As we celebrate Women's History Month, we put the spotlight on a woman's group that's right here in Buffalo. Tradition Keepers is a Western New York storytelling group, co-founded by Sharon Holley and Karima Amin in 1995. For 30 years, the group has told all types of stories, such as animal stories, folk tales and biographical stories, as well as hosting programs and workshops. Holley explains how the group came to be.
“We were originally part of another story telling group in the city, which was called Spin of Storytellers of Western New York. And after conversations with some of the co-founders for the National Association of Black Storytellers, we decided that we would [want to] place a lot of emphasis on African American stories in our community. And so, we founded the group Tradition Keepers, Black Storytellers of Western New York.”
Holley emphasized the importance of telling African American stories because as she puts it, you can’t move forward unless you know where you’ve been.
“People say, well, why are you telling stories about enslavement? Slavery is over. Well, in our current situation, if you read history, you kind of see things moving back toward enslavement, but our people endured that. So how did they endure? There are stories to tell, how they were able to survive, how they were resilient, and we need to be able to tell those stories so that the current generation know that we've been through tough times, we've been through bad times, and we were able to make it [then], and we can make it again.”
Despite 3 decades of experience at telling stories Holley says telling stories is not as easy as it looks.
“People think, oh, you just get up there and tell a story, but there's a whole process to first finding a story that you want to tell, finding an audience or a place that's appropriate to tell the story, and then the process of learning the story. For most of us as storytellers, we don't use the book, so we have to use our words to make sure that we paint the picture for whoever is listening can see.”
Holley also mentioned their initiative in trying to spread the knowledge, recruiting younger storytellers and more men. Further saying, storytelling is not just a woman specific thing.
“Our group is primarily made up of women storytellers, for some reason, but throughout the country, there are a lot of male storytellers. And sometimes in our invitation to other tellers, to come in, we have invited male tellers because I think it's important, especially to young men, to see that this is not just women's work. There are men who are very good, excellent storytellers, who also make a living as a storyteller throughout the country, and as part of what we were doing, we started a group called storytellers of tomorrow. So, we are now trying to recruit young people, from grades 4 to 12, to introduce them to storytelling, give them tips and hints and workshops on how to prepare a story, how to learn a story, and how to tell the story. When the conference was here, we had some of them perform at the National Conference, telling their stories, stories that they had learned. So, we were hoping to continue working with these young people, to try to get another set of eyes, another group of people interested in storytelling that can carry on once we're no longer doing it.”
