Anishaa Dibaajimowinan

The stories we just thought up.

Sorry this is late. Book launch things have had me spending October in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Tweed. I'll be home for a few minutes and then I'm off to the east coast with stops in Fredricton and more. I'll be sure and let you know where I'm going to be as soon as I do! You can subscribe the the Bad Indians Book Club podcast in whatever podcast app you use and get the episodes which are set to release every Tuesday whether or not I get the transcription and blogpost done. They'll finish on November 18, a limited run series from those panel discussions I did a couple of years ago that became the foundation of the book and then I'll be back to our regular Nanaboozho stories along with some guest bloggers.

This episode got me thinking about the importance of oral storytelling traditions, not just as a quirky thing that some cultures do but as an important part of collective participation in stories. Oral storytelling requires an audience, perhaps only an audience of one or two but also much larger groups. And the group with which we share the story shapes how we tell the story, it shapes what we emphasize and how we embellish or strip bare the story being told. There is, as Kesha points out, a purity to oral traditions because they lack the filter and polish of the written text.

This is something you may recall from the last conversation about memoir, N'dadibaajim. In that conversation we talked about the ways that the publishing industry itself shapes how our stories are told, the industry decides what we take out and what we leave in. The act of writing also becomes a kind of authority: this is the correct version, the others are incorrect. But oral practices are much different and I wish I had followed up with Kesha on her comment about them being more pure because that is counter intuititive isn't it? How is something that changes so much from one telling to the next, from one generation to the next as history itself gets woven into our stories, more pure? I agree with her, and I'm trying to work that out for myself as well.

It shifts what we think about as purity doesn't it. Because all the shifts and changes in the story itself, all the different ways the story gets told depending on the storyteller and the audience, the location and season, it sounds like impurity. It sounds unstable or unreliable. I grew up evangelical and any difference in the stories had to be explained away, often distorting the stories themselves to force them to fit together. But what if those changes are part of what makes it pure? Because those changes are what helps the audience to hear the core message of the story rather than staying wedded to a version that may not connect with them in the same way. And maybe there is not a single core anyway.

A video crossed my feed a week or so ago about why we should read fairy tales to children. They boost imagination and critical thinking, helping children learn to navigate moral issues and understand the relationship between action and consequence. They offer hope, the hero succeeds despite impossible odds, defeating evil and finding happiness. Familiar symbols and themes create a framework that renders the world comprehensible. We often forget that so much of the world really is brand new to children. They don't have any context for so much of what happens to them. There is language development, cultural literacy, and a way to process pain which is something I hadn't considered. Fairy tales, folk tales, myths, and legends help us to understand pain and explore the things that frighten us from a safe distance.

Indigenous peoples from those here on Turtle Island to Africa, Palestine, and beyond all have traditional stories that do this for us. That shape our children and help them face unfamiliar situations. We can laugh at the antics of Nanaboozho, Anansi, and Clever Hasan but they also teach us the ways in which the world is predictable and demonstrate the consequences of our actions. They teach us that problems, even when they seem enormous, are not insurmountable, and that unlikely friendships may help us accomplish great things. That is, in fact, the entire point of my blog as I work through an archive of traditional Ojibwe stories documented in 1906. Our stories teach us how to live well in this world.

But what happens when our lives become consumed in an interminable, horrifying present?

In an interview, Sonia Nimr says that contemporary stories of displacement, the Nakba, and individual family stories about lost homeland and lost trees are taking the place of folktales. That is devastating, not only for the loss of story but also for the loss of history and future that goes along with it. Our stories gesture towards a distant past, long before our present circumstances, and the kind of future we imagine is based in the kind of past we hold onto.

We all have stories of trauma, of displacement, and destruction. And those are also important stories to tell and to share. But they are not the entirety of us even when it feels that way, and the stories we tell, the often seemingly silly and frivolous stories, are important because we are important and our survival as a living people relies on them.

Episode 7 Bad Indians Book Club

Anishaa Dibaajimowinan, the stories we just made up

Patty Krawec: This is Patty Krawec, your host and the author of Bad Indians Book Club Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds. This podcast series, which formed the basis of the book, brought together marginalized writers and the people who read them. 

There is no conventional word for fiction in Anishinaabemowin, but the phrase Anishaa Dibaajimowinan suggests that there are some stories we just make up. In this episode we hear from authors Waubgeshig Rice, Sonia Sulaiman, and Kesha Christie who share stories with us from Ojibwe, Palestinian, and African/Afro-Caribbean traditions.

Jenessa Galenkamp joins us briefly at the start before focusing on moderating the chat. There were no recommended books this month, just enjoying the oral traditions of the Ojibwe, Palestinian, and Afro-Caribbean communities. Waubgeshig Rice is the author of several books including Moon of the Crusted Snow, Moon of the Turning Leaves, and contributed a short story to Sword, Stone, Table which is referenced in this conversation. Sonia Sulaiman is the editor of Thyme Travellers, an anthology of Palestinian futurisms. Kesha Christie can be found on her website, Talkin’ Tales, where she shares stories as well as her own skills in learning to tell your own story.

There's just too much good fiction out there written by Indigenous people, whether even if we were just to narrow it to the Anishinaabe people, I started with Waubgeshig as the first person I approached about being on the panel. And even if we just limit it to our own nation, there's just so much good fiction out there. And then part of this project, I've really been broadening my understanding of what it is to be Indigenous and who is Indigenous and what that means, to be Indigenous in the place that you're not Indigenous to. How do our stories, and that's part of what Kesha and Sonia talk about, is how do their stories root in this place and help build community and build relationship in this place.

And then what do our own stories have, because our own stories change. That's one of the things that I grew up Evangelical Christian, right? There's one story. That's it. And even though the four gospels are a little bit different, we're gonna shoehorn them in until they're all the same. We're really come up with reasons for why … one thing that I really loved about Anishinaabe stories is how different they are, different communities will have different ways of telling the same, the same story because community needs are different. Perspectives are different and our stories evolve and change over time. And so that's something I'm really excited about hearing because we're going to be sharing stories and then talking about how our stories shape us, how they help us, what they teach us.

Like I said in the email about Daniel Heath Justice’s book, why Indigenous Literature Matter and all of the ways that stories fiction and nonfiction and their evolution and all those ways that they help us be good people, be good relatives, be good ancestors. I'd never thought of speculative fiction as a way of learning how to be a good ancestor and that's such a really neat framing. 

Jenessa: I'm Jenessa, I read The Moon of the Crusted Snow and I read Black Sun, and I read another one by Rebecca, what was the other one? Oh, Trail of Lightning. All of those books are really good. My favorite was The Moon of the Crusted Snow and Trail of Lightning. And I'm not just saying that because we have one of the authors on here, but I really love sci-fi and like apocalyptic stuff and just like talking about like things ending, things being reborn.

Both like Trail of Lightning and The Moon of the Crusted Snow dealt with that. And I thought it was just really cool, like the perspectives of the stories were told from especially like when The Moon of the Crusted Snow, because I feel like it was set, like I might be wrong, but it set like at the beginning of everything happening.

So it was really cool to like, watch things or read things like unfolding and nobody really knows what's going on. I still am like what actually happened? So maybe write a book two ... 

Waubgeshig Rice: Okay. I was gonna talk a little bit about the Arthurian retelling you mentioned Patty off the top. And I just wanna say miigwetch, we for having me, this is super cool.

