We are storytelling human beings.

Stories are our schemas of how we come to know, are known and will be known and remembered.

Stories within oral tradition help define one's self in the world and culture and in relationship with others in the community.

As Five-Fingered Dine' the collection of origin stories are "narratives that can illuminate and educate" and contain "compressed historical knowledge and human experience" (Schwarz, 1997).

Contemporary Navajo turn to the origin stories making up Navajo oral histories as the most important sources of information about their world . These stories establish an "ethnic identity for all Navajo, defining meaningful relationships among individual members of the community and between the community and the cosmos (Zolbrod 1984:25 as cited in Schwarz, 2001, p. 11).

Cultural stories ground us to our cosmology of knowledge, values, beliefs and understandings. Stories are our natural technologies giving meaning, making meaning in understanding our world.