As a young girl, Amy Bruton Bluemel collected stories, like souvenirs, from every country she lived in. With a father who was formerly in the Navy but later served on bases around the world through the civil service, Bluemel grew up constantly adapting to new cultures. Despite the differences she found in the places that her family moved to—Germany, Türkiye, Scotland, and Japan—young Bluemel never failed to find traditional tales and the storytellers willing to share them. 

Bluemel’s love for stories stemmed from her parents, whom she saw as storytellers in their own way. Her mother, Elizabeth Ann Kaney Bruton of the Chickasaw Nation, was a natural. “You didn’t realize she was telling you stories. She would work things into conversation, and later you’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s a moral to that.’” Bluemel’s father’s skills were more obvious. He was non-Native and the family entertainer. “If we had to wait in the car for something, he would always try to entertain us. He would come up with these huge stories.”

Surrounded by stories at home, Bluemel was drawn to storytellers in every new environment she entered.

“I listened to the stories of the Hodja when we were in Turkey, and listened to Asian stories, and stories of dragons when we were in England. So, I grew up all over the world learning stories and living with storytellers.”

When Bluemel returned to Texas for high school, she was excited to discover just how widespread the stories she collected overseas were. She could talk to just about anyone about the mythologized stories of the dragons of England and Asia, and most people knew what she was referring to. Given the wide reach of these distant cultural narratives in the United States, Bluemel couldn’t help but wonder why stories from her own culture were not widely or even locally known by non-Natives. A member of the Chickasaw Nation, Bluemel grew up hearing bits and pieces of those narratives from her mother.

The Chickasaw Nation, whose ancestral lands are in present-day Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, are known for their rich oral tradition. Historically, storytellers like Bluemel have been tasked by other tribal members and elders with recording Chickasaw history and educating their youth about tribal values.

This summer, she shared her nation’s rich traditions during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Indigenous Voices of the Americas program, where her passion and talent for storytelling were palpable in the reactions of the audience, who at moments laughed, scowled, and even yelled out. Through investigations of Chickasaw words and phrases and lively storytelling, Bluemel illuminated the history of the Chickasaw Nation.

But first, she would ready herself. As the heat swirled around the museum’s exterior amphitheater, Bluemel would first check with the audio crew, then flick her long silver hair over her shoulder. Staring into the audience full of parents, children, and everyone in between, she would make a request.

“At a certain point in the story, I am going to say, ‘Put your rattles up.’” Once audience members raised their pointer fingers, she told them that when she said “go,” she needed them to shake their fingers and make a rapid “chick-chick-chick” sound, imitating a rattlesnake. Children in the audience giggled nervously—some too shy to make a sound, some overly eager to win Bluemel’s approval. As she conducted a practice run, she jokingly scolded those who began to rattle before she gave the signal.

“The kids I had earlier were better. C’mon!”

As Bluemel dove into the story of the baby rattlesnake, she unabashedly embodied each character: a bunny, a raccoon, a deer, and even a bear. Crouched down, knuckles bent like claws, Bluemel growled at the audience. As she personified these animals, she also taught the audience their names in the Chickasaw language, teasing the children for not already knowing.

“Now, you guys know Shawi’? You don’t know who Shawi’ is? What are y’all teaching these kids? You’ve got them all mixed up! Shawi’! He wears a black mask. He’s got rings that go up his tail—Raccoon!”

She kept the audience on edge, ensuring they paid attention and were ready to respond if she called on them. Through an engaging mix of cold-calls and energetic storytelling, she left audiences with both new Chickasaw words and a desire to hear more.

Bluemel discovered her love for performing in Dramatic Interpretation competitions in high school. With ten minutes to interpret a piece of literature, using only body language and her voice, she was challenged with effectively embodying the story and impacting the audience. It’s how she learned how to read a crowd, to use language to inspire, educate, and caution audiences.

While performing the stories of other cultures, Bluemel became more curious about her own. She began to connect with her roots and was surprised to find just how much Chickasaw and other Native languages are used by non-Native people in everyday life.

“There is not a lot that people understand about Southeastern Natives, even though people speak the Native languages of the Southeastern tribes all the time. The names of states and rivers all throughout the United States are Native words—Iowa, Alabama, Massachusetts, Oklahoma. When I tell people that they speak Native languages all the time, they’re shocked!”

These Native words tell stories of their own. Bluemel shared how the city of Tuscaloosa and the Tombigbee River were named. Tuscaloosa comes from the Choctaw words tʋshka, meaning warrior, and loosa, meaning black. This moniker alludes to Black Warrior, a Choctaw king who was murdered by Hernando de Soto in a village called Mobila—Mobile, Alabama’s namesake. Similarly, the Tombigbee River in Alabama gets its name from the Choctaw term itumbi ikbi, which translates to “coffin maker.” European colonizers named the river with the three English words that sounded closest to the original: tom-big-bee.

As Bluemel shared the origin stories of these placenames at the Festival, she hoped to encourage curiosity and remind non-Native visitors of the people and cultures that existed long before Europeans arrived. 

“We have language everywhere, and I think it is important because the more people who understand, the better. It makes them think about what land they’re on and wonder who the people were who lived there before.”

During our interview, Bluemel shared that one of the biggest challenges to preserving traditional Southeastern Native stories is their dynamic nature. Bluemel says stories are alive and constantly changing. Even within her family, Bluemel witnesses her stories change and shape to whoever is telling them.

“When I hear my daughters retell my stories, I notice that they’ll tweak it just a little bit and change it to reflect their own experiences. One of the things that I think people have to realize is that storytelling, like language, is alive . Your influence and what has happened to you is always going to affect how you tell the story.”

As Bluemel will tell you, storytellers wear many hats—historian, librarian, entertainer, educator—but they also play the role of protector. Both literally and metaphorically, storytellers protect their people and histories by teaching children lessons that help keep them safe and by preserving cultural stories as a sort of human archive.

“As an Indigenous people, we’ve lost so much of our history that storytelling is an absolute must for us.”

In addition to preserving history, Bluemel argues that storytelling has the equally important role of teaching the next generation Chickasaw values. Often featuring animals like Chokfi’—the rabbit trickster—these stories help educate children on how and how not to act. The story of Baby Rattlesnake, a favorite of Bluemel’s to perform, explains the dangers of not listening to elders while also teaching children bits of the Chickasaw language.

Above all else, Bluemel believes that the true power of storytelling is its ability to transcend time and culture by connecting us through our innate desires to be heard, protected, and remembered.

“I’ve worked with storytellers from Africa, Norway, and all over the world, and we all tell basically the same stories. It’s incredible to think that 2,000 years ago, someone in China was telling their kid about why the rabbit’s tail is so short and fluffy, and at that same time an Iroquois woman, an African woman, and a Chickasaw woman were all telling their own children a similar story. It’s interesting, no matter how we try to separate ourselves, it all comes down to being human. We all want a safe place to live, and we all want to love our children.”

Despite the universal and adaptive nature of stories, Bluemel believes that Native storytellers play an essential role in ensuring that tribal histories and narratives maintain their integrity and core meaning.

“There are some stories that must remain the same,” she explains. “At one point in our history, there were people who were entrusted with our stories. They were trained from the time they were little to be the community storyteller, which is essentially the historian. They kept track of information. They recorded the diseases that plagued our people and the victories we won.

“The storyteller is really the librarian of culture.”

Read an illustrated version of Bluemel’s story about the baby rattlesnake on the Festival Blog.

Lauren Hogg is a writing intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and a senior at Georgetown University, majoring in American studies.