I was at an event with Sonia back in the fall for the, I think it was the draft reading series. And it's cool to be here with you, Kesha. Just wanna say I'm really looking forward to hearing from everybody tonight. Again, chi-miigwech Patty, this is super cool. I'm in I just wanna acknowledge I'm in my backyard in Sudbury, which is the traditional territory of the Atikameksheng Anishinaabe.

And Sudbury is also known as N'Swakamok. This is all under the Robinson Huron Treaty and I'm originally from Wasauksing First Nation, on Georgian Bay near Parry Sound Ontario. And those are Robinson Huron Treaty lands as well. I’m Anishinaabe and Canadian descent. My dad is from the res and my mom is from town as it goes.

And I live here with my wife and our two little boys, one of which has just gone to bed. I got the monitor here close by, just in case. And my wife just brought our other boy back from soccer. A little bit of excitement is probably coming up, but that's why I planted myself in the backyard just in case.

Yeah, I'm happy to talk more about The Moon of the Crescent Snow as our discussion goes on, but I'll just talk a little bit about the story that's in this anthology. It just was published last week. It's called Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices and it's a collection of Arthurian retellings, or I guess newer versions of the Camelot story.

Yeah I was approached a couple years ago by a writer named Jenn Northington based in Philadelphia. She and her friends, Swapna Krishna were considering doing these Arthurian retellings from the perspective of so-called marginalized people.

And so they wanted LGBTQ perspectives I guess newcomer to these lands perspectives. Race shifting, gender shifting perspectives as well. And when they emailed me, I said I don't really know too much about the whole King Arthur world other than what's in pop culture, right? The sword in the stone movie that Disney put out, many decades ago.

Knights of the Round Table, Camelot, those old movies and so on. And I said, I'm not really sure what I could contribute other than that pop culture perspective. And they said, oh no that's great too. We wanna hear what someone from your background has to say or, can how someone from your perspective can reinterpret, one of these old stories that have been told by white people ad nauseum for centuries now.

And then for me, the easiest parallel I could draw was from my own community's experience with being displaced and being colonized and the excalibur story, the sword and the stone story, is probably the most popular or most renowned King Arthur story about, him pulling the sword from the stone, the excalibur, and then, becoming this revered figure.

Nobody believes that he can do that, etc, etc. But in, in my community, when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties I was very fortunate to be a kid in a time where the adults and the elders were really making widespread concerted efforts to reclaim the Anishinaabe customs bring the stories back, bring ceremonies back, and so on.

So as I was a kid growing up in the eighties and nineties, I saw this sort of reawakening in my community, and I had a very positive impact on me and my family and my peers and so on, because we were fortunate to grow up with I guess a clearer sense of identity than many of our ancestor family members did as a result of colonialism, so one, one story in our community that persists today in recent history is that we don't know where our drums are. Where I'm from originally is on Georgian Bay, as I mentioned our ancestors migrated up and down the North shore of Lake Huron in Georgian Bay since time of memorial, as they say.

But once the Robinson Huron Treaty that was signed in 1850 was, I guess interpreted and then enforced by what became Canada after 1867 that the way the authorities interpreted that was to displace my ancestors from the mainland and put them onto this island called Parry Island. But, traditionally known as Wasauksing by our ancestors.

So what happened then was, forestry became the primary industry in what became the Parry Sound Ontario area. That was the end of the world. That was the apocalypse for my ancestors, and that happened only to my grandmother's grandparents' generation, right? So that's only four generations ago, ultimately, so not long ago at all.

So I've known that experience my entire life, and that's what really inspired Moon of the Crusted Snow in many ways too. But with the drums specifically, there were stories about people in our community holding onto these really old, really revered drums, but nobody knows where they are now, because after being displaced from a mainland went out to the island, and then the Indian agents came onto the island and was, tasked with upholding the Indian Act.

And that meant forbidding, ceremonies, culture, celebrations, gatherings, et cetera. And that also meant taking the drums away. So those drums were either confiscated and destroyed by the Indian agent. I'm sure some of them were. But some of them, they said, were also hidden away. Were also protected somewhere.

But somewhere along the way, that knowledge has been forgotten. So nobody really knows where those drums are. And so when I was thinking about the Excalibur story I, I drew a direct parallel to that because we have this, these tangible items in our communities, recent history that we're unaware of, that nobody has seen since, the displacement of colonization and so on.

Ultimately finding those drums again would be a pretty important moment. So I wanted to write about that in this sword stone table methodology. So the story I wrote is called Heartbeat. It is set in the 1980s. So at the time when I was a kid and it follows a 12-year-old boy named Art. So Arthur. And he has this elder figure named Merl, Merlin, so he goes to this elder, and the elder tells some stories about the drums and Art comes from a very, I guess colonized family. There's a lot of shame connected to the Anishinaabe culture and language and so on in his family.

But he has this desire to learn more about being Anishinaabe himself. And he, connects with this elder to discover that. And then the elder tells him the story about these drums that are hidden somewhere in the community. So I won't give the story away too much, but, ultimately Art makes his quest finding those drums and hopefully delivering them to his community once again.

So that connection with the drum I saw really inspire and invigorate my community as a kid because, when our, my parents' generation like my dad and his peers specifically it was a lot of the men who were going through some pretty tough times, living in pretty destructive ways.

But they decided that they wanted to get out of those cycles and find ways to raise our generation in a happy and healthy way. So what they did was found elders to come into our community to teach them drum songs and so on. So again, though we didn't have our own drums. And, there's this mystery that's loomed over us for a long time about where exactly they may be, but they made do with what they had as best they could. And that meant so just to back up a little bit, we had this elder who would come in from a neighboring community. He'd bring a big drum and we would sit at the drum and we'd learn the songs and we'd learn the rhythm and so on.

But then, this elder who would leave who would bring these drums in would leave. And then we didn't have anything to practice on. So my dad and his buddies decided that, we're going to need something to practice on because we don't know how to make our own drums yet. We don't know where our drums are.

So what they did was they got in the car and they drove down to Orillia, to a pawn shop, and they saw like a rock drum kit, like a bass drum, floor to high hats and so on, right? And they said to the guy we just want the big drum, how much for the bass drum? And I guess the guy looked at them funny. He was like if that's all you want, however much, right? So they bought the bass drum, brought it back and they turned it on his side. And they're like, okay, that's the same size as a pow wow drum. That's gonna be our practice drum from now on.

Then they're like, oh, I guess we need sticks. We don't know how to go out into the bush and get the right kind of sticks for drumsticks. So let's take tent poles and fishing poles and cut them down and then take foam around the end. So my earliest memories of learning how to drum are, on this big bass drum with these like foam tent pole drumsticks, like that.

Looking back, it was a really, like DIY kind of punk rock way of reconnecting with culture and reclaiming it. But ensuring that there was that rhythm there, that heartbeat and those songs, those melodies, again to echo through our community. In some ways I'm always inspired by that because it shows how the resilience but also the ingenuity of Indigenous people in reclaiming these things have been taken from us in really creative ways because, there's nothing else around us to support us doing that.

We're very much on our own. So that was basically the the main inspiration behind that Heart Beat story. So again, if you're interested, you can order it online, published by vintage, so Sword, Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices. 

Patty Krawec: I love that story about the drums because I think we get so caught up in the “sacrit”, right?

And I'm spelling that S-A-C-R-I-T it's sacred the way we think about it. And it's, and it's gotta be in a certain way and it's gotta be done right. And I don't wanna diminish that because if culture is the transmission of knowledge and that, our connection to everything became before it matters, but not when it gets in the way.

