories featured tricksters of one kind or another, like Rabbit and Water Beetle. Even as a child, I always found their adventures more interesting than those of, say, Aesop or the Grimm brothers. There was something liberating in the idea of a central protagonist who wasn’t necessarily or always moral and certainly not an innocent à la Snow White, Cinderella, and Pinocchio, but a character driven by selfinterest , especially because his or her self-interest almost always served a greater good. For example, Rabbit inadvertently ends up giving fire to the First People out of a wish to smoke them out of his home. He succeeds in smoking them out, but they end up with fire, which makes their lives better and advances their culture. In the same way, Water Beetle begins the creation of the whole world by tricking other animals to bring earth up from below the ocean that, at the time, covers all things. He tricks them because he wants a place where he can rest for a bit. From selfinterest and trickery comes the beginning of all things. These trickster stories were in stark contrast to the very direct moralizing of so many of the other fairy tales with which I grew up, and seemed richer somehow in their moral complexity. As a child, I couldn’t know this complexity was part of the attraction, but I know I was always drawn to trickster stories . I also grew up in New Mexico, so traditional Native American stories and sacred objects like Katsina and Navajo weavings and sand paintings were simply a part of day-to-day life. A number of my friends were also Native American, primarily Apache, so growing up in New Mexico I learned more about Kokopelli and Coyote, who were central creation figures in the southwest, and also about our tricksters. Coyote especially fascinated me because he was both a physical reality—actual coyotes skulked around our orchard—as well as a spiritual being responsible for the birth of the First People, the scattering of the stars, and so much more. The day-to-day experience of dealing with coyotes informed part of this fascination. My Apache friend Richard made sure that I knew to avoid the stare of a coyote, to turn around and take another road if one crossed my path, and to gather up its scat and bury it around the house so spirits wouldn’t come in and so forth. When I moved to Vancouver, I was introduced to the central character of the Northwest folklore, Raven, and I knew immediately that I wanted to tell not just his stories, but all of the stories I remembered from my childhood—stories of Coyote and Rabbit and the Rough Faced Girl...