Our capacity for understanding and/or making meaningfulness from the Native’s first stories is seriously limited. Dr. Erika Patterson offers us two reasons as to why this is so in her lesson 2:2. The first problem is: the acts of collecting, translating and publishing first stories and the social process of the telling are disconnected from the story. This creates problems for ascribing meaningfulness. We find ourselves questioning who is collecting the stories and why. These questions are problematic because it is difficult to interpret the stories without using European symbolism and mythology.

The second problem that Patterson lays out for us is: the serious time gap of almost 75 years, between 1880 and 1951, when the telling and retelling of stories were outlawed by the Indian Act. Accordingly, the possibilities for storytelling at the potlatch and other similar First Nations institutions across the country were greatly diminished, as was the ability to voice or dispute the ownership rights inherent with the telling of the stories. So in turn, telling first stories today, we can assume, is much different than it was back before the Indian Act was instilled. There are so many different variations of one story, it is hard to decipher the true story from the fictitious story produced through a game like telephone.**

**For those who are unfamiliar with the game telephone: it is a game that requires a group of people. Once in a circle, one person whispers a line, sentence, phrase, or whatever they wish to tell, into the ear of the person next to them. Then that person who received the story whispers into the person’s ear next to them. And so the story telling goes on and on through the entire circle. By the time the story reaches back to the story teller, the story has been completely augmented and changed from its original story. This is because each story teller changes a word or expresses emotion in places that the original story teller did not.

Upon reading Wendy Wickwire’s compiled and edited book based on Harry Robinson’s stories, Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory, I came across a third reason as to why it is difficult to understand or make meaningfulness from first stories. Robinson told Wickwire of “big meetings,” which nowadays are called the Land Question. Robinson states that the problem with the Land Question is that everyone ignored how Indians had come to be here in the first place. The European implicated that land belonged to the European. However, that is not how us Natives see ourselves. We belong to the land, and no justification was/is needed for our presence.

I would also like to point out that Wickwire concurs with Patterson in regards to oral narratives being collected and published in a disconnected European way. Wickwire states that anthropologists who recorded oral narratives limited themselves to a single genre, “the so-called “legends,” “folktales,” and “myths”” (Wickwire, 16). The anthropologists had little interest in the fact that many of their Native narrators were miners, cannery workers, laborers, and missionary assistants who maintained equally vibrant stories about the history of their people and culture. Their editing disrupted the integrity of the original narrative. Wickwire goes as far to state that they systematically suppressed all evidence of history and change. Whether or not that was the anthropologists true intentions, we will never know. However, she does offer us a very strong message, one that made me really think about the stories that I have heard from my na’a and relatives…

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For those who don’t know about the Native terms of Canada or about the Indian Act:

http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-5/fulltext.html

Here is an interesting documentary:

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talon Books2005. (1-30)