sign language. When the child becomes an adult, he moves to Eyeth and becomes a Deaf teacher to hearing children. One day, a student is upset because she does not want to return home to her Deaf family for the weekend, so he comforts her by telling her of the planet Earth, where the majority of people can hear and communicate by speaking. The story plays both on the importance of identifying with a common culture, and by playing on the puns "ear-th" and "eye-th" for the majority hearing and majority signing planets respectively. This traditional tale is also told in a play written by Aaron Kelestone at NTID, called TALES from the Deaf Side. One traditional story that emphasizes the importance of shared Deaf identity tells of two Civil War soldiers, one from the North and one from the South, both of whom were Deaf. Upon encountering each other, they pointed their guns at each other, but upon realizing they were both Deaf, put their guns down and began chatting. This story is a powerful demonstration that the men's shared Deaf identity superseded all other connections or alliances they had formed to the outside world. Not only do the two Deaf characters see a reflection of themselves in the other Deaf character, but they are also supporting each other in a way common to minority cultures. Ben Bahan's story, "Bird of a Different Feather", creates an allegory about the oppression that some Deaf children face when born into hearing families, and also uses the imagery of the absence of light. In the story, a straight-beaked bird is born into an eagle family. Throughout the story the eagle family attempts to mold the straight-beaked bird to fit in, thus setting up an allegory relating the experiences of Deaf children born to hearing families who try to mold them to fit hearing culture. The eagle parents enroll the straight-beaked bird in a school where it is supposed to learn how to act like an eagle, such as develop hunting skills, despite the differences in his physical characteristics. They even encourage it to undergo surgery to change its beak into a curved shape more like an eagle's beak. The result is that the straight-beaked bird feels that he does not fit into a single bird species, and flies off into the sunset alone. In addition to playing with a "lack of light"