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Storytelling

Storytelling has a variety of roles in families, communities, and cultures. Storytelling allows generations to share moral, spiritual, and environmental knowledge, to support roles and relationships in the community, and to pass on individual and community histories and ways of surviving. Storytelling grounds knowledge in place and language. Stories have unique power to reveal truths about everyday life or history, and can inspire social or political activism. Ideally storytelling allows reciprocal and respectful relationships to develop between the listener and storyteller. Importantly, stories and storytelling acknowledge, accept, and value ways in which individuals and cultures are unique.

The preference for written knowledge over oral traditions was a major force in colonization that devalued storytelling. Western educational systems and missionary activity perpetuated the loss of history, ways of knowing, and ways of learning that were preserved through storytelling. Valuing storytelling as a method for learning and knowing can have a decolonizing effect. Storytelling as a method within research projects can promote more meaningful and relevant outcomes for people in communities.

 
 
“A lot of strength I get is mostly from my grandmother who raised me. And when I think I have it tough, think that I can’t go on and live this life in this modern world, in two worlds; the western and my Iñupiat culture…and I think about it and I think about my grandmother who told me stories about, not having enough, barely making it, being cold- if you didn’t work and survive for your family, you- you didn’t survive. So my forefathers and ancestors I really look up to. And I want my children and children’s children to know about who they were when they complain, because it really grounded me. I took my Iñupiat values back, I take the best part of western world and Iñupiat world and try to have harmony. When there’s so much chaos around sometimes. To have that little piece. Nature, I go to nature. I take a walk by the ocean.”