Home Read & Respond Category: Indigenous/Indigenist Storywork

Archibald, Jo-ann / Q'um Q'um Xiiem. Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. UBC Press, 2008 (pp. 176). https://www.ubcpress.ca/indigenous-storywork

Annotation: Archibald describes what she has learned from her Stó:lō elders through her study of "storywork." She developed that term because it "signified that our stories and storytelling were to be taken seriously" (3). Storywork is educational as it communicates "cultural values, beliefs, lessons, and understandings that are passed from generation to generation" (1). It strives to promote a state of harmonious "holism" or the interrelatedness of individuals, communities, the natural and spiritual worlds. Archibald shares with readers what she learned through a process of carefully attending to how, when, and why elders tell stories to communicate important lessons to their communities. In doing so, she invites us to consider ways we make knowledge as both processes and codes of behavior. Archibald's book interweaves important lessons from oral cultures and storytelling communities to establish a storyteller as one specially encultured in patient practices of listening, contextualized telling, and collaborative making meaning. After grounding her approach in Indigenist principles of responsibility, respect, and reciprocity as well as in the humor and humility of Coyote as trickster-teacher, Archibald offers specific chapters on teaching via storywork. In her conclusion, titled "A Give-Away," she addresses the question of non-Native teachers and Indigenous teachers working across tribal cultures telling specific Indigenous stories, writing that "they must begin with a cultural-sensitivity learning process that includes gaining knowledge about storytelling protocol and the nature of" any stories they may share (150).

Positionality Statement: I came to Archibald's work as I have been seeking to articulate a holistic perspective on how storytelling and narrative form a methodology for teaching, learning, researching, and community-engaged practices. Her concept of "storywork" perfectly names and describes that perspective. I am still sitting with Archibald's chapters on curriculum and pedagogy, and how they open a small, tentative space for non-Indigenous teachers to share public Indigenous stories (oral and/or written) with their students. Although I assign writings by Thomas King, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leslie Marmon Silko, and other Indigenous writers frequently in my courses, I'm unsure about the appropriateness of me (as a white teacher-scholar of all-settler ancestry) assigning decontextualized stories--such as a Coyote story--themselves. A better approach would be to invite an Indigenous teacher-scholar-storyteller to my class instead. Archibald's book, however, contains great lessons on how storywork unfolds as a practice, and the insights she provides about listening, telling, and contextualizing are great for learning about how stories do their work in our human world. In sum, for me, her book has been foundational for my ongoing consideration of stories as life.

Contributor: Nancy Small (nancy.small@uwyo.edu) contributed this source citation on March 26, 2024.

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King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (pp. 172). https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-truth-about-stories

Annotation: This book is a text version of Thomas King's 2003 Massey Lecture Series (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2003-cbc-massey-lectures-the-truth-about-stories-a-native-narrative-1.2946870). King was the first Cherokee author/speaker invited to participate in this noteworthy series featuring Nobel Prize winners and other internationally renowned authors. Because the book is based on King's speeches, it is structured as a series of oral stories, with each chapter beginning and ending with a similar framework. Through his work, King asks readers to consider how the narratives we live in every day--informed by creation stories, literary representations, stereotypes, memories, and histories--shape our views of ourselves and of Others. In the Afterwords, which was not part of the lecture series, King shares a "private story" and reflects over how we can sometimes fail each other, our communities, and ourselves when we are lulled into wrapping ourselves in our own comfort rather than facing our stories head-on. Throughout the book, King weaves in links to other artists and scholars such as Edward Sheriff Curtis, Will Rogers, and Gerald Vizenor, but he makes these "scholarly" or intellectual moves more sparingly. The primary braids in this text are of King's first-hand stories, stories of his close friends, observations on how history and legislation have erased Native communities, and Indigenous stories (such as one about Coyote and the Ducks). Through these strands and how King weaves them together in relation to one another, he calls on readers to (re)consider how our narratives of the past perpetuate the present. At the end of each chapter, he reminds readers that these stories are gifts. He tells us to take the story he has shared and do with it whatever we wish, with one caveat: "But don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story" (29, 60, 89, 119, 151).

Positionality Statement: I came to King's book when I began teaching about storytelling and narrative as sources/practices of great rhetorical power. Because the book is a text version of his speeches, I love how my students and I can study the way he deftly weaves together different topical strands. The result is a whole (chapter, message) that resonates even larger than the sum of its parts. Put in conversation with other texts such as Archibald's Indigenous Storywork, King's book both delivers important lessons on Indigenous experience and serves as a model of how stories can have incredible impact. Because King's lectures and book are aimed at a broad public audience, particularly to those white folks who have not considered how these narratives circulate through time, it's a text that I feel more comfortable teaching as a white professor with settler colonial ancestors.

Contributor: Nancy Small (nancy.small@uwyo.edu) contributed this source citation on March 26, 2024.

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Wilson, Shawn. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing, 2008 (pp. 144). https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/research-is-ceremony-shawn-wilson

Annotation: In his book, Shawn Wilson establishes an Indigenous Research Paradigm grounded principles and values common across worldviews of Native peoples in Canada and Australia (although he does not intend to be exclusive to those geographical areas, see p. 7). In his writing and his theory, Wilson centers relationships, so Research is Ceremony is written in multiple voices and styles, including letters to his sons, "talk story" conversations with friends and colleagues, Wilson's first-person storytelling and commentary, and of course, his scholarly contributions. His paradigm is composed of four interwoven aspects: ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology. At the heart of these concerns are relationality, reciprocity, and respect, all of which contribute to a practice of "relational accountability" (99) grounded in care and humility. Through this book, Wilson asks readers to consider ourselves, our communities, and our environments as interconnected and always in relation. "Research is a ceremony" in that it opens spaces where we might "build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between our cosmos and us" and encourage "a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world" (137).

Positionality Statement: Wilson's book has been influential and transformative to my entire way of thinking and practicing as a scholar-teacher. My dear friend Mysti Rudd recommended Research is Ceremony to me when we were colleagues at an international branch campus of a USAmerican university together. I was struggling with the ethics of importing Western education into our local spaces at the same time I was writing my dissertation, which was a narrative/story-based project. Wilson's writing style affirmed that scholars can speak in a wider variety of ways beyond the detached "disembodied view" of the social sciences, and his lessons on relational accountability re-situated the whole research process for me. I continue to think carefully about my identity as a white Western scholar as I learn from Wilson's work. In an editorial around the same time the book was published and in a subsequent talk published on YouTube, Wilson states that he offered his paradigm to everyone. It is "Indigenist" in its design yet available to anyone--you don't have to be Indigenous to learn from and apply it. That leaves me inspired while also mindful of not lapsing into a mode of appropriation. I come to Wilson and other Indigenous teachers with a good heart and a desire to learn better, more inclusive and mindful practices from them.

Contributor: Nancy Small (nancy.small@uwyo.edu) contributed this source citation on March 26, 2024.

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