Telling Tales: The Tohono O’odham Nation

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A retelling of an ancient Native American story from the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose traditional lands straddle the border between the United States and Mexico. The story encapsulates the tribe’s close relationship with their land, plants and animals. But their ancient way of life is now under threat from President Trump’s plans to build a fortified wall across their sacred lands. Penny Boreham explores the power of ancient stories by taking three traditional tales and juxtaposing them with contemporary experiences and issues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello from the BBC World Service and welcome to the latest edition of the
0:05.0	documentary podcast. If you have the time please rate the documentary on your
0:09.6	podcast app and leave us a comment. let us know what you think.
0:15.0	Welcome to Telling Tales. I'm Penny Borum.
0:20.0	The power of ancient tales is that they never age.
0:24.0	They connect us across time and space, across continents and creeds.
0:29.9	In this BBC World Service series Telling Tales, we are retelling some of those ancient stories
0:35.6	from around the world and juxtaposing them with our contemporary experiences so that we can
0:41.4	feel their resonances and connections and are reminded about how much we all have in common as human beings.
0:50.0	Today we are telling an ancient Native American story from the Tohona or Autumn people,
0:55.0	whose ancestral lands are in the Sonoran Desert,
0:58.0	a harsh dusty landscape of rocks and cacti, straddling the border between the United States of America and Mexico.
1:05.0	In fact the word Tohono means desert and or autumn means people.
1:10.0	They are the desert people.
1:13.0	And our story is about the origin of a cactus that's only found here in the
1:18.0	origin of a cactus that's only found here in the Sonoran desert.
1:23.0	This cactus, the suwara, or as the Oautum call it the Harshan,
1:27.0	is a large tree-like cactus covered by protective spines
1:31.0	with ribbed and upward curved branches like arms which develop as it
1:36.2	ages. The cacti can live for 200 years and are extremely sacred for the autumn.
1:43.0	This sacredness is explained by the story
1:46.0	which reveals how the Suwara is the incarnation of a little boy
	...

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