Not when it gets in the way of trying to reclaim these things that were stolen from us. Because if they had allowed it to get in the way, then you guys wouldn't have had that practice. That's not the right kind of drum. And then you wouldn't have had anything at all.

And you wouldn't have, and really, we lived at the bush. How pure could we have been in terms of how things were done? Come on, like skirts to the ankle? I don't think so. Not practical, not practical at all. No. But now I'm gonna throw to Sonia because you all, you have a story also about something that's coming back. Coming back to Fox. Fox loses his tail. 

Sonia Sulaiman: Hi, I am Sonia. I live at the, I believe it's called the Third Meeting Place of the Council of Three Fires in Windsor, Ontario.

And I'm a first-reader at Strange Horizons Magazine. Otherwise, I am telling folk tales and talking about folklore on Twitter all the time, like twice a week usually. And I think this is really opportune because the last time I did a reading like this was of a folk tale during the day, which is actually taboo in the way that the traditional storytelling works in Palestinian folktales.

It's the evening that is opportune for these types of stories. Women typically told these types of stories. They were called, sort of informally, stories that are all lies from beginning to end. And this contrasted with the men who told stories which were putatively true. So they were considered biographies rather than the lies that the women told.

I don't know any of the actual, like these are the mental epics and they're pretty much like these long romances in the sense of an adventure like the Australian Legends. And I don't know any of those 'cause they were very hard to I think pass down through the disruption that the Palestinians faced with their displacement.

And actually one of the interesting things about Palestinian folk tales is that there was a movement to try to preserve them in the late, in the early forties. So just before the displacement of the Palestinian people, there was this sense that the folktales were being lost, the old ways were being supplanted by these Western modes of living.

A lot of it's transmitted through the lens of orientalists. And so I read a lot about their concern about the primitive culture and the, I think one book even termed it like savage semitic traditions being lost as we get modernized. So that was a concern before the, in the process of colonization of Palestine, that this is what the British typically were concerned about.

They used to study us to see what remained of biblical cultures essentially, so they would look at folk tales for some kind of a clue to stories that are passed down in the Old Testament, the Torah and things like that. I did prepare a story today. It's called it's, it doesn't actually have a name, but it's been passed down as the tale of how the fox got his tail back.

And so of course, before I tell the story, there was traditionally several things that were done. So there was the sort of nonsense poetry that was told, and it was I don't have any prepared, but it was called a mattress because it was meant to get the audience to be rested and settled in. And so it just bi bodi boo type of, didn't make any sense, but just getting people comfortable and like in the mindset that this is now a kind of sacred time.

And the being a special kind of time, it was open to a supernatural intervention. And you would also do a blessing before you would actually begin the story itself. Because it was if you don't, well in most folk tales and folklore in Palestine, you have to bless before you begin anything because it can be influenced by the djinn in particular, that there're always like on the periphery waiting to interfere in things.

So one of the issues that I typically face when I tell these types of stories is how to do a blessing with a mixed crowd or a general crowd. So I think this time round, just if you can think for yourself just for a few minutes of something that's a blessing in your tradition or in your spiritual path or in your life, even if you wanted to just say, it's all good, anything would work for me just a little bit. And you don't have to say it out loud just in your heart. 

For the fox to get his tail back, he has to lose it first, right? So he went to this woman who was, she was boiling some milk, and it was really getting nice and sweet and steaming. And the fox came over and he thought, I'll just take a little sip of that because it looks really good. She won't know, just take a little bit.

And before she knew it, he drank the whole thing, and woman came up and she grabbed his tail and he said, “gimme my tail back”. And she said, “you can get your tail back when you return my milk”. And he said, “how am I going to do that?” And she said, “there are my goats. Go over there and milk them.”

So the fox went over to the goats and the goats said, “well, we can give you some milk”. And they stroked their beard and they were like thinking about it. And they said, “but first we need some fodder. So go over to the olive trees and bring us some branches, and then we'll give you some milk in return.”

So the fox went over to the olive trees, and olive trees were swaying and just enjoying the sunshine. And they said, “why do you need branches for?” And he said, “oh, I need to get some fodder for the goats, that the goats will give me their milk so I can get my tail back.” And the tree said, “we'll oblige you with some branches, but first we need a human to come and dig around our roots because we're really getting bunched up and crowded.”

So the fox goes, “okay, I gotta find a human now.” So he went out looking and he found a plowman, and the plowman was just resting in the shade. So he walks over to him and he explains his situation and the plowman says, “I'd be happy to dig around the olive trees, but I don't have any suitable work shoes. My boots are all full of holes.”

So the fox says, “what am I going, how am I going to help you?” And he says, “go over to the cobbler and ask for some shoes.” So the fox goes over to the cobbler in the village and the cobbler says, “why is a fox coming over to my shop?” And the fox says, “oh, it's a long story uncle.”

And he tells the whole thing from beginning to end and the cobbler says, “I'll tell you what. I do have an old pair of work boots, and you can have it for free and just bring it over to the plowman.” And so the fox brought the shoes to the plowman. Plowman got up and put them on, went over and dug around the olive trees.

The olive trees were happy they could get all the nutrients and spread out some more. So they danced and they let their branches down for the fox, and the fox took the branches back to the goats. They then gave them, gave the fox milk, and the milk was restored to the old woman, and the old one gave him his tail back.

So now my story is flown, as they say, like a bird from my hand to your hand. That's one of the traditional endings for a Palestinian folk tale. And that I think highlights why the stories have to keep changing with each telling. It's not, the way I've told it this time is not the same as the last time I've told it, and it won't be the same as next time.

And when I write it also, it's each time I write it, it's something a little bit different. There's a little essence that's different to it, but I think this particular story is one of my favorites because it really gets to the interrelatedness of all things. You have here a lot of threads that run through Palestinian folktales and folklore about the beingness of the trees and even their stories about buildings having consciousness and taking part in this kind of chain of events that could go either towards building a community or showing the collapse.

If there's a in one story, the, it's a louse that dies and which is a creature that's typically looked down on and is like a pest or is considered dirty and reviled, and that's the word I'm looking for. And even that death causes the whole collapse of an entire community of beings including the dump that is bordering the village. So everything mourns in that case. But this story is about it building up the community that there was this wildness coming in the form of the fox coming into the settled place. And there was also like a dichotomy in Palestinian folk tales about the wilds and like the nomadic peoples and the settled peoples. So there's stories about Bedouin that come in and there's also the Mamdani, the city people. So you have all the stuff that goes on the stories and it's very organically fizzy. 

Patty Krawec: I like that connectedness of it. And the little fox, he's not being bad, he's just being a fox. This is what foxes do, right?

Yeah. Like he's not being, like a terrible. He's just being a flock and then. But then, yeah, like you said, everything has life. And I've been reading, I just finished Tyson Yunkaporta's book about Sand Talk and and he also talks about how the connectedness of everything and, and I've been writing my own book and thinking through how we're connected to things and stones have life and you know so the goats, they want what they want and it's all very yeah. The olive trees need something very particular done and, we all need something and just, I don't and then, Waub’s books too go into how connected things are, with Moon of the Crusted Snow, the infrastructure down, some falls apart and that. Impacts, they impact things up in the north.

