The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 11/3/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Sam Noblett Sunny Dooley, a Native Dine' Navajo storyteller, speaks to students in the Computer Sciences Building on Monday evening. Sunny Dooley has translated the stories of The Saltwater People Clan from their native Navajo language to English so that they can be shared. [Click to enlarge]

One night, as a child on a Navajo reservation near Gallup, N.M., Sunny Dooley's grandmother woke her from sleep on a sheepskin blanket on the floor to greet the flocks of geese flying south overhead.

The family sent prayers and messages to the birds, which would be passed on to dead relatives when the flock passed by the Milky Way along their migration.

Years later, she would send the same prayers to her father.

"It smells good, doesn't it?" her father asked, gesturing to an invisible plate of food before him. Unable to eat properly for years, he had requested that Dooley drive him to his doctor's office, fearing that he was near death.

A traditional Native American storyteller, Dooley told her stories to about 20 students and community members in a classroom in the university's new Computer Science Building Monday night.

Blending traditional Navajo stories with personal anecdotes, Dooley spent two hours painting a world inhabited by talking animals, grandparents, uncles and monster slayers.

Their adventures, which ranged from the epic, to the comical, to the mundane, were set in locales that were interchangeably dreamlike and banal ­-- from high desert mesas to the drab hospital waiting room where Dooley's father spoke his last words.

"The food. They're bringing me food."

Wearing a purple sash and elaborate jade jewelry, Dooley spoke with varied inflections and genuine mirth, making elaborate gestures and occasionally bursting into laughter.

From a young age, Dooley would spend nights in her community's Hogan, a traditional Navajo home, while storytellers recounted her people's legends.

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