Cherokee tales are now his life

Storyteller to appear in Raleigh today

Lloyd Arneach grew up on a Cherokee reservation in the North Carolina mountains, but he was a suit-clad computer programmer when he stumbled upon an art form long revered by his ancestors.

Arneach started telling what he calls "the stories of his uncles" nearly 40 years ago, thanks to the urgings of a Girl Scout and a college professor. He quit his day job 15 years ago and now tells a mix of Cherokee folk tales and more modern stories to children and adults on a national circuit.

He will tell stories today at the American Indian Heritage Celebration in Raleigh.

It's a vocation Arneach treasures, which is clear as he speaks of a roomful of elementary schoolers in Utah whom he recently had engrossed in a folk tale.

"I could tell they were seeing the same pictures as me from their reaction," he says. "They saw the eagle flying over the valley. It's like drugs, I was so excited."

But it's not a role Arneach ever aspired to. He was living in Atlanta when a Girl Scout who baby-sat his children asked him to talk to her troop about the Cherokee. She wanted an Indian badge, and there were no books on Native Americans in the library. (The girls were shocked when he showed up in a three-piece suit; dispelling the idea that American Indians still live in tepees and get around on horseback remains a part of his show.)

Soon he got calls from other troops, then Boy Scouts, historical societies, museums, schools and universities. His talks focused on Cherokee culture and history. A college student recorded some stories for a folklore course.

A decade later, the professor that taught the course put some of his stories into a book. At a book signing, he was invited to a storytelling festival. Around that time, his wife died from a brain tumor. He retired and returned to Cherokee and soon started telling stories full-time.

Since then, he has told stories on The Discovery Channel and at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. He has also published two books.

"All this because 38 years ago, a baby sitter could not find a book on Indians," he says.

He tells real-life stories of people he has met -- an American Indian Olympic athlete and one of the actors from the movie "Dances with Wolves," for instance -- as well as stories about his own life on the reservation and a few tales he made up.

Then he tells the tales he learned from two of his uncles who were renowned storytellers.

"They would go back and forth at family gatherings," he said. "It was like a tennis match."

Storytelling is no longer so revered in Cherokee culture, Arneach says, joking that video games are the storytellers for his tribe's youth.

But it still has a vital role in society, even in the digital age, said Brian Sturm, an associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. It creates an experience that new media can't recreate -- one that everyone in the room shares.

"You create a space so vividly that listeners are essentially there," said Sturm, who has done research on storytelling. "When you leave a storytelling experience as a listener, you have a sense that you have been somewhere with friends."

Sturm said some storytellers make six-figure salaries working at places such as the Kennedy Center, where Arneach has performed.