Sonia Sulaiman: And yeah, they used to build cairns of stone and they'd called them witnesses because they believed that at the day of judgment that the stones would actually speak to witness for the worshipers when they go out in the fields to do their worship. They didn't actually have to get to the shrine or to the mosque. They could get within sight of it, and they would build one of these stone cairns. And that was what was called a witness. And so I always thought that was beautiful. 

Patty Krawec: Okay. Now that makes me think of what just happened in Winnipeg when Wab Kinew, because he was an honorary witness for the truth and reconciliation comission. And so he took in all of that testimony that was being given, the events that he went to. 'cause, the ones that he went to and his job as a witness was to confront untruth. When it came forward. And so when oh, I can't even remember his name now. But when he got up the minister, the new minister of Indian things reconciliation, I think he is minister. But anyway, when he gets up and he starts talking about the good intentions of people in residential schools and Wab Kinew confronted him because that was his job as a witness. He wasn't like being rude or disruptive. That was his job. And so like when you talk about these stones having light, being a witness, when we behave in bad ways, when we behave in ways that are contrary to agreements made, this is their job to speak up in some way. And, we don't always have the willingness to listen. 

Sonia Sulaiman: Yeah. And I've heard about Palestinian priests who have talked about how if things continue the way they're going, all that will be left in the Holy Land are Holy stones. 

Patty Krawec: So the d’jinn, before we move on to Kesha, I know from watching X-Files and bad Disney movies, I know things about d’jinn, but I'm sure that what I know is really not true.

Sonia Sulaiman: It's very different in Palestinian folklore than in general Islamic folklore. In Islamic folklore. I believe all believers have to believe in the existence of d’jinn. If I'm not mistaken, I'm, I could be wrong. Along with angels and so on. These are beings that are created by God and that the d’jinn were created from smokeless fire as an element whereas humans were created from the earth.

And so that sets us apart as two completely different beings. But in Palestinian folklore, there's a spin on it and it's completely different. In fact the story goes that Eve had too many children. She couldn't actually nurse all of her children. And so she was secretly exposing half of them and Adam became aware of this and he asked God to protect them. And so God hid them away. And d’jinn comes from the word for the hidden ones. So that's the way I, maybe it could be that the Palestinians took the etymology and back engineered the story, that in fact this is what's going on.

So you, they did have stories about half d’jinn, half human lineages, and even entire Bedouin tribes that were supposed to have been descended from d’jinn and humans. So it was a very messy line between the two in Palestinian folklore. Whereas in the broader, they were more like. No, it's, no they're different things, ou can't really have that kind of relations going on. But yeah, they were considered to be almost like the fae, like they're bordering on, like they're always present waiting to trip people up for not do, not showing proper respect in particular at thresholds, sort of wherever, they're also in water that's not covered by the sun, so in wells and things like that. So they thought they were hiding in there.

Patty Krawec: like trickster figures?

Sonia Sulaiman: they have because they're in Palestinian folklore, because they're human adjacent. They have the whole spectrum of morality that humans do. So there are evil ones, there are good ones. There are actually, they have human religions and they have spirituality so that you could find a Muslim d’jinn who has gone on the Haj, for example. But you'd also find just a trickster figure type of d’jinn too. Usually you would have to respect their place and they would respect yours type of thing. But I think that it carried over with how they treated other factions of people because, or even other beings, because you also had to show respect. So if you dropped bread on the ground, for instance, you had to pick it up and ask respect ask a permission, it was called, to pick it back up again. So it was like a general way of carrying yourself that you showed respect for other beings and. They thought that the foxes had their own chief, for example, the animals had a kind of parallel political structure to humans. 

Patty Krawec: Yeah. The world is so much more complicated than we think. There's so much more going on. And I think, and then I love that about our stories just the recognition that there's so much more going on. And then that brings us to Kesha. 

Kesha Christie: Good evening everyone. I am so glad to have the opportunity to share with you this evening. So much has been shared already and the consensus is about connection. And I like to say that the folk tales and the stories that we share connect our past to our present and our present to our future or future to our present.

So we're constantly connecting or steering in a way. And as we tell the stories. It's like Sonia said, every time you tell a tale, even if it's the same story, you've told it five times or there are five different tellers, you're getting a completely different story each time simply because they're picking up different energies.

I like to think of the stories we tell as energies. 'cause there are times when stories have found me. It was my responsibility to share that story, but I didn't understand what that was when I first started telling. But it's interesting how you can get up and want to share a story one way, but there's a message that needs to be presented.

For example, the stories that we tell are as old as time. They've been passed down generation to generation, but they're always relevant. And I think that's the little magic for lack of a better word, every time you tell a folk tale somehow. With either one person or there's that familiar energy that makes it current, it makes it relevant.

And so when you add the new voices to it, it doesn't change the story so it becomes unrecognizable. It gives it a different power because it's relevant in the time. Adding that new voice, adding that new perspective, we're not changing anyone's mind, just giving them a different way of looking at it or whatever the situation is.

For me, I didn't know I was a storyteller, but looking back on my experiences, I see now that I've always been, I used to write poems over here and then I would witness or I would see the storytellers from the Caribbean presenting. And then, you get busy with life and life takes you in whatever direction. You just follow the direction. And then there came to a point where I looked around and I thought, where are our storytellers? It's not enough to just be Canadian, it's not enough to be African, it's not enough to be Jamaican or Caribbean. There's more meaning behind it. And right now it's great 'cause when we think of culture, we think of clothes and the music.

But I knew there was something a little bit deeper that I wanted to share with everyone. But I was afraid, really, introvert, not wanting to really share my feelings, afraid to be judged. But then I realized that when you're telling or when you're sharing your story, it's not about you, it's it. It's not about me at all.

It's the story, it's that energy. It needs to just be brought out into the world and it'll be taken and changed, accepted or denied by who's receiving it. So I'm just giving it a platform, which is so necessary, especially now that we're insta this and that instant gratification. It's so important to slow it down and remember who we are so that you can go forward with a better understanding of yourself or even a better understanding of those who came before you. And I found that so many cultures outside of mine had traditions that they were passing down. And when I looked around, I thought okay, so we're passing down music. We passed down some cooking. But then the gems of my culture are really the proverbs.

So when I looked to proverbs, they were always those tricky little phrases that older people always said, and no one knew what they meant. However, somehow when that proverb gets thrown at you and you don't know what it means, some point in your future, that proverb comes to you right in the moment where the meaning is revealed.

And now you're thinking, ah, I got it. But if I'm having that aha moment, but I'm not sharing it with the generation to come, where does their aha moment come from? Why don't, you know? So I realized at that point that I needed to fill a gap. I needed to stand in the space. Looking around, the storytellers don't all look like me.They don't all sound like me. And even if we're sharing the same story, the way I tell it would be very different. Like I would throw in the proverbs that no one knows, but now they do. 'cause they're feeling that experience. And the more we share every story, we're now giving our children an opportunity to understand more about who they are.

Because now they're seeing their history they're hearing their history as opposed to reading alone, their history. 'cause it's great to have text, but we understand that those who write the text, write it how they want it to appear. This oral tradition of sharing it's pure. There's no filter on it. Yes, we can add to, we can add to the present time or there are little tweaks where we change here and there, but it's the purest form of history that we can give. And it's really coming from, literally coming from our ancestors. Because if you're just the platform to share that story has come through a few times.

