What stories are authentic folktales?

I was trying to remember the name of a story, then the name of the audiobook on which it was recorded. The story was called, "The Bear Child." The audiobook was called Lessons from the Animal People. The storyteller was Dovie Thomason. It occurred to me to look for independent confirmation, any other sign on the internet, that the stories on this album were not simply stories Thomason had written herself. So far, I haven't found the stories anywhere else, but I still love the stories. These stories are probably old tales whose origins are not visible through a Google search.

The story that broke my heart, and then tried to put it back together, was the one I mentioned above. "The Bear Child" is about a boy whose uncle walls him up inside a cave, because the uncle doesn't want to care for the boy anymore. The boy gets help from other animals, notably, a mother bear. At the end of the story, the storyteller states that bears live near humans, and that humans respect bears because they have the ability to sniff out child abuse, and to do something about it.

My daughter, Phoebe, loves this album. She likes to sing the chant from "The Bear Child." Also, she thinks "The Making of the Animals" is funny, with the different animals being shaped differently by their creator. The animals try to describe how they want to look, but they keep talking over each other and confusing the creator, who then gets impatient. Mistakes come next. We listen to the copy from the library, often. Maybe we should get our own copy.