SASL Newsletter - Spring 2018 Issue Issue 9 - Spring 2018 | Page 3

hearing child of deaf parents, ends up catching the hitchhiker's fraudulent action, thus vindicating deaf
people. Although most deaf people may never encounter a police officer who knows ASL, such a
circumstance would be welcomed. The Hitchhiker represents many aspects of Deaf culture and how
mainstream society interacts with deaf people (see Rutherford, 1993 for more insights on this classic
story of the deaf community).
One may wonder how The Hitchhiker came to be folkloristic and why it has more than one
version. There are two reasons for this. One is that it was created by the deaf community with no
known source of its origins. The other is that “finding versions and variants of what is conceived to be
the same story is proof of tradition and oral transmission” (Haut, 1994, p. 48). According to Habel
(1988), “all folklore must exist in more than one place or time or both. One of the inevitable r esults of
multiple existence and oral transmission is variation. No two versions of an item of folklore are
absolutely identical” (p. 13). A narrative in the folklore tradition can be changed as it passes from one
individual to another. The main idea basically remains the same, but any individual can add or delete a
segment or expand or de-emphasize an idea.
To date, The Hitchhiker has eight versions, some of which have different titles. All of the
versions are signed by a single storyteller except for the version by Bahan and Klein in which thirteen
people deliver the story.
Deaf and Law by Simon Carmel (1981)
Deaf Speeding by Marlon Kuntze (1984)
The Hitchhiker by Dan Pineda (Originally created in 1994 and reprinted in 2006)
The Hitchhiker by Norman Weiss (Originally created in 2007 and posted on the
DawnSignPress Facebook page on September 16, 2017
The Hitchhiker by Ben Bahan and Bridget Klein (2009)
The Hitchhiker by David Rivera (Originally created in 2014 and posted on the
DawnSignPress Facebook page on June 3, 2017)
The Hitchhiker by William Millios (2015)
The Hearing Hitchhiker by Dolly Morrow (2017)
To give you an idea of versions that were produced in the 1980’s and the 2010’s (30
years apart), two video examples are shown below.
“Deaf and Law”
by Simon Carmel
(1981)
“Courtesy of Simon Carmel,
excerpted from the
American Folklore in the Deaf
Community video, 1981”
(Continue on the next page)
The Power of ASL
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Spring 2018 – Issue 9