So now it's coming through you to deliver a specific message, which is, I dunno, it's, it gives me chills every time I think about it. So before, I do think of myself as a storyteller, I just told stories that happened to be from the Caribbean, but then when I fully understood the stories that I tell traveled from Africa, they traveled from a place that I've never been to. They can, and the people that live there were taken. They were brought to the Americas, they were brought to the Caribbean, they were brought to different places, but there are so many that didn't make it. So their stories were actually saved from in that journey so that they could be shared at the new destination.

So that I could now tell the story that originally came from Africa. And what I love now is that the stories that I tell, I often try to weave the tale. Like I'll tell one story it seems like I'll tell it twice, but I'll tell the African version and then I would tell the Caribbean version because then it gets all those cultural textures to it when it's told from the Caribbean end of it.

So the story that I wanted to share tonight really gives us an idea of where stories came from. It really highlights the trickster character, which is Anansi. Anansi is a mythical creature, and he, I'll call him, he was fashioned after the Ashanti spider God. So the Ashanti people lived in Africa, in the area that we now know as Ghana. And the stories are crafted in a way where Anansi has the face of a man and the body of a spider. He's known as being a trickster character, but of course, with every trickster character, he's got his little quirks. He's known as being lazy and always trying to get out his own way in many things. But there's times when all of his foolish behavior or his trickery benefits everyone.

And this is how stories came to the world.

Long ago. Long ago, people worked hard. They would tend to their lands, they would cook their meals, they would gather in the evening, sit by the fire and sit and look and sit. They would go to sleep and repeat the next day. Now, when Anansi saw this and thought the people need stories, there is one person who held all of the stories in the world and that was the Sky God Nyame.

Anansi decided at that point that he was going to go and see Nyame and get those stories. He fashioned a web and went up into the sky to seek an audience before Nyame. “Nyame, I want your stories. The people need your stories.” Nami laughed, “Anansi, who are you? Many have come before you and failed. What makes you think you can pay the price?”

And Anansi thought, “Let's find out the price.” Nyame said, “You'll have to bring me three things. First, you'll bring me Onini, the snake who can swallow a goat whole. Next you will bring me Osebo. Osebo is the leopard whose feet are as sharp as spears, and finally bring me Mmoboro the hornet who stings like fire.

Ooh. And then she thought to himself, “this is a big price,” but he will pay it. The people need their stories.” Now all of these animals except Mmoboro were bigger than Anansi, so he would have to be very smart. So Anansi accepted the challenge and came back down to earth. When he came back down, he looked at the people and smiled because he knew that he would bring them the stories.

He thought and thought the night through until he came up with a plan. First he needed to get Onini. Anansi went out into the forest and grabbed a long bamboo stick. He threw it over his shoulder and started walking through the forest talking to himself. I don't think so. Onini was passing through and saw Anansi quarreling with himself.

“Anansi, why do you quarrel with yourself?” “Ah, my friend, I'm not quarreling with myself. I'm quarreling with my wife. She says that you are smaller than this stick and weaker. I think that you are stronger and longer, but I don't know how to prove I’m right.” “Yes, that is easy, Anansi. Lay down her stick and I will lay next to it.”

So when Anansi did. “I'm still not sure when I think you are longer, you move your head or when I look again, you move your tail. I might have to tie you to the pole.” Onini agreed. So Anansi spun a web, he tied some around Onini’s head, his tail, and a whole bunch of places in the middle. When he was done and Onini was snug to the pole, Anansi laughed. “You are caught.” And Anansi picked up the bamboo stick and took it up to Nyame. Nyame smiled out of one side of the mouth. Off Anansi went 'cause he had more work to do because when he came back down he had to fashion a plan in order to get Osebo, the great hunter.

He took the same path every night to catch his prey, but there needed to be a plan in place and Anansi had one. He dug a big wide deep hole along the path that Osebo takes every night. When he was done, he covered it over with leaves and sticks and a little bit of dirt. When Anansi was satisfied, he went home for the night and out came Osebo sleek, cunning, stalking his prey, he took one step too far and he fell into the hole that Anansi had dug.

He couldn't get out. He tried and could not get out, and was stuck in that hole till morning. That's when Anansi passed by. “Oh, Osebo how did you get down there.” “Get me out, Anansi. Get me out.” Anansi looked at the predicament. What would he do and how would he get Osebo out? He saw a skinny tree. He thought to himself, this would work.

“Will you kill me and my family?” “No, Anansi get me out.” Osebo said. So when Anansi bent the tree over into the hole fashioned a web and let it down, when he did he said, “tie this around your tail.” Osebo followed. And then when Anansi was satisfied, he'd let go of the tree, which flew up to its proper height, and Osebo came out of the hole, bouncing around, spinning in circles.

He was so dizzy, and while he was spinning Anansi twirled the web and wrapped him up tight when he was done and Anansi laughed, “you're caught” and took him up to Nyame. Nyame smiled outta both sides of his mouth. There was more work to do. So Anansi came back down to earth this time, he had another plan.

Easy plan. Mmoboro, his sting was like fire and he was angry, but Anansi had a very good plan. On his way home, he found a calabash, and when he plucked it, he opened it up and scooped out all of the goodness, all of the flesh, and he rinsed it out and put in water. When he got to Mmoboro’s nest, Anansi took a deep breath and he took another one, and then he poured water on himself, and when he was good and wet, he threw water on Mmoboro’s nest and the hornet and his family were angry and they came out fighting.

Anansi stood close by with a large leaf over his head and he said, “oh, the rainy season has come early. Oh, Mmoboro, your home is all wet. What will you do? I know. Why don't you get into my gourd, my calabash here, and you can stay there until your home is dry.” There had no choice. Everywhere was wet or so they thought, and in every one of them flew.

Zing. When the last Hornet flew in and Anansi took the leaf and pugged the hole, he took the calabash up to Nyame and presented it. Nyame laughed. He said, “Anansi, I told you to bring me Mmoboro and you'll bring me a calabash. What am I to do with this?” Nayme shook and he could hear the hornets vexed inside. Nyamelaughed a whole hearty laugh. “Anansi, bigger men than you have failed. But you have come and you have earned these stories.” He took the stories out from under his throne, presented the box to Anansi and said, “Anansi, these stories are your stories. You have paid the price, and anyone who tells these stories must know that they belong to you.”

Yes. Anansi took the box, came back down to earth, and he looked at all the people who were sitting around the fire with nothing to do, and he started to give out stories. He gave out stories to everyone that was present and those who weren't. Their families received stories and the people told stories to each other, to their children's children, and this went on and on.

Until this day, you can still hear of spider stories in Africa. They all know about spider stories. And now, I'm telling you a spider story, so I encourage you to go out and share this one too. 

Waubgeshig Rice: I think for me hearing those trickster bush stories when I was a kid really firmly placed me in. You can hear, I think you probably hear this crow. There's Nanabush, a story about the crow, right? Once upon a time as the story goes, the crow was formerly a very colorful bird, with a very cool song but it was very cocky at the same time, and it thought it was better than every other bird around it.

To tell a very condensed version of this Nanabush took it upon himself to humble the crow because the crow was bullying some of the other birds around it. And what it did was, what Nanabush did was drag pull the crow down, drag it through the mud, and then snip its tongue so that it couldn't sing its beautiful song anymore.

So the crow makes this caw noise. Caw, caw, caw. Which in Ojibwe or Anishinaabemowin means no.  It is saying no Nanabush. No, don't take my colors away. Don't change my song. That's why we hear the crow saying, gaawiin it's caught to Nanabush. So anyway, yeah, just having a crown nearby and, saying it's vocalizing whatever its sound is reminds us of that Nanabush story.

