Something that resonated with me in the past weeks activities was the story in Nancy Turner’s video about the Grouse. It got me thinking about the importance of storytelling and the protocols in aboriginal communities.
The oral traditions and storytelling culture are still central to aboriginal personal and community identity, and provide major means of remembering and conveying personal and community experience with university researchers. These stories describe stark accounts of betrayal and upset, as well as descriptions of positive experiences. They provide dramatic reminders to researchers of the importance of respectful and collaborative relationships with traditional community leaders and their members.
Given the history of education and research in aboriginal communities, trust is critical in engaging native people in partnerships for education and research. I read a very good article outlying the very importance of story telling and how negative experiences can effect First Nations attitudes toward researchers and education in general for generations. The Article gives examples of negative experiences and suggests that negative stories contribute to a lack of trust and motivation for educational research. Aboriginal people in Canada are still underrepresented in terms of their participation in post-secondary education, and as researchers of their own people. They are overrepresented in terms of poverty, and incidence of certain diseases such as type 2 diabetes, AIDs, and tuberculosis. They are disproportionately overrepresented in prison populations and, in the Western provinces in Canada, are the largest growing demographic group. The importance of good stories of research-community experiences should not be ignored.
Source:
The Importance of Story-Telling: Research Protocols in Aboriginal Communities
Deborah C. Poff
Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics: An International Journal
Vol. 1, No. 3 (September 2006), pp. 27-28
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jer.2006.1.3.27