'Sometimes, We Have to Sacrifice': Indigenous Legend Teaches Kids Community Responsibility

Cindi Alvitre is an indigenous mother, grandmother, weaver, writer, storyteller and traditional singer.

A Tongva descendant of the Moompetam (Salt Water) Clan – the original people of Los Angeles and the southern Channel Islands – she teaches American Indian Studies at Cal State Long Beach.

Her new children’s book, "Waa’aka’: The Bird Who Fell in Love With The Sun," gives new life to a traditional story with a timely message about community, climate change and the danger of making selfish choices.

Alvitre spoke with The California Report Magazine's host Sasha Khokha. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On Dedicating the Book to her Father

My father Bernard Alvitre was a skin diver, an abalone diver. He taught us about the connection to everything that lived among us, how everything has a story.

The seaweed, the seagulls, the water, the sand, the sand dollars, everything had a history and a story.

He cherished that. That was his way of teaching. It was through us and and the ability to be able to to memorize these stories.

A Pre-Human Tale of Community Responsibility

The pre-human characters had to find a way to get Tamet, the sun, up into the sky. Because every day he was growing larger and larger and larger, hotter and hotter, and was impacting and affecting all the life. The trees were beginning to shrivel, the water was beginning to dry up.

Waa’aka’ is the other main character. She is a black-crowned night heron. And she has a very vain streak about her. She found out that if the sun was with her, she could see her reflection [in ponds of water] and just gaze at how fabulous she was.

The sun was growing hotter and hotter. The council decided they would toss him up into the sky. Waa'aka' becomes very anxious about it because she's realizing she will no longer be able to gaze at herself. She decides she's going to ruin this whole plan, because when they toss him up into the sky, she's going to grab the net and break it, and he's going to fall back to Earth and be with her forever.

She grabs the net. The sun explodes into what he is today – this immense ball of fire and light and heat. She collapses as a burned bird back to the earth.

The rest of the community scolds her because she actually endangered everybody.

Her punishment is to forever stay in darkness and never see the light of day or see her reflection again.

She's left with black streaks on her head, and she juts her head forward in shame.

On the Lessons the Story Has for Today:

Sometimes, we have to sacrifice to provide and to extend generosity to others, so as to continue life and to give life to everybody else.

This is a very important message. Right now as human beings, not to exert our power or authority over the natural world, but to take care of [it].

That's the indigenous philosophy: We 'Take care of.' We need to practice that – not to model it, not to understand it, not to intellectualize it, but to practice it. To take care of each other. Take care of those things that give us life.

The only way we're going to be able to push forward in a very healthy and collective way is to come together. To acknowledge that these these entities in the natural world, how important they are to indigenous people.

We cannot separate our relationship from these the sun, the nature, the birds, the medicinal plants, the Mother Earth, the water, the air. They are very much a part of us and they all have their own stories. They have their own lineage and their own genealogies, and they are their own tribes.

Alvitre also just finished working on an art installation in response to the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus in L.A.'s Grand Park. In her artist’s statement, Alvitre wrote: "It is imperative that those concerned with social justice strip away that veneer of objectivity to challenge, interrogate, and sometimes invert the social relations and structures of power immortalized in public art and monuments. To re-signify public spaces is to conjure new opportunities to imagine something different. Something better. Something more intimately inclusive of the land and all of its people — past, present, and future."