Grayhawk Perkins opens the 2025 Indigenous Forum
In this video, Grayhawk Perkins opens the 2025 Indigenous Forum at Bioneers with humor, heart, and a unique welcome in the Mobilian language. He shares teachings passed down from his grandparents, emphasizing that storytellers are the “walking bibles” of Native Nations and that we must continue to share stories and create new ones. Grayhawk offers powerful lessons through storytelling, like the butterfly who learns to listen. Watch the talk to experience Grayhawk’s wisdom, music, and unforgettable storytelling.
This talk was delivered at the 2025 Bioneers Conference.
GRAYHAWK: How’s everybody feeling today? I know you ain’t from New Orleans. If I said how’s everybody feeling, they’d go, “Yeah!” Everybody, how ya feeling today? Alright. Now you make me feel at home. Alright.
My name’s Grayhawk Perkins. Actually, in my language I am [SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE] Weird last name, Perkins. And I belong to the United Houma Nation. I’m also Choctaw, and I belong to Muscogee Nation, along with my sister here.
And I was going to open up and tell you a little bit about us in Louisiana. We are a mound building people, and I, myself, live only a few miles from one of our mounds. If you’ve ever heard about the mounds in the Southeast, we had whole cities. And I always tell people, I say, hey look, everybody talks about the little villages and the tipis and this and that. No, we had big cities, man. We had architecture, we had agriculture, we had astronomy, we had it all, and we were building these big mounds that are 80 feet high. We had cities as big as New York. We weren’t going anywhere. Okay? And we’re still there.
In my tribe, we have 17,000 people, and our language, we speak three, not including a foreign language called English. But we speak Houma, we speak Choctaw, and we also speak Mobilian. And today I’m going to open up in one of the languages that is very rare; in fact, it became a trade language in the Southeast, and it’s the Mobilian language, and I’m going to do a welcome in that.
And basically I just said where I was from, and I was thanking you for having me here in Berkeley, and my name again, and then thank you for all my new friends. And that’s the Mobilian language. Anybody—I hope some people might have understood that. You know?
But what I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you a little bit…how I got started. I was a teacher for 40 years in the school systems. I worked—I was on the tribal council when I was 18 years old, and I’ve been involved traditionally with my tribe since I was born. And one of the things now they call me a storyteller, and I think people don’t realize how important storytellers are in our culture.
Storytellers were the walking bibles of our culture. And in fact, in a lot of our nations, storytellers were more important than the chief was because they knew more than the chief even knew. And so years ago, when I was young, my mother told my wife that I was 4 years old and people would come and give me nickels and Coca-Cola to tell stories. So I was—It was inevitable I was going to be a storyteller.
Well, I’m going to start off with one story, and it was my grandfather. My grandfather was sitting on a porch one day, and I was about 9 years old, and he goes: [SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE] Come here. He says, I’m going to tell you a story. Now if anybody in here has grandparents that tell stories, okay, you realize you’re going to be sitting there for a while. Alright?
So here I am, I’m sitting there, and I walk up and get on the porch, and I’m sitting there; I’m ready; I got myself all ready for about an hour, two-hour story. Well, he tells me this story and it’s only five minutes long. Well, I was going, whoa, that ain’t grandpa; something’s going on here.
And he says, “Go play.” I said okay. So I go play, and about 3:00 that afternoon, he says, [SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE] Come here. “Tell me that story that I told you this morning.” Well, 45 minutes later, I finished that story. And he looked at me and he said, “Oh, you’re going to be a storyteller.” He said, “I would have been upset if you would have told me that story exactly the way I told it to you.”
But as a storyteller, we take the stories that we learn and we add our life experiences in those. And at 9 years old, I had a lot of life experiences at that point, and I added things to that story, and he just was so happy. Because he said, “You see things that other people don’t see.” And he says, “When you tell that story, make it your own. Make it your own.” And I’ve done that ever since.
And I’ve got a new book that just came out, and I spent a long time putting it together, and it’s taken some of our old stories that are fractions of stories, and I brought it into the 20th century. Now we have all these stories that are now finished.
I had somebody tell me not too long ago, especially when I was writing the book, they said, oh, that doesn’t sound traditional. I said, are we supposed to stop 300 years ago? No. We need to write the new stories. And I’m going to write and I’m going to talk in the same fashion that I grew up in. You know?
And I know people usually, when I walk in, they go—they look at me like this…and then they—you know, I don’t have that Indian talk. You know? I’m from New Orleans. I’m going to have a New Orleans accent. You know? And that’s how you’re going to hear me.
And somebody once told me when I did a program, “Where’s your Indian outfit?” It’s here. I’m Indian. It’s my outfit. Alright? That’s it. You know? And they go, “What?” I said—Earlier, we looked at a picture of my great-great grandfather in 1842, and he had just come back from Washington. He was dandy. He was decked out and he had his ruffled shirt on and everything else. That’s to me is traditional. I’m representing my great-great grandfather, and that painting was authentic.
And so when I come, I’m representing my people and this is the way I dress. You know? Yeah. So I don’t have to put on a show.
Somebody says—One time they told me, they said, “At your house, do you have Indian stuff?” I said I don’t have anything Indian on my walls. And he said, “Well, what’s in your house?” I just look at a mirror. There it is. I just look in a mirror. I don’t need stuff on my walls. I just look in the mirror.
