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Castellano's fifth characteristic of indigenous knowledge is that it is
conveyed through narrative. And stories and indigenous knowledge are
so fundamentally intertwined, there's so many implications of this characteristic
of knowledge. First of all.
Stories are so important in indigenous worldview, that the language often has
different words to describe different classes of stories.
And, and example that I'm familiar with is Nishnaabemwin.
We have a word for stories that are like legends, stories that occur in, in this,
this very, really kind of historic, pre-historical time but a time that, that
stands for above and for all time. And those are the Aadizookaan, and then
there are the stories that are stories of our experience that we relate to one
another and events that happened that we, we witnessed.
And those are the debaajimolenin. So, we have two different words just for
story. And there's a very ritualized way of
telling the Aadizookaan vein of stories. And those stories contain our, our,
cultural heroes, our tricksters as they've been talked about.
So someone like Nanabozho, who has all of the human elements that make the stories
so, appealing to listen to and humorous and also relatable because they're all
desires and appetites that humans can relate to.
So Nanabozho often gets in trouble because of these appetites.
Whether it's his great hunger, or lust, or you know, many, many other human appetites
and desires that, that tempt him to do things that he shouldn't do.
And part of the reason these stores are told, the reason that knowledge in them is
important is they have a moral component certainly.
Nanabozho makes mistakes so we don't have to.
Yet we often do. So, it's a, that's why it's so important
to keep hearing those stories is to not caught up in the same trapping.
But they also contains a lot of other things that are going on, and you know, I
really encourage you, if you can, to locate Leslie Marmon Silko's work.
And she wrote an essay about how story works and it's, it's in Yellow Woman.
Her yellow woman essay collection. But there's her telling of a story and
you, you, relate to it on one level, the first time she tells it and that's kind of
the enjoyment, the, the, the pure enjoyment of story.
Narratives are appealing and they're also easier to remember for us, as humans to
remember, stories rather than kind of outlines and points of information.
But to hear a story you can often, tell the main elements back again.
After the first time and if you heard them over and over again you can you can often
tell the story with greater detail too. But you first experience the story as
Silko tells it on that level of what happens the plot, the characters but then
she goes on to outline. The knowledge that's contained in the
story, and for oral cultures that were telling stories, the stories did a lot of
work beyond the telling of a story. They encoded geography and history, and
memory, and family roles and responsibilities, knowledge of how to do
things, knowledge in relationship to land about where to find food.
And this would all be encoded in the stories.
So on one level when anthropologist are, are gathering some stories and preserving
stories as they did in late 1800s or early 1900s I don't know if they were at the
time aware of, of the other work that those stories were doing to kind of show
relationship of certain people to certain places.
And Silko does such a lovely job of showing this in that yellow women
collection. So when she recounts the story and says so
that point where the, the characters in the story walk past a mountain and they
say, you see that mountain and it, and you can tell it's this mountain because of
this description. It's, it's kind of setting up a way to
remember how to walk home. So, by describing the journey that the
people in the story take, it's also encoding story for the, the real people
hearing it, so they can say, oh, okay, I know where that is.
That makes the story come to life, but also, is a way that the young ones could
remember how to get home. If I see that mountain, then I know I go
this way and that way, just like the story, and I find the village.
It also is a way of kind of staking our title, not that they were attempting to do
this, in, stories, but by describing, villages place, people's place, our
families place, in relation to certain areas.
It was also kind of encoding, we recognize and acknowledge that, that is the right
place for these people. And, this becomes very important when,
oral testimony is finally allowed, into law, to, determine aboriginal title.
In Canadian cases, especially with, in the West where many treaties were not, entered
into with B.C. First Nations, the, the oral stories that
describe a people's. Connections to a place and their long time
occupation of a place becomes important for those reasons.
So they're, they're kind of mapping out, who can be where.
Who, who has access to a certain resources and that certainly gives an indication of
title and ownership although ownership is. Kind of a foreign concept.
Nevertheless there was an acknowledgement of who, who could be where.
Who had a responsibility to look after certain places?
And, and these are all right in that story too.
In telling these stories they're, they're also telling a history.
So by saying character went to this mountain and then the character engaged in
a battle with this group there. They are also encoding like a long term
understanding of what happened in a, in a place.
There's also cosmology and all kinds of other knowledge that's encoded in the
stories. And for very skillful storytellers, they
know which elements to emphasize and highlight at a given time if they are
using the story to convey the geography, to convey the history, to convey title, to
convey ownership, to convey responsibilities.
To convey relationship, and so that they can, they can stress the parts of the
story that need to make those elements heightened and come, come out.
So the narrative component of indigenous knowledge is just so important.
There are some other elements to the story and I kind of touched on this, but the
mnemonic device of a story. When you tell something in a narrative
form, it's easier to remember and recount. So often times knowledge keepers will,
will tell stories about important things and events that need to be shared with
others. And we can't leave out the important
aspect of how engaging stories can be. So it's, it's often more interesting to
hear the knowledge shared as a story rather than to have the knowledge just
conveyed in a, in a kind of low, low context telling.
So for all these reasons and many more, story and narrative is an important
characteristic of indigenous knowledge and Castellano points that out.
Jean-Paul RestouleAssociate Professor
