Stories may not actually breathe, but they can animate. The breath imputed by this book’s title (Letting Stories Breathe) is the breath of a god in creation stories, as that god gives life to the lump that will become human. Stories animate human life; that is their work. Stories work with people, for people, and always stories work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided. What is it about stories—what are their particularities—that enables them to work as they do? More than mere curiosity is at stake in this question, because human life depends on the stories we tell: the sense of self that those stories impart, the relationships constructed around shared stories, and the sense of purpose that stories both propose and foreclose

— Arthur Frank, Letting Stories Breathe (2010, as cited in Zipes 2012)

In this lesson and throughout our readings, many explanations (or disclaimers) are offered regarding our contemporary inability to discern true meaning from stories of old–many if which hold true for stories of all origins, beyond our studies of first nations literature. One of these challenges is first presented as a paradox whereby possession is made of the story by the storyteller them-self, thereby modulating the meaning to fit their own circumstance and world view. Thereby, there story changes each time the story is told to fit the advances and alterations concerned with each subsequent generation. This idea closely links to the theory of cultural information transfer known as “memetics”, first developed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970’s. Dawkins contended that a “meme” is a unit of evolutionary memory that is passed down through generations. Modern use of the word has taken reference to referring to technologically aided cultural transmission of symbols, jokes, and various other artifacts–yet the contemporary research being memetics spreads far beyond this use. Researcher Susan Blackmore, in her article “Consciousness in meme machines” states,

When people copy actions or words, those actions or words are copied with variation and then selectively retained and copied again. In other words the actions and words (the memes) fulfil the conditions for being a replicator in a Darwinian evolutionary process (Dawkins, 1976; Dennett, 1995)

This idea very well repurposes this theory into a context of the cultural transmission of morality and information contained within the art of storytelling.

The next reason that is proposed very well reinforces the importance the act of knowledge and morality sharing contained in the first. By outlining the tragedy of residential school systems and the other requirements contained within the Indian Act in Canada–the disconnect from understanding, especially amongst youth removed from their homes and culture–is profound. Between 1880-1951 this practice was banned across the country, thereby limiting most opportunities for the dissemination of stories amongst Indigenous cultures.

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This idea is very important as the residential schools by design directly removed children from the peak time when children are most affected by acculturation and/or develop their sense of place in the world.

This research comes from a interesting article on the phenomenon of cross cultural instances of similar fairy tales–stories which offer meaning to children in moral and social matters. As these children were removed from their communities during these formative times, and instead filled with Western ideology, these values and information were modulated by Western thought. Without placing judgement on that particular aspect, what this obviously presents is a compounding modulation of the stories upon reintegration to fit their altered world view

He meticulously describes why and how memes function for children within a civilizing process, or what he calls acculturation.

Memes, or cultural units of Information such as stories, form meme or culture pools over time. Children’s acculturation depends on

memes, which do not always function smoothly. They undergo change through innovation, the influence of chance events,

the social transmission between populations, the movement of carriers between populations,

the natural selection of cultural variants, preservation through free decisions, and coerced preservation.

Konner points out that “cultural constraints include the limits imposed by technology, mental habit, and other inertial

factors that correspond to stabilizing cultural selection, the default condition of cultural transmission.

Values, imposition, and cultural constraints, among other factors, affect the flow of memes,

so that different ones have different degrees of likelihood of being transmitted to the next generation’s culture pool.

Furthermore,  this gives significance to Harry’s alternation of stories to fit current reframed realities, such as the moon landing, in Wickwire’s introduction.  Wickwire presents two other reasons for the level of skepticism which needs to be applied to stories.  The first is presented by quoting Michael Harkin, “As Harkin explained, the collectors’ goal was to document “some overarching, static, ideal type of culture, detached from its pragmatic and socially positioned moorings among real people. Thus they, “systematically suppressed … all evidence of history and change”” An example of this is offered as removing the symbol of a gun from a published story to better fit the narrative of precontact Aboriginal culture. The anthropologist seeks to capture the wisdom of a “mythteller”, when the stories are told by individual storytellers who inflect their own wisdom unto the stories. You can see how each of these potential problems are all intertwined in a problematic feedback loop of sorts.

While a commonality amongst first nations storytelling can be offered as the interconnected nature of the natural, supernatural, and human worlds–the introduction of outside influences of the latter has modulated our collective recall of the stories themselves. As “Indigenous people had no gods”, the introduction of these foreign settlers emerged merely as varied “spirits” which took the form of human beings.  However, we also see the in Living in Stories how the separation of whites into the realm of a spiritual “Other” is bypassed, in lieu of a direct comparison of wisdom and morality amongst two distinctly similar human beings. Harry Robinson told this story of two twin brothers,

 …A pair of twins (were) charged to undertake a series of important tasks related to the creation of the earth and its first inhabitants. The elder twin performed his duties exactly as instructed, but the younger twin stole a written document— a “paper”—he had been warned not to touch. When confronted about his actions, he denied having done this. Because of this, he was immediately banished to a distant land across a large body of water. The elder twin was left in his place of origin.

This is certainly not to say that the Canadian treatment of Canadian culture makes whites deserving of humanized caricaturization in storytelling–however, what this shows is the retelling of a story to fit modern land disputes as a form of memetic expression and continuity.

Cited

Blackmore, Susan. Consciousness in Meme Machines.

Robinson, Harry. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory.  Talonbooks, 2005.

Zipes, Jack. The Cultural Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales: Human Communication and Memetics. Princeton University Press, 2012\

Memetics. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

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