‘Everyone wants to know where they are from’: Why this Utah storyteller wants to tell your ancestor’s story

Kalima Watson could feel the power of his ancestors flow through him.

There was Aunty Rose , who in the 1970s invented a cellophane hula skirt with her cousin and became a key figure in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance at a time when Hawaiian language and traditions were being suppressed.

There was his Māori ancestor, Pouaka Reihana Paki, who was a boy born in New Zealand when muskets first arrived in the 19th century. To save him from danger, his family hid him in a crate of raisins, earning him the name “Pouaka Reihana” — or “box of raisins.” Before sending him away, his mother tattooed his real name on his arm so he would never forget who he was or where he came from.

And there was his great-grandmother, Tori Waiata Ormsby, who descended from a Scandinavian Viking named Orm . As