“We say this story happened a long, long time ago, back when the Great Turtle Island was new…”
So begins Perry Ground before an audience at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2010. A Turtle Clan member of the Onondaga Nation, Ground is an educator who has dedicated his career to bringing traditional indigenous stories to life.
“They are human stories,” he says. “And they remind us who we are supposed to be as human beings, how we are supposed to act, how we are supposed to interact with other people and the world around us.”
Perry Ground, second from left, helps RIT celebrate Native American Heritage Month at an event in 2012.RIT photo by Maria Sharp
As the second Native American to hold the position, Ground will also serve as a cultural ambassador of sorts, working to strengthen RIT’s ties with the local Native American community.
Often seen in traditional Haudenosaunee [pronounced hoe-dee-no-SHOW-nee] clothing, such as a purple shirt with beaded detail and a feathered headdress, Ground has been telling traditional stories since the late ’80s, when he was a student at Cornell University. Ground says he turned to storytelling after observing two different ways of teaching about Native Americans at the time.
“One way involved people that I call podium pounders,” Ground says. “They would stand up to give a lecture and say something like, ‘Indians, good; White people, bad.’ And they’d literally pound on the podium sometimes.”
