A small crowd quietly paid attention to Louis LaBombard’s every facial expression and hand gesture during his Native American Stories from Various First Nation Cultures, a storytelling event recently held at the Oak Harbor library.

LaBombard — whose native name is Gentgeen Ashkagentum — has been a storyteller since he was 15. He has traveled around the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Europe to tell stories “to kids from 8 to 80,” as he likes to say.

To him, storytelling is more than simple entertainment — it’s an important art form that he devoted almost 60 years of his life to preserve.

He recalls the times his grandmother would encourage him to “go out and learn about other people.” So go out and learn he did, visiting tribes in North and South America and meeting other storytellers.

“Telling these stories lets other people know about how indigenous people think, how they explain their cultures and their stories,” he said. “Each one of the indigenous nations here have their own stories about how they came to be — some came from the sky, some came from the inner Earth, some came out of caves, some were created by creative beings.”

In the past, he explained, Indigenous people did not have schools, therefore traditions and knowledge were passed down through shared practices and spoken word.

“Every story that I tell has certain lessons within it that are indigenous,” he said.

At the same time, some stories share similarities with famous myths from around the world. According to LaBombard, this happens despite cultural differences because there are patterns in the way people understand and experience their reality.

The 75-year-old, who taught anthropology and social sciences at the Whidbey campus of Skagit Valley College and is a Vietnam veteran, has been calling Whidbey Island his home for the past 32 years. He is Haudenosaunee — or Iroquois, a group of tribes located in Northeast America made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onodagas, Cayugas and Senecas. His father was Seneca and Mohawk, while his mother was Dutch with some Delaware ancestry. As suggested by the wolf embroidered onto the baseball hat he proudly wears, he belongs to the Wolf Clan.

Like tens of thousands of Indigenous children, LaBombard’s father was forced into a boarding school, where he was abused.

“He lost everything,” he said. “They forced his culture out of him.”

When he became older, LaBombard used his degrees in anthropology and sociology to tell his father about his culture and people, knowledge he had lost to forced assimilation.

“It was really heartbreaking for me,” he said.

LaBombard believes it’s important to learn about one’s own culture, language and traditions. Although he has hope that his young grandson will continue his legacy, he acknowledges that, with the rise of technology and the pace of modern lifestyles, preserving one’s cultural identity has become harder than ever.

“It’s really hard to maintain traditions in this world,” he said. “There are still some good storytellers around, a lot of them are older and they’re trying to pass down their traditions but the young people are too into technology, things like that. They don’t want to take the time to learn the stories in the right way. They don’t want to take the time to actually go around and find out how these things are passed on. So as the older people pass away, of course the stories are lost. And when that happens, the traditions are gone,” he said.

Although books and videos are helpful to open people’s eyes to other cultures and become more tolerant, he believes they are not the same as learning from the people themselves.

“The practice of it is important,” he said. Without it, he said it simply becomes something people learn, rather than assimilate into their own identity.