Michelle Scalise Sugiyama calls herself an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in literature, folklore, evolutionary psychology/anthropology, and hunter-gatherer studies. On this website, Talking Stories, she builds an open, evolving encyclopedia that shows how hunter‑gatherer stories function as an information technology for storing and transmitting detailed ecological knowledge across generations.

At heart, Talking Stories is a love letter to forager cultures and their oral traditions. It starts from the conviction that hunter‑gatherer stories are “voices from the past” that encode the detailed, empirical observations that kept communities fed, safe, and in right relationship with their homelands.

Instead of treating myth as fantasy, she treats myth as careful noticing: stories that map whole ecosystems—animals, plants, seasons, stars, hazards, and opportunities. She honors the intelligence of relationship that Indigenous and local peoples built with their places, and refuses to dismiss that intelligence as “primitive” or “pre‑scientific.”

Talking Stories is an open educational resource designed for teachers, students, and researchers who want to rebuild curricula around Indigenous ecological knowledge. It:

• Aggregates stories from diverse foraging peoples and unpacks the ecological knowledge they contain.
• Organizes that knowledge into “domains” (animal behavior, plants and fungi, weather and seasons, navigation, etc.), so educators can plug it into biology, ecology, literature, or anthropology courses.
• Offers a Forager Folklore Bibliography and methods pages so people can build their own cross‑cultural samples and not just cherry‑pick a few exotic tales.

This is very much “infrastructure for imagination”: not a finished museum exhibit, but a set of tools and maps that help others do their own teaching, research, and storytelling work.

WEBSITE: Talking Stories

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