And the moral in that story is to be humble, right? To not place yourself above anybody else or anything else in creation, because we're all meant to be, peers, we're all meant to be kin on this earth on this land. And we're meant to work together and live together. And so that's what Nanabush story always taught me, and I think like in many ways, those really short, often entertaining and funny Nanabush stories are geared more towards kids to pass those morals or those lessons down, right? There's like a similar story about the birch tree, what we call wiigwaasaatig, the birch tree, as we know, has, these horizontal markings on it, these brown and black markings and the similar stories that the birch thought it was the most beautiful tree and Nanabush humbled it as well by, marking up its spark and so on. So you can walk through the bush and, see that first tree, you can hear the crow. You can be reminded of these Nanabush stories. You can walk on the rocks near the lake and see lichen and moss on the rock. There's a Nanabush story around that too.

Patty Krawec: Tell that one. 

Waubgeshig Rice: Yeah. So essentially and as everybody has said, it's interesting because I've heard different versions of this throughout my life depending on where I go, depend on who the elder is, who's sharing it. And like you can hear these regional and community influences depending on where you hear the story, right?

So then the Anishinaabek that I'm descended from are on, the North shore of Lake Huron and Georgia Bay, as I mentioned earlier. But you can go a little farther south, and hear a similar version with slightly altered details but with the same core moral or the same core lesson, right?

Which is super interesting because that's what binds us together, are these morals that are passed on in our story. So anyway the story of Nanabush and why we have lichen or moss on rocks goes back to Nanabush preparing for the winter. Fall is coming. Nanabush has had a really good summer. He has  put off preparing for the winter because he's had a good time, swimming, eating berries, just relaxing, enjoying the sunshine and so on. But as it starts to get colder, he thinks, oh geez, maybe it's time to start getting ready. I should go out and gather some food.

My preparation for my winter lodge and so on. So he's walking along the beach and he doesn't see anybody else around. And he thinks, oh no maybe all the geese have left already. Maybe I'm gonna miss out on that potential food source. So he is walking along and then he hears this a bit of commotion up in the bush and he says, “oh, I wonder what's going on up there. I thought everybody was gone, but let's go see what's happening.” So he walks into the bush and he sees this big gathering of geese, and they're all celebrating. They're having a party and they're singing, they're dancing and so on. So Nanabush goes up to one of them and says, “Hey Goose, what's going on here? What are y'all doing?” And the goose says, “Nanabush, we're getting ready to go down south. We're just having our last celebration here up in these homelands. We're giving thanks for the good summer that we had and we're making our preparations for our long flight down to the south.”

And he said, “oh, okay. May I join you in your celebration?” And the goose says, “yeah, of course. Come and join us. Come and dance, come and sing. Offer us one of your songs and one of your dances.” So Nanabush takes a look around and he notices that, the geese are nice and plump, they're getting ready for this long haul.

And he thinks, “whoa, there's a few dozen here. Perhaps this is my bounty for the winter. Perhaps I can hunt all these geese on the spot and I'll be set for the winter.” So he goes back to the goose, he was talking to, and he says, “Hey Goose I got a song for you all. I can, show you this dance that we do where I'm from, and will you join me? Can I offer this to you? And can we celebrate together? And the group says, “yeah.” So Nanabush says, “okay, so what you gotta do is you gotta close your eyes and you just gotta twirl around in a circle. That's the dance.” And puts us in the circular motion, like the cycle of life. And it's a very sacred thing.

But he's bullshitting this goose at the same time. He's just making this up, right? So the goose says, “okay, miigwetch, thank you, Nanabush. We will do this dance. Please lead the way.” So Nanabush closes his eyes and starts in a circle, and then all the geese start doing. So then Nanabush sees his chance and he goes up and he wrings the neck of one of the geese, goes to the next one, goes to the next one, goes to the next one, and essentially slaughters all the geese that are celebrating in the bush. So at the end of his little song, a few dozen geese on the ground there. So Nanabush says, “okay, I got my bounty for the winter. I'm good to go.” So he hauls 'em all back down to his spot on the beach where he was thinking about setting up a lodge, and he stacked them all up.

So he starts a fire and he starts preparing to make his own meal for the evening. And he cooks one of the geese. And he eats it all, and he gets full. And by this time he is, a little slower, a little, larger and so on. And he's a little fatigued from, the excitement, so he says to his butt, his rear end.

He says, “okay, butt I’m going to have a little nap. So I want you to keep an eye out, make sure nobody steals all our food. This is all our food for the winter. I'm gonna go have a sleep.” So Nanabush passes and he wakes up a little while later and the sun starting to go down, and the fire’s starting to go out.

And he notices that there's just legs of the geese that he was cooking to eat later. And then the rest of the geese are gone. And he says, “what, rear end, you're supposed to pay attention. You're supposed to keep an eye out. Now all of our food is gone for the winter. Now I'm gonna punish you.”

So when Nanabush sticks his butt, into the fire to set it on fire. And he, in this moment of sort of confusion and greed, he forgets that his butt is connected to his body and that he's actually harming himself. So his butt catches on fire and he notices that he's actually in pain. So he is oh, geez. So he runs over to the rock and starts sliding down on his butt, scraping his butt off the rock to try to put the fire out.

So what remained was, these colorful sort of trend markings on the rocks. So that's the lichen that we have today. Those little green sort of leafy things and in the form of moss as well. And when we see, the moss and the lichen when we're going swimming in the summertime, it reminds us that, oh, Nanabush wasn't ready. He got greedy and he ended up screwing himself over. When you see that lichen just make sure that you're preparing yourself for the winter and that you don't get too greedy, you know that you're part of a community and that you're part of wider creation. So that's one of the versions of that story.

It is usually called the Nanabush and the geese. Yeah. There are variations of it from communities to community. 

Patty Krawec: I love the number of, butt stories that there are, in Anishinaabe culture we have so many butt stories. You guys have no idea.

Yeah. Wait, I got a collection of stories that actually I sent to my, one of my kids. They’re traditional Lac Seul old stories and some of them were really rude. Like they, I told one on Twitter that was just, it was just, it was cracking me up. Because we live in this world, right? With these ideas of I don't know, like modesty and whatever, and they're just so imposed from elsewhere and you and these stories, this is life, right?

When you're sharing a wigwam with however many people over the course of the winter. And sometimes they're eaten, things that come Jerusalem artichokes and things that come up out of the ground, you're gonna have to deal, with each other's bodies and with each other's kind of normal unsanitized lives.

Yeah, I, as soon as you mentioned the lichen, I was like, we need to hear that Nanabush story. I've heard other versions of the shut eye dance, I've heard others where the lone loon calls out a warning and yeah. So he doesn't get all he has more than we anyway, 'cause that seems to be a theme with Nanabush is that he takes, he takes more. He takes more than he needs. How do tricksters show up in Palestinian stories? Sonia? 

Sonia Sulaiman: I was just thinking about that. It's unfortunate that I don't know any of the men's stories because I've heard that one of the archetypes of the hero is typically a cunning figure. And even in the folktales the man is, there's a cycle of stories about clever Hassan whose name means just clever, handsome.

