On one recent snowy morning at Unity Elementary School, Leslie Hubbard’s sixth-grade pupils excitedly move their desks out of the way, creating a big circle of chairs.

They do so at the request of this day’s special presenter, Nicolle Littrell.

The Belfast-based Littrell is also an actress and filmmaker, but she’s here this day in her role as a storyteller of folk tales of the Wabanaki, an American Indian word that means “people of the dawn” or “people of the first light.”

“Who can tell me about ‘How the Sweetgrass Came to Be’?” Littrell asked the pupils.

With her intermittent prompting, one pupil would tell a bit of the story, then falter, then she would call on another volunteer who would continue it. Afterward, they discuss the tale and what lessons there were to learn from it.

It’s the last day of her month-long residency at Unity, and Littrell is savoring the results.

“I love when I see that the lights go on, and I see that they make the stories a part of themselves,” she said. “I love to see that they listen, and their enthusiasm for what they’re learning. I love hearing the stories recycled back to me. Then I get to sit back, listen, enjoy and learn things about the stories that I hadn’t thought about before.”

And maybe, just maybe, she sees a little bit of herself in these inquisitive children.

Littrell, 34, also grew up in a small town in upstate New York named Canajoharie (Mohawk for “the pot that washes itself,” inspired by a large cascading waterfall that tumbles into a huge pool of water). A fan of traditional stories, she was the girl that kept checking the same book of Greek mythology out of the local library. Back then, the public schools didn’t satisfy her curiosity about the local Iroquois Indians, giving short shrift to their culture.

Today’s students are getting opportunities that Littrell didn’t thanks to recent legislation, which requires that American Indian studies be part of Maine history education. So her storytelling is one way to learn about the Wabanaki tribes: Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac and Maliseet.

“Kids I’ve encountered are devouring this information,” Littrell said. “There’s a certain reverence for native people, and not a lot of information has been shared until recently. It hits something primal, the quest for who we are and what our own back yards reveal. There’s something exciting about walking in the imprints of our ancestors.”

And, in the tradition of oral history, these Unity sixth-graders, either solo or in small groups, are animatedly repeating the stories to a class of second-graders.

“It’s wonderful how much they do remember,” Littrell said. “They’re learning Wabanaki words and names. They really pick up on the details, the subtleties, especially the older class.”

Next, both classes gather on a big rug as Littrell unveils a story new to the children, “The Corn and Tobacco Mother,” which tells of how a female archetype sacrificed her body to feed her offspring for generations to come. Afterward, she had the students pass around a corn doll and each told about what he or she enjoyed and gleaned from the story. One boy declares that the godlike beings in the story weren’t real, but were “an urban legend.”

Later, at a local caf?, Littrell explained how she went from growing up in a rural area to the Big Apple and then finally to Maine.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in theater and English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, she did what many fledgling actors do: She moved south to New York City. There, over seven years, she acted in film, television and theater. Also, she and her then-boyfriend operated a organic produce delivery business, a service that was eventually documented in the book “My Brother’s Farm.”

Growing disillusioned with the sporadic nature of an actor’s life, she spent a year working as executive assistant to the chief curator of the Department of Film and Video at the Museum of Modern Art. While at MoMA, she took screenwriting and filmmaking courses at New York University.

Then, in the summer of 1999, she came to Maine to serve as a counselor at The Healing Community, a camp for children with special needs. It was a time when Littrell found herself adrift, both personally and professionally.

“I was in transition,” she recalled. “I had left my relationship. I was getting frustrated with being an actor in New York and being at the whim of others. I had stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to leave New York, but I wasn’t sure what kind of life I could have for myself as an actor outside of there. But when I was going up Route 1 and saw the sign for Unity, Friendship, Hope and Freedom, I knew something was up. I just fell in love with Maine.”

She decided to move to Maine and leave acting behind, becoming a writer instead. But she got sidetracked, taking a teaching position at the Maine Film and Photographic Workshops in Rockport. In addition to schlepping around equipment, she acted in all her students’ films, “and my faith in acting was somehow restored. It was also an opportunity to learn about filmmaking in a very supportive environment.”

