On Shared Stories

Let’s start this blog post by getting anecdotal. (If it’s possible to hear an eye roll, I swear I heard yours, across the Digital Void. Or across the classroom, maybe, depending on when you read this [I see you glancing over your shoulder: I’m watching].) In the interest of time, though, I’ll just give you the Cole’s Notes of my self-indulgent tale. It begins like so: one cold November, young (dimple-cheeked?) grade 10 Brenner travels from Prince Albert to Ottawa to attend Forum for Young Canadians, a non-profit program that hosts high school students from across Canada in the nation’s capital to teach them about citizenship, parliamentary institutions, etcetera, etcetera. I remember the experience vaguely: it was a fun time; I met a lot of people… What I remember most vividly, though, was a presentation from an indigenous leader about residential schools. I remember it best because of its emotional impact: the speaker, justifiably, spoke with some anger, and I remember feeling the weight of that anger acutely. I also remember my kneejerk reaction to rationalize: should I feel responsible for residential schools? I was just a kid, I thought. I rationalized further: surely my fairly humble family history (featuring an orphan train or two) was far removed from the political decision makers who implemented and continued residential school policy. My rationalizing was a direct symptom of wanting to distance myself from the story of residential schools, so I did not have to feel an inconvenient unpleasantness: of guilt, of complicity in perpetrated pain. This story was made proximate to me by a survivor, in a government boardroom on unceded Algonquin territory, and I resisted its gravity.

Something that resonated with me in Cynthia Chambers’ article, assigned to us last week, was its focus on stories. Stories can be hugely socially impactful, Chambers suggests, in that they harness the immense power of the imagination: “While all that glitters may not be gold, it could be,” she suggests. “That is the power of the imagination and of what we learn to believe” (32). Stories are often how people learn, and they are therefore ripe with potential: the power to preserve knowledge rooted in affective experience, the power to educate. However, Chambers also posits a problem with stories: they are so often incomplete, partial: “no story tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; each is a bargain between what can be told and what cannot, or will not be spoken” (33). Perhaps such a problem speaks to the unwillingness of many people to face the full impact of residential schools. People have trouble seeing themselves as implicated in stories of perpetrated harm, because they have constructed their own stories that are incongruous with this cruelty. The story of Chamber’s grandmother, for instance, was one of personal freedom and new beginnings, quite incongruous with the injustices of colonialism. Or let’s return to the Ottawa boardroom: I felt then that the story of residential schools was incongruous with the narrative I had constructed of my own life: I viewed the story of myself and my family as one mainly of love, and this story was backed up by all the stored sentiment that my felt experiences with a loving family had imbued me with. I had a hard time reconciling this with a narrative of shared complicity in injustice and harm.

Given the competing nature of entangled stories, I think one starting path towards reconciliation becomes finding common stories, as treaty people. Chambers does an inspiring job in her text of opening narrative windows for settlers, allowing us to see ourselves in a shared narrative with indigenous peoples. The treaties are “our” story, too, she suggests: a story “about the commons, what we shared and lost” (29). Being treaty people, Chambers suggests, is an acknowledgement that settlers and indigenous peoples now occupy a common land, and we therefore share the common narrative of survival: “What we have in common […] is our need to make a livelihood that does no harm,” state the Ulukhaktokmiut Elders (33). The shared narrative of survival, moreover, is indelibly linked to responsible care for shared land. Our shared story, perhaps, in being one of survival, is also necessarily one of environmental responsibility and care for one another. I think this is what Chambers is getting at, anyways.

Stories, in my understanding, are vessels for felt memory: they store energizing sentiment, and that sentiment can be used. It’s okay to recognize that stories are partial and complicatedly entangled. But in taking opportunities to listen to and acknowledge stories, and accept our role in them instead of turning our backs, perhaps we can learn to channel the sentiment that they store, sublimating it into effective change, collectively “making a livelihood that does no harm.” Embracing indigenous stories of people who know how to care for the land becomes key to this endeavour. Maybe this, in part, is the spirit of Treaty Ed.