As Dr. Paterson alludes to in here second prompt this week, there exist some difficulties when trying to understand or trying to ascribe meaningfulness to First Nations stories. These difficulties arise from the First Nations’ storytelling process and from sanctions against the First Nations, as described by Dr. Paterson, but they also arise from a failed academic approach that looked at myths instead of modern stories.

O.K. Nick, then tell me about the storytelling process. 

While Western histories are understandable by way of close reading alone, First Nations histories are much more complex and elaborate because of the oral tradition of storytelling. When I call it an oral tradition it is almost a misnomer, since it so much more than that, but it is the best English word I can find to describe the First Nations story. Performance makes it sound to informal and dramatic, calling it an oral tradition gives it more authority. Yet beyond the oral aspect of First Nations storytelling is the visual, historical, and temporal aspects that give it a constantly evolving significance. Previous units have shown us that only certain people can tell stories at certain times, and if the conditions are not right these stories may not be told. That is because First Nations stories are more than just words, they have meaning in their delivery, their time, and their place, permitting the storyteller to adjust the tale but keep the meaning intact. This allows the story to grow and evolve over time, and multiple hearings are necessary for one to truly understand the meaning (Robinson, 19).

So why can’t we just watch First Nations ceremonies and understand them now?

This is where the sanction of the previous century weigh heavy on our ability to understand First Nations histories. The Federal government was determined to assimilate the various First Nations across the country, and in doing so they took children away from their families and disconnected generations of First Nations people. Many First Nations celebrations and ceremonies where stories were told, such as the potlatch, were banned by the government as part of the attempted assimilation. Now that we know how important the ceremony of storytelling was it is not hard to see why many histories have been lost. The chain of storytelling was broken, the stories were unable to grow and evolve, and many never had a chance to be retold once bans were overturned. In unison with the potlatch ban was the opening of residential schools that took First Nations children away from their families and placed into Western boarding schools. These children were denied any knowledge of their ancestors existence and where taught Western-Christian value systems that eroded much of the connection to their past. The potlatch ban and the residential school system combined to inhibit an entire generation of storytelling, killing many histories that were never retold.

And how was this compounded by a failed academic approach?

As we see in Wickwire’s book, the historians and anthropologists studying First Nations stories focused more on the classic mythical tales and less on more recent retellings of the classics. Perhaps this was a function of the sanctions as well; the disconnect in the First Nations communities between generations meant that very few stories were retold in the early and mid 20th century and academics glossed over the 19th century retellings because there was no recent evidence that this had occurred. In any regard the academics took the mythological/historical approach they did, as described by Wickwire (22-23), and this left many modern First Nations stories unknown in the literature. Wickwire argues that this “raises questions about the messages that collectors gleaned from their narrators’ stories” (23). Wickwire has made an effort to reconcile this by purposefully seeking out stories with historical ‘impurities’, but the old approach remains a large burden on our ability to truly understand First Nations first stories.

Works Cited

Posluns, Michael. Speaking with Authority: The Emergence of the Vocabulary of First Nations’ Self-government. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Robinson, Harry. Compiled by Wendy C. Wickwire. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talon, 2005. Print.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1.2 Story & Literature.” University of British Columbia , Vancouver. 5 Feb. 2015. Lecture.