"I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller"

The statement draws a line between vocation and role. Storytelling is his craft, the engine of his imagination, and the way he shapes memory and experience into meaning. But “traditional Storyteller,” with that deliberate capital S, signals a specific cultural office in many Indigenous communities: a bearer of sanctioned narratives, seasonal cycles, and ceremonial knowledge, bound to protocols of permission, accuracy, and time. Claiming that title would imply authority he neither holds nor seeks.

Working in the novel and in English, he transforms oral cadences, communal memory, and reservation humor into literary structures that belong to modernity: shifting timelines, interior monologue, irony, and ambiguity. A book like Winter in the Blood echoes the elliptical movement and layered voice of oral narrative, yet it is not a recitation of origin stories. It navigates rupture, dispossession, alcoholism, shame, survival, through invented characters whose private wounds refract historical trauma. That method honors tradition while refusing to reproduce it as museum piece or ethnography.

There is humility in the phrasing. He signals respect for those entrusted with sacred story while refusing the outsider’s demand that a Native writer certify “authenticity.” He belongs to a continuum rather than a category: a listener who has heard the old voices and a novelist who rearranges them under the pressure of contemporary life. The landscape still speaks; trickster energies still flicker in irony and dark humor; communal memory persists, but it arrives filtered through the technologies of print, the expectations of a mixed readership, and the freedom, along with the risk, of invention.

To be a storyteller, then, is to witness, to create, to make song from fracture. To be a traditional Storyteller is to keep, transmit, and guard. He stands between those roles, drawing strength from one while practicing the other, bridging without claiming the title of bridge.