When Navajo storyteller Geri Keams introduces her...

When Navajo storyteller Geri Keams introduces her tales, she tells listeners that her stories come from a different time and place, and yet can speak to anyone who hears them today.

Keams grew up in the 1950s in the Painted Desert region of Arizona, where as a child she herded sheep and hauled water, by hand, in barrels.

“We didn’t have electricity. We didn’t have running water,” the 40-year-old Los Angeles resident said.

Nor were there television or radio in her family’s hogan, fashioned from mud and logs.

“Stories were our way of connecting and communicating,” Keams said. “I want all people to hear the stories I enjoyed as a child.”

On Tuesday, Keams will weave her tales for families at Pasadena’s Kidspace Museum, 390 S. El Molino Ave. There is no charge for the two performances, at 2 and 3 p.m. But museum admission is $5 for children, $4 for adults, $3.50 for seniors, $2.50 for ages 1 to 2. Infants are admitted free. For more information, call (818) 449-9144.

Besides being a storyteller, Keams has been acting since her days as a University of Arizona drama student, when she successfully auditioned for a role opposite Clint Eastwood in the 1976 film, “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” Recent credits include television’s “Twin Peaks” and “Northern Exposure.”

Although she has told stories all her life, Keams did not become a professional until four years ago.

A 1990 grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission enabled Keams to return to her homeland, where her grandmother (a well-known rug weaver), uncle and others retold the stories she had heard as a child. There were the trickster tales of “coyote” and stories of “spiderwoman.” And Keams relearned creation stories that take a full seven days and seven nights to trace the Navajo from their origins to the present.

All these tales, she said, come from people who realize that “the human being is only one small strand in the web of creation and that these stories help connect us to that web.”

Above all, including her acting success, Keams’ work as a Navajo storyteller is what matters most to her.

“It’s like a heartbeat . . . at the core of what I am,” she said.