Working with stories part 4

My final installment on working with stories in my facilitation practice.

Stories to Remember who we are

The best teachers tell stories. They will sit you down and tell you a story about someone or something that was facing the very situation in which you find yourself. All the great religious leaders told stories. Many of their stories focused on the fact that the wisdom we need is available to us right now. That wisdom may be ancient, but there is nothing new under the sun.

I am a keen collector of teachings from Aborginal Elders. By teachings I don’t mean stories commonly thought of as “the myths of Indians.” Rather, I covet and value the wisdom that is shared by my Elders who aim to make it directly applicable to my present situation. Whether it is Herb Joe’s teaching about “poor weak human beings” or Sonny Diabo’s lessons about the life path, Elders show us that the stories that are ancient and deeply embedded in our cultures have applicability to the present day.

First Nations communities suffer from a couple of centuries of objectification. Our stories and teachings have been collected like museum pieces and stored on shelves and in books where they seem to atrophy and become more and more distant from daily life. It is not uncommon to hear people questioning the value of these old teachings and their relevance to contemporary situations. This has created a very disempowered situation. Without our own stories, we go to the stories of others, and those who have the most powerful story telling technologies (TV stations, media outlets, films) have also had a fairly consistent agenda of colonizing indigenous peoples. Mass media continues the colonization of indigenous peoples by giving us stories that are not our own, filling the vacuum left by the loss of our traditional technologies.

You might well be forgiven for thinking that the traditional modes of passing on stories have disappeared if you have never heard an Elder teaching. But once you discover that these teachings are very much alive, and what’s more, they are OURS, something shifts. You begin to look for more and more knowledge that is actually borne from life in this place, stories from our own families and territories. Stories about the land and the people and the situations that haven’t changed even if the cultures have. It becomes clear that the stories and teachings are still current, that they are relevant and more powerful than imported stories because they are from the land beneath your feet.

Indigenous peoples are indigenous through the connection to land. For centuries the land has been interpreted through stories. So to reconnect people to their lands, the stories must be told and the cultural understanding set in the enduring context of who we are, where we have come from and where we are right now. Traditionally, stories were not mere curiosities served up to pass the time and entertain. They were the fundamental clues to living a healthy life in a very particular place. And they remain current.

I once listened as Nuu-Chah-Nulth Elder Julia Lucas told stories of son of Raven and son of Mink and how they tried to have their way with the young women of the community. Terrible and painful fates befell both of them as a result of their sexual improprieties. They were funny stories, but they were offered as earnest teachings about sexual health for young people. And they are just as current in an age of AIDS and other STDs as they were in the old days, when the punishment for sexual misconduct could be pain and death from other means. For the youth who were listening to Julia, these stories really sank in. They were their stories, their teachings, stories about their ancestors and directly relevant to their lives.

Having these stories and the realization that the stories are yours is a tremendously empowering thing. It can be truly transformative to realize that all the cultural baggage you seem to have been saddled with is actually important, relevant and exclusively yours. If you have this knowledge available to you, then you don’t need to go outside for your stories. You can remain true about who you are, secure in your identity and gifted with your teachings. From this place of power you can go out into the world and hear the stories of others with open ears, seeing them for what they are rather than attaching to them to fill a gap in your life.

I think this lesson applies to any group with a shared culture. This is why Open Space Technology meetings work well in organizations. People create their own agendas around the stories of the organization and over the course of a day or two, folks realize that what they have in the room right now, in this moment, is far more precious than they ever thought. By telling stories, recapitulating history, interpreting each other’s inner lives and sharing lessons learned, people come to realize that their own experience has immeasurable value to the group.

This is not a prescription for group-think or navel-gazing. It is rather a call to understand how important the tacit knowledge inherent in any group is to that group’s destiny. Stories are the DNA of culture. They reflect where you have come from and they determine where you will go. You can augment your DNA with other genes, but the stories you have right now are the ones that have brought you to this point. They are responsible for every piece of success and every taste of failure. Learning from these stories, seeing the successes as things to replicate and taking medicine from the failures is what propels you forward without dependence on outsiders. It gives you strength to move in the outside world secure in who you are and what you are doing. It allows you to be focused on your purpose while you interact with a learn from your environment.

Stories mediate our inner and outