Storytelling Storytelling is an art greatly cultivated by Indians. Southwestern Native American cultures value the skill of speaking well in front of an audience therefore the ability to tell stories is highly regarded. Folk tales are very important for they show how people think and what their values are.
Language is valued and used to transmit culture.
The picture of the doll at left represents a storyteller surrounded by children at the moment of a story being told. Today some of the stories are also told by reading. There are Native American tales written in Indian languages and some of them have been made into bilingual books. They are written in both English and Hopi language, for example. Just like the Native Americans, all the students in our classroom speak a language other than English.