Connected at the hub — University of Idaho professor Rodney Frey’s new book a reflection on lessons from indigenous elders

Forty years of experience working with Native Americans go into Professor Rodney Frey’s new book “Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey Into Native Oral Tradition.”

Bookpeople of Moscow will host a reading of Frey’s book along with a question and answer session at 7 p.m. Thursday at the downtown location.

Frey, a professor of ethnography at the University of Idaho, describes the book as an “ethnographic memoir.”

“It’s a lot about my own story, but it’s also about stories of others that have become part of my story,” Frey said.

Frey’s story includes two bouts with cancer, a childhood in the diverse city of Denver and a long journey with the Sun Dance — an indigenous religious ceremony he began taking part in at the age of 25.

Frey said he wrote his four other books with the collaboration of Native Americans and the focus of those books was to describe their cultures. Frey said this is the first time he is “standing back” and reflecting on the teachings elders have shared with him. Major themes include empathy, the power of storytelling, the protocol for working with other cultures and resolving seemingly “mutually exclusive” topics like science and religion, Frey said.

“There’s lessons that elders that offer that will affect all of us,” he said. “This isn’t just a book about me. It’s not just a book about (the) indigenous. This is a book about lessons from the indigenous for all of us.”

One lesson Frey said particularly impacted him came from Tom Yellowtail, an elder in Colorado. Yellowtail, Frey said, saw the world as a medicine or wagon wheel with different spokes, each of which represented a different culture, group or religion.

“They’re all distinct,” Frey said about the spokes. “They all have their own histories, their own languages, but they’re all equal. That wheel would not turn very well if some spokes were longer than the others or some spokes were eliminated.”

This mindset leaks its way into the way Frey teaches his classes at the university. Since he teaches about indigenous people, Frey said he thinks it is appropriate to also teach in a way similar to that indigenous people have taught for centuries.

“There’s a relationship between what we teach — the content — and how we teach it — the pedagogy, the methodology,” Frey said. “And if we use Western, Euro-American techniques of teaching about the indigenous, we undermine the stories we want to tell. We undermine the indigenous.”

He said “Carry Forth the Stories,” actually began as a course packet for his classes about 10 years ago, and evolved into the full book it is now over the past couple years. After December, Frey will retire from the university, he said. And though he taught and learned many things during his time as a professor, it is still Yellowtail’s lesson that sticks out.

“Most important, I think in our human lives, is empathy and compassion for each other,” Frey said.

Nina Rydalch can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NinaRobin7

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