Tonight I’ll be telling a tale about a star in the sky that everyone has heard of. It’s not the biggest star, or the brightest. But for a long time, it was one of the most important stars in history. It’s a star called Polaris. Or as we know it as, the North Star.

This story comes from a group whose ancestral lands span the high desert of the United States Southwest: the Paiute.

They knew the landscape of the desert intimately, and they read the night sky the way you read a map. Because for them, it was one.

But our story doesn’t start in the sky. It starts with a young mountain sheep who wanted nothing more than to make his father proud.

This is Star Stories with Ian Lauer, where we sit together under the stars and retell ancient stories told about the night sky, and uncover the ancient knowledge hidden inside the world's oldest myths.

An ancient story from the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes tells us that the stars of the Big Dipper is a memorial, written in the night sky for anyone willing to look up and listen.

They saw an animal. A hunter, a father, a hero. They called him The Great Fisher. Not a fisherman with a rod and a line, but an animal. A fierce, weasel-like creature found in the forests of the Great Lakes.

But tonight's story doesn't start with him. It starts with his son, Little Fisher. And a hunt in a frozen world that's about to change the world forever.

This is Star Stories with Ian Lauer, where we sit together under the stars and uncover the ancient knowledge hidden inside the world's oldest myths.

Every culture in human history looked up at the same sky, and told stories about what they saw. Stories about Gods and Monsters, love and betrayal. Sacrifice and revenge.

But those stories were more than entertainment.

Encoded in them were things like calendars, star maps, even survival guides.

Knowledge so important that the only way to protect it was to embed it inside a story.

These are some of the greatest stories ever told. And they were written…in the stars.

I'm Ian Lauer, and I've spent my career studying the night sky. First through astrophysics, and now as a storyteller.

And this is Star Stories.

Each episode, I’ll immerse you in one of these ancient myths.

We’ll sit together under the stars and I’ll tell you a story: Unfiltered, the way it was meant to be heard…including all the gory, and sometimes ridiculous details.

And at the end, we’ll uncover the science and knowledge these stories were intended to pass on.

Star Stories by Ian Lauer. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.