I’ve got a lot of stuff from the Irish culture and all that. I collect all cultures.
Well, I’m going to go to the second story. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. But the second story, it’s in my book, and I felt—My sister here and I were talking earlier, and we feed off of each other, and we both said this one word, and it kind of made her think of a story and made me think of a story. And I’m going to tell you the story.
Once upon a time there was a young lady, young girl. She was a good girl. She was a good Choctaw girl. Yeah. But the only problem is she never shut up. Anybody know anybody like that? Well, she never got quiet, and anytime the elders were talking, beh beh beh beh beh beh…and she wouldn’t stop. And her grandmother walked up and said sometimes you need to be quiet and just listen and respect those elders. So she tried. It lasted about 10 minutes. And grandma said, look, you interrupt the elders all the time and you don’t listen; you’re not going to learn anything. You need to listen to those elders. You need to pay them respect. And she did it again. She tried, but it didn’t last long.
Well, one day, she was walking down one of the dirt roads in our community, and as she’s walking down the dirt road, she sees a mushroom ring in the middle of the field. Anybody ever see a mushroom ring in a field? Yeah. Well, with the European culture, they call that a fairy ring, they call it a magic ring. But if you’re Native American, you stay away from that ring. Okay? And she didn’t hear that story about staying away from that ring.
Well, she’s walking along, she sees the ring, and she decides to go check it out. Well, she goes and checks it out, and she gets in the middle of the ring. All of a sudden, it just fogged up around her, and she is scared. And when it cleared up, it didn’t look like the place she was in before, but outside that ring, there were two elders sitting on a log, and they had their backs to her, and they were talking. And she goes, “Excuse me! Excuse me! Excuse me! Excuse me!” And one of the elders did this. And all you Native people, when an elder does that, what does that mean?
Wait a minute. Just give me a second, I’ll be with you. They don’t have to tell you anything. And she stops for a second, and she goes, “Excuse me! Excuse me! Excuse me!” Interrupts them again, and they do this. She went this with two fingers.
Four times. Native culture, we give you four chances. Alright? She had her four chances. And finally, the other elder turned around and said, “Excuse me, are you always that rude?” And the girl got quiet. She says, “Look, we’re going to do something here. We’re going to make sure that you listen, and that you learn.” And all of a sudden, the little girl turned into a butterfly, and the little girl looks down, and she’s a butterfly. And she says, “Your job now, you can’t talk now; all you’re going to do is fly around. And when you see two people talking, you stop, you listen, and if the words are good, pass between them and let them know that their words are good. But if the words are not good, go the other way.”
Well, the two elders said, well, hopefully you learn something. And the two elders turned into butterflies and they fly off.
Well the little girl is flying around, flying around. Finally, she starts doing that, she starts going from people to people, and she’s just listening. And all the other butterflies, they watch what she’s doing. And as they watch what she’s doing, they go over to her and they talk to her. Now she’s a butterfly. She understands butterfly language. Okay?
And they ask her: What are you doing? She said, well—She explained what she was doing. And all the butterflies said that sounds good. Then all the butterflies started doing it.
Now if anybody’s ever been sitting there with someone, and a butterfly flies between you—I don’t know if you’ve had that happen—but I was talking to a ground at Moundville in Alabama, 200 students, and telling them this story. And while I was telling them this story, two butterflies flew right between us, and the kids went whoa! And I said, now, the elders said when—Add to this, the elders told her before they left, if anybody tells you thank you, you will turn back into a little girl with all the knowledge that you have, and you become a teacher.
Well, I told that to all the kids, and at that point when the butterflies flew through, they all howled thank you. And I said, well, that must have not been the little girl. Okay?
And so that’s happened to me quite a few times, and I guess what it is, sometimes we have to be like that butterfly, all of us. You might be young, you might be thinking that you know everything, but sometimes you just need to be quiet and listen to what those elders are saying because they’ve got wisdom. Be like that butterfly, fly around, and then one day, when you have all that knowledge, then you become the elder and you become the teacher. Okay? And that’s the story of the little girl and a butterfly. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
CARA: Thank you, Grayhawk.
GRAYHAWK: One more thing. Alright. I’m going to get—This is audience participation. Okay? You guys, loosen up your throats. Okay. Here we go.
We are going to do a song that dates back quite a few hundred years. Well, I’ll just go back a thousand years. I don’t know, has anybody ever heard of Green Corn ceremony? She did. Yeah, I know she does. We have a thing that’s called Green Corn, and our dances are stomp dances, and this song that I’m going to sing is basically a friendship dance. It’s a stomp dance. Now everybody here, if you sing this song with me, you’re condemned to be my friend for the rest of your life. Okay. And you’re also friends with the person next to you for the rest of your life.
So we’re going to do this song, and it’s a call and answer. So everybody, we’re going to try three words. First word if Yo. Everybody try it. Yo! Ooh, that was good. Yoway[ph]! [AUDIENCE REPEATS] Here we—They beat you ever there. I hear that, man. Uh huh! I will translate. Yo means yes. Yoway means yes, indeed. Uh huh means uh huh. Alright. So here we go.
Me first Yoooooo…. Now I know what a flat tire sounds like. Geez. Okay. Yoway! Uh huh! Hee yay! Hee yay! Ho yo! Ho yo! Eh hee yay! Yo koe[ph] kee[ph] And that means thank you.
Thank you very much.