Littrell left the workshops after a year and made a mass mailing to theater companies throughout Maine – and “people actually responded, not like in New York.” This led to her performing with the Belfast Maskers, re-honing her acting chops and, even more importantly, helped her make friends and to become involved with the Waldo County town that would become her home.

Around that same time, she created her production company, Film Farm. According to her Web site, “Film Farm produces original, Maine-based work, inspired by local history and heritage. Film Farm’s mission is to entertain, educate and enrich Maine’s communities through innovative storytelling, including digital video and theater, and share the process of creation.”

For a girl who often spent time on her grandparents’ dairy farm, “the farm is a very vital symbol to me. I liken [filmmaking] to planting and cultivating seeds and working together to help them grow,” she said. “I see my production team as being like a farm crew.”

Around this same time, she did some voice work for Audio Bookshelf of Belfast, serving as narrator on “The Birchbark House” by Louise Erdrich in 2001 and portraying Sacajawea in “Sacajawea” by Joseph Bruchac in 2002.

While doing research for those roles, Littrell visited the “People of the Dawn” exhibit at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor. It was there she discovered the woman who would become her muse: Molly “Molly Spotted Elk” Delis. Delis was a Penobscot dancer, actress and writer who was born on Indian Island in 1903. She danced in New York City and Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.

Molly Spotted Elk was also a collector of Wabanaki folk tales. As a girl, she would perform chores for tribal elders in exchange for having stories told to her. She collected these in her book “Kathadin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abanaki Tribe.” It was originally set to be published in Paris in the 1940s, but the day it was due out, the Nazis invaded. The Maine Folklife Center finally published it in 2000 at the University of Maine.

“I could really connect to her story,” Littrell said. “Here’s this girl from a small town going to the big city. She was my guide into a culture I really wanted to learn more about: the Wabanaki.”

She met and became friends with Delis’ daughter, Jean Moore of Indian Island, and found key historians and elders. She read a biography of Delis by Bunny McBride and read her original, handwritten folk tales at the Maine Folklife Center.

Littrell originally envisioned a film or a one-woman show about Delis, but she kept coming back to the folk tales, which she started adapting for public and school programs. She offers schools either the storytelling or the opportunity for students to adapt the tales into plays. She’s been doing the residencies since last summer. She’s putting on a theater workshop at Robertson School and both activities at the Toddy Pond School, both in Belfast. She usually supplements the storytelling with creative activities for the children such as art, dance, poetry or songs.

What leads her to take these tales to students?

“It’s coming from a little girl who wanted to learn about native people, but who wasn’t given the opportunity,” she said. “I just want to share what I’m learning. I hope it’s inspiring them to go out and learn more.”

Littrell’s other current project is her first film, “Trap.”

Set in the deep back woods of 1920s Maine, the 15-minute film is the tale, told without dialogue, of a marriage between a trapper and his retired ballerina mate, Anna. Set at the end of winter, “Trap” follows Anna’s attempt to escape from her co-dependent relationship. It stars Littrell as Anna and Matthew Heintz, the Thorndike man also known as “The Northwoods Balladeer,” as the trapper.

“A lot of people can access that feeling of being trapped, in one way or another,” Littrell said. “Through being creative, we can free ourselves from some of the limitations we imposed upon ourselves.”

The digital film was shot late last March and early April at the cabin at the Maine Forest and Logging Museum in Bradley, with one flashback scene filmed at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor. Littrell, co-producer of “Trap” along with Wendy Schweikert, credits the community support she received in donations of services and materials and volunteers as being a vital part of getting the work made.

“It’s a little miracle,” she said. “They were all excited about my idea and wanted to help make it happen. They all wanted to b e part of a dream.”

Littrell realizes that she’s just beginning on her path as a storyteller.

“I just want to be the best storyteller I can be, whether it takes the form of oral stories, film or theater,” she said. “I wanted to be a magician as a little girl, and I feel storytellers are magic.”

Nicolle Littrell will be giving a performance of “Northern Lights: Wabanaki Folk Tales” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5, at the University of Maine’s Hutchinson Center in Belfast. For more information, call Nancy Hauswald at 338-3879.

For more information on Film Farm, contact Littrell at 323-3932 or nicole@filmfarmmaine.com or access www.filmfarmmaine.com.