When considering the ways in which first stories are understood are complicated, the limitations brought on by a change in media and the systemic destruction of Indigenous Peoples culture through practices such as residential schools. Dr. Paterson’s first potential reason, which is that storytelling is a “social” process, and the nature of hearing or reading them outside this context obviously effects their meaning. This made me think of Linda Hutcheon’s writings about the process of adaptation in her book A Theory of Adaptation. In it she discusses the complications of adapting a work to a different medium namely that “each medium, has its own specificity, if not its own essence” (Hutcheon 24). While her work generally tends to focus on european forms of narrative and media, I believe the case can also be argued for in the context of Indigenous forms of narrative such as storytelling. When stories change forms, they are altered to take a form that is more effective for that form of media. First stories were not only designed to be told orally, but they were initially created to be exchanged within Indigenous communities. Taking them out of this context thus changes how they are told. Dr. Paterson’s second potential reason, which was the structural removal of children (and culture) through residential schools and the Canadian government’s prohibition of storytelling within First Nations communities, is significantly problematic in oral traditions which require that stories be continually shared and passed down. An additional problem that I would suggest is that these first stories, and the stories mentioned in Wickwire’s introduction exist within Canadian/Colonial cultural baggage, linguistic differences, and frame of references. This is exemplified in Wickwire’s introduction when she discusses how anthropologists such as Frans Boaz and Claude Levi-Strauss’s attempts to represent, classify, and record Indigenous and Aboriginal stories created limitations for her own understanding of the stories Harry Robinson told her. For example, Levi-Strauss divided myths into “hot” and “cold” zones and furthermore designated Western mythology as being hot, or changeable and Indigenous mythology as “ahistorical and timeless”. When Wickwire was recording Robinson’s stories, she found that they fit into the category of hot stories, despite Indigenous stories being placed in the “cold” category. When I learned of this, I found it strange to even suggest that cultural mythology would only fit into one of these categories in the first place. In contemporary western culture, we constantly retell stories that fit into the monomyth tradition, with new forms which often exist outside of the historical narrative. The need to classify and distinguish, which is present in the Western academic tradition actively, clouds meaning when we attempt to assign arbitrary distinctions between different forms of storytelling

There is also the problem of translation between languages, particularly when it comes to cultural constructs and practices. This is apparently when the chap-TEEK-whl is translated to unbelievable.  To demonstrate the inherit problems of the shift between differing cultural and linguistic frames of reference, I’d like to turn to a first contact story that focuses not on historical examples of contact but of a speculative future contact in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Darmok” (while the article explores many additional interesting concepts related to language, it is more helpful for understanding what happens in the episode). In that episode the two groups struggle to communicate because the ways which language functions and relates to narrative and storytelling for both groups differs. Since both groups only have understanding of their language and culture, when they attempt to apply that to the other group, meaning becomes confused, just as how it does when we attempt to understand the meanings of first culture stories.