Whatever other titles he may hold, Snoqualmie tribal member Marvin Kempf is a born storyteller. Creation, the monster of the mountain, and battling giants, are all easily-recalled legends from his culture, and ones he loves to share.

“I was thinking about another story,” he announced over lunch last Friday. It’s a story he learned from his elders, when he asked why his own people didn’t have beautiful creation tales like the Jewish tradition.

“They laughed and said ‘oh, that’s a young tribe,’” he said.

Then they told him their own story.

“The supreme being, the creator, was so beautiful, he never spoke… but when words came out, they were like song. He lifted his head into nothingness, and sang us into creation,” Kempf said.

His favorite story right now, though, is about a people whose history and culture extends back 13,000 years, farther than Judaism, farther than Chinese culture. The people are his own, linked from coast to coast and from the top to the bottom of North America.

The best part of the story? It’s completely true, with physical evidence to prove it.

A 13,000 year-old pair of sticks carved from mammoth bone, and a large sharp stone knife, or Clovis point, found near Wenatchee several years ago, are the proof, and the link to tribes all over the country, he says. The pieces are not sled runners, as archeologists originally supposed, but components of the “stick game,” called Sla-hal in the Snoqualmie tribe, but with different names in every part of the country where tribes still play it today.

The game spread, as the tribe did, through intermarriage, across the United States. People still play it today, following the same set of rules that, as far as anyone knows, have always been used, for 13,000 years.

“The anthropologists say you can’t get better continuity than that!” Kempf said.

Sla-hal is a combination of song and strategy. More than a game, it was also a source of power and protection, and it was a tool.

“It’s called the game of peace,” Kempf said, noting that warring tribes sometimes played the game, thousands on each side joining in power songs, instead of engaging in battle. “The elders said way back when, we used to war with giants, and we would settle disputes with them playing this game,” he added.

Sla-hal is also the name of the gathering May 5 that Kemp has organized for some 60 tribes and about 400 people at Seattle Pacific University on Saturday, May 5. This first-of-its-kind event, Kempf says, will be “a family conversation” about not just the game, but the cultural heritage of the people, and the effect this discovery may have.

“The families that wrought America are always being told who they are and where they’re from and their identity… by anthropologists, by museums, and they don’t even know what the artifacts are,” Kempf said.

He hopes with this gathering, and the annual events to follow, that he can give his people a voice.

“The Sanawa line never got to speak after the treaty,” he said, referring to his great-grandfather, Chief Sanawa, and the treaty of Point Elliott, signed in 1855.

“This day the Sanawa line is opening up for all the family to speak. And it’s about the importance of all our relatives and family throughout the northwest.”

Saturday’s gathering is not open to the public. More information can be found at www.spu.edu/depts/spfc/happenings/slahal-gathering.