And so sometimes he's a prince, sometimes he's a fisherman's son, it doesn't matter. Like a stock character. And he gets into and out of trouble by using his wits. But there isn't really like a, I would say like in the mythology a trickster or figure that I can pinpoint. I think mostly that's in with what are called the Seras, the biographies where the men would tell stories. But the getting back to the, some of the tales being a little bit rude, when I was reading about the context, the social context of the folk tales. They said that what happened is often the tellers would be the older women. And that the older women, because of their age, they had a certain freedom in what they were able to talk about, which the younger women were not. And so there was a lot of the culture was very conservative in most cases.

And people wouldn't talk about anything to do with the body and so on. It was all very much like trying to be very stoic, I guess you might say. And so the women, the older women were coming out with stories, like one of them is about a woman who wishes for a daughter and she says, prays to God for a daughter and says, just gimme any daughter, even if she's a little shit.That's what the story is about, that she has a little poop daughter. There's stories that deal with very explicitly with sex and so on that are like the collection that's being reprinted soon which is called Speak Birds Speak Again has a lot of material that actually the book was banned by Hamas in Gaza because it had so much like sexual material in it.

So they're very conservative that party. So they did not approve of these traditional stories that were collected in mostly like in refugee camps. So they're trying to stamp out something that, you can't put a lid on that.

Patty Krawec: And I think too though like the conservative element in our cultures, those come out as a result of colonization. Yeah, because so much of it, and I've got a friend, we talk about, she talks about terminal creed, whereas things have always evolved and adapted. And yet you know that there are those like very traditional people that they know this is the way it is, this is the life spirit, is this is the way that we do the prayers.

This is the way, and it fixes it in amber. And it's, I think, the same process at work in terms of how are the other people seeing us? And we have there, there's a level of self protection happening. 

Sonia Sulaiman:  some of the orientalists had said too, that they were, when they talked about the folklore that they were getting, they did complain that the informants, they called them, so the native informants they called them would be very concerned about what the Orientalist scholar wanted to hear and how it would be received. So they would talk about only certain things and keep other things in this holy silence, not talking about them. And so there were entire books written by people who had lived among the natives and had access to some of the stories and some of the details that were not otherwise talked about.

Patty Krawec: Everybody's really interested in native things again. Settlers are feeling guilty and wanting to, all up in their feelings and wanting to learn about us and stuff. And, somebody was recommending to a friend of mine, a native person on the internet that had been punking them that they should read Black Elk Speaks and Lame Dear Visions. And they're both books written by white anthropologists. And when native people talk to white anthropologists, like you just said, we're shaping our story a little bit. We're holding back some stuff. 'cause not everything is for everybody. But there's also a certain amount of, there's a certain amount of awareness about how it's being heard and how it's going to then be taken out into the world.

And do we really want, our official story being Nanabush dragging his butt down the rock. So we're gonna tell others. Exactly. We're gonna shape them a little bit differently. But Kesha, Sonia made, and it just, the comment about the older women, and I know turning 40 was like the best thing in my life.

That one happened a long time ago, but there was a certain amount of liberation that happened in that moment when I realized in my forties now, and I don't care. It even got worse when I turned 50. There is some freedom. How do you find then, not saying that you're 40 or should be, but just in your storytelling as you encounter other stories.

Is there a difference in the way older women tell stories? 

Kesha Christie: Yeah, absolutely is. The freedom of language, I would say, not necessarily foul language, but just 'cause we can, I, I can speak in plain English or speak in Patois or Creole depending on which version of what story I'm telling. And I find that just older folks in general, they tell you the story and they tell you the story behind the story and the rest of it.

So you could be there for a while because they want you to have the whole spectrum of it. And so you're getting the story the way it would've been told. You're getting the story the way that you would've heard it amongst  family and friends, and then you're getting the true story that you would only tell behind closed doors.

So you're getting all those versions mixed into one. And I find that, yeah, crossing that threshold just made it seem like, you know what I'm here. Take it or leave it. And so as you tell the story, I'm telling the story as, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. I'm not gonna give you the textbook version because I'm in a mixed audience.

I'm gonna give you the actual version of the story the way I would tell it amongst friends and family. But I'll explain a few things that I wouldn't, that are not obvious or common knowledge. So that's the way I've take that, the approach that I've taken when I tell stories. But when I sit in groups like this where there are older tellers, I'm just like, 'cause you're getting all the tea.

Waubgeshig Rice: Yeah. Much like Kesha said, from my perspective, as a nephew there are fewer limits on language I've found, and fewer limits on, or self-imposed limits I guess I should say. And on structure, on space, on, on everything. And. And in that sense too, you get everything a lot more bluntly and a lot more to the points.

There is the story behind the story and everything else. I love how you put that because that's so true. For me I consider it a very humbling experience. I feel very honored to be amongst these, to be hearing things because, what has happened to our cultures, I guess more broadly as Indigenous people is this patriarchy that's been imposed upon our cultures.

And the power that's been, more lopsided towards the male side in our communities, when traditionally it was never that way, and the Anishinaabeg that I'm descended from as I understand it, the women were always the ones who gathered create a consensus on key decision making, and then sent the men out to either negotiate with the settlers or trade with them or whatever else, but with the creation of the Indian Act system and the chief and councils that have derived from that, it's been predominantly men who have been in those positions. And unfortunately, women have been silenced and pushed to the periphery for far too long.

Thankfully, nowadays, I think women are returning to that rightful place. And I feel very fortunate that, I had more elder women in my life than elder men to influence and inform me as a kid. So I think in that sense, that, that's why I'm always like deferring to the aunties basically. Anytime and anywhere I end up, the aunties will be the ones to keep you in line. The aunties will be the ones to tell you it straight up. 

Patty Krawec: I was just thinking because as we age, so we've got our gender roles, right? Like the, for the Anishinaabeg people, the men are responsible for the fire and the women are responsible for the water. For Two-Spirited people, they moved back and forth like these gender binaries. Like we, it wasn't really like a binary, it was, because there were two-spirited people who moved back and forth between those roles. But as you age, like as a woman ages, we less estrogen, more testosterone.

But that's just what I was thinking. 'cause as we gather in all of these stories and we hold all of these things as we get older, the rules, and that's what tricksters do too, right? Tricksters are always pushing back against those rules. 'cause the rules are important. Society doesn't work well without rules, but we also have to be able to push back against them so that they don't become constricting.

As you think about story and kind of the role that stories play in your life, what do you hope from them? What do you hope? And so I'm gonna pose that question to each of you as you. As you work with stories, you pull them in from your community and other sources and then, Sonia, I love that image. You've released it into the world. And as this is your work, what do you hope for, from the stories that you draw in and then release?

Sonia Sulaiman: There's a lot of damage that's been done by colonialism to the Palestinian people. And one of the casualties has been the continuity with the folk traditions.

And somebody has written about this, I think it was Sonia Nimr she has a little collection of stories called Ghaddar the Ghoul and Other Palestinian Stories. She had talked in an interview about how the story of the displacement and the sort of individual family stories, of the lost homeland and the individual trees and the land features of the home that are lost have taken the place of the folktale in many contexts.

And that's what I see when I am like the folktales aside. There's a certain truth to them, right? But these stories that have supplanted them are literally true in a very different sense. And whenever you meet Palestinians, what they'll do is they'll start identifying by where they're originally from, where their ancestral homes are, and making connections that way.

I've met people that are my cousins because they were from the same village as my father. And then from there, usually you'll tell a story of what we call the catastrophe, the Nakba. So that was the depopulation of Palestine. And so everybody has, excuse me, has a Nakba story about their parents, about their grandparents.

Usually grandparents at this time, but some people still have some parents that are old enough to remember and they'll be full of trauma, full of grief. But also this like reverence for the homeland. And like the way my dad describes the village is it was always ever giving and abundant, in this sort of automatic way that didn't have to rely on human cultivation or anything.

You like grapes growing here and quinces and you could just go and pick them and they were just, produced and being almost like a paradise in itself. And then the loss of that paradise. So you would tell these stories over and over again to the younger generation so that they don't forget.

One of the things that was assumed was that the older generations would die and the young would forget Palestine, and then that would be the end of Palestinian people and it would be an open and shut case. And that hasn't been the case at all. So I think for me retrieving these stories has been a bit like having to negotiate through all the orientalist lensing and all the lot of the sources I have to refer to are texts that have fixed in amber the stories and tried to codify them and classify them and infuse a lot of racism sometimes.  One collection begins with just saying that these stories are like a dead dog. Beautiful teeth. And so the reader should look at the beautiful teeth and not the dead dog. And I'm thinking, wow. So yeah, I had to read through all these really fraught sources to bring out the fragments that have survived and try to breathe life into them again, and then let them go and start doing their fizzy, messy thing again.

Patty Krawec: It made me think that we have, like you had said it, you all have Nakba stories, like the same, like we all have residential school stories. Every native person, has a residential school story. A lot of us have child welfare stories. We, we've all got those stories and then I wonder, that makes me wonder what our stories are gonna look like a hundred years from now. As our traditional stories have incorporated, these histories as well and how they're going to, 

Sonia Sulaiman: there actually is a collection called Palestine plus 100, which was published by Comma Press. And it's, the whole thing is what is Palestine gonna be like a hundred years after the nakba? And they had Palestinian writers to write science fiction stories, short stories.

Kesha Christie: The journey to finding my voice was, it was already laid out, but you didn't see the patterns. Now I'm looking back and I see everything all presented out and I think that our children need to know who they are and where they truly came from, where their people came from. It's like there's so much time has been spent on the drama, the, my, the slavery, the abuses. But it's, there's such richness that started before then that our stories capture those, our stories, even though the stories talk about our experiences, they still share our beliefs, our traditions are woven into the stories that we're telling.

So yes, they're getting a great tricksters tale or they're getting great quote unquote fantasy story, but they're getting the morals that we're trying to teach them anyways. And they'll be better receptive experiencing it through the story than for us, parents wagging our fingers or, when I was growing up, it was like, you have to go to church and you're in church for three hours. And it's I didn't hear anything. I just knew I was hungry. But, if I was, listening toa storyteller, that would've been a whole different experience. I would've forgotten I was hungry and been all about the story. So finding those stories, and it is as Sonia said, you've gotta dig through a lot, and sometimes you find two sentences and you've gotta either build the story or just share the two sentences that you have.

But it takes understanding the time, understanding the experience to be able to build those out. And it's important for the teller to take that journey and for who we're sharing the story with, to experience it as well. I found that when I sharing stories, my love is just sharing stories. I think even if it's with myself or one person, sharing the stories is so important because now you're hearing it again. You're bringing it back to life. You're bringing those lessons back. You're giving them, I wanna say priority, but that's not the word that I'm looking for. You're making it important again. I remember when everyone was like, oh, Black Lives Matter. I was like, whoa, where have you been?

It's always mattered, but they forgotten because they got caught up in the hoopla, in the news, but forgot about the great stories that show that we were inventors and, all of these things: your iron, your dishwasher, your dryer. That's, that was all the mind of someone that they're now saying, oh, by the way, your life now matters.

It was mattering then too. 'cause you're using the appliances kind of thing. So it's important that we give the whole picture and especially now, our kids are moving fast. We're moving fast, but it's so important to, to make that what do you call it, MQT time or meaningful quality time, make that be when we're sharing our stories, our elders are, are passing away.

So those who were. Who had the weight or the responsibility of sharing those stories are not gonna be there. So if we stop talking, then the story dies. And we can't afford to do that. We need to continue to share and leave a footprint or leave a blueprint for our kids to be able to follow or take up that mantle.

'cause someone will be interested. It might not be my children, it might be someone else's, but at least I've left some type of footprint that they're able to say, we have history. And this is a story that was told generations ago. I'm hearing it again. I'm not reading it in a book. 'cause when you read it, you're making your own context.

Like you're, you are making your own pre, you're putting your own prejudice. But when you're hearing that story, you're hearing your history, your, all of those experiences, all of those traditions are now sitting here. It's like music. As soon as the beat hits you feel it in your heart.

That's what you, what happens when you hear the story? So I'm just gonna keep telling and keep sharing and they, the having to dig up the stories and there's a lot that you go through and being able to tell the stories that have never been told before or have been forgotten. I love the experience of those saying, Hey, I remember that story. And then they retell it to their grandkid and that experience has to keep going. 'cause that's how our stories keep moving forward. And that's how we keep giving life to who we are. 'cause the truths, our truths are histories. Our oral traditions keep flowing forward. 

Waubgeshig Rice: Yeah I hope to just continue trying to relay these stories and try to elevate the people who are sharing them at the same time.

I think at this point in my life, I do have a platform and there's a responsibility that comes with that. 

And we're at a point now where I think there are a lot of Indigenous stories that are thriving. A lot of our older stories our current realities as well, Indigenous people are more empowered than they've ever been in this sort of modern context to share their stories 

Speak their truths and so on.

So I'm inspired by that all the time. I recently quit my journalism job last year, so I'm transitioning out of working, 20 years in mainstream media and what I hope will be, more of a holistic approach to story receiving and story sharing. And that was my whole plan before the pandemic set in, was to spend a lot of time in communities with elders.

But, I'm patiently waiting the opportunity to do that again. All that to say though, what I do struggle with and what. Slightly discouraged by our dwindling Indigenous languages as a result of colonization and colonialism. And we do, we are seeing a mad dash to record as many elders as possible sharing these stories in our original languages.

But not a lot of the younger generations have the capacity or the resources to learn those stories properly in those languages and then share them more widely at the same time. And that's not any of our fault. That's not our fault. The, that we don't have those languages, those are taken away from us.

But I do believe, if any sort of government or leadership is serious about reconciliation, quote unquote it would fully fund opportunities for all Indigenous people to learn languages fluently so that these stories can live again can live once again in the way that they're originally intended to be shared in these Indigenous languages.

So my hope is that, as my kids grow up, they'll have more opportunities to hear these stories in their original language. I do believe the desire is there. There is a passion for these languages and the stories help them reemerge in that way. It'll just take a lot of work and some support from the bodies that took languages from us in the first place.

That is my hope to see these languages once again. See these stories once again be shared in our original languages.

Patty Krawec: Thank you for listening. You can find me online at thousandworlds.ca where I write about traditional Ojibwe stories and how they connect with our lives, along with the books that I'm reading or feel relevant to the story. This podcast series and the book that emerged from it changed me the way that good books and the conversations about them do. Remember the first rule of Bad Indians Book Club: Always carry a book. 

These conversations originally streamed live and were recorded in 2021. Editing and transcripts completed by Tiffany Hill with the generous support of Dr. Eve Tuck, director of the Visiting Lab Lenapehoking. Our theme is Biindigen, an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.

Baamaapii!

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Excerpt from Booklist, a starred review which means the book is "outstanding in its genre": A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives.”

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