Ancient folklore reminds humanity of its connection to its ancestors as well as the world in which it resides.

Monday afternoon in the Pioneer Room of the Memorial Union, members of the Black Earth Institute educated the audience on some aspects of human nature they believe have become lost in today’s secular society as part of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness and the Creative Imagination.

“We live in a world pushed about [by] business,” said Patricia Monaghan, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at DePaul University, arguing that the worth of art is too often determined by its price tag rather than by its historical value.

The institute was formed four years ago “to serve as a median between humans and other forces,” such as ancestry and religious history.

Monaghan told a folk story in which there was a cow on Earth whose milk never dried out, no matter how many buckets were put under it.

When man decided to place a siphon under it to suck all the milk out, the cow “jumped to the heavens and dribbled milk through the sky to form the Milky Way,” terminating the never-ending supply of milk and forming a galaxy in the skies.

“This shows the results of man’s greed,” she said.

In folklore history the rabbit teaches humans to “trust at your own peril,” said Deborah Holton, associate professor at the School for New Learning at DePaul University.

In colonial slavery times, rabbits represented the mental disposition of slaves. The rabbit was cunning and witty and had the same talents slaves used to fight against the demeaning state of mind slave masters commonly tied to force upon them.

The rabbit is also seen as being a friend, a brother or a teacher and is commonly found in children’s stories today, such as Br’er Rabbit in the Walt Disney movie “Song of the South.”

“The rabbit represents the creative force necessary to overcome insurmountable conditions in life,” Holton said.

The wolf is another animal that serves as a connection between humankind and folklore history.

Cristina Eisenberg, graduate student in Forestry and Wildlife at Oregon State University, enlightened the audience with a recent story that occurred in the small town of Wisdom, Mont. More wolves reside in this town than humans. Hence, the wolves commonly try to claim the area for their pack. One day, a pack killed a cow in an effort to claim the land, and the residents called the government to kill the pack of four wolves.

Eisenberg showed the audience a picture in which a few school-age children and their teacher are standing in front of the pack of dead wolves with smiles on their faces. To contrast that, Eisenberg also showed the audience a picture in which an intern is placing the palm of its hand against the paw of a wild wolf. She said this tells us that humankind is trying to reclaim kinship [with wolves], while others are resisting it.

“We’re kin,” she said. “We have relations that go back thousands and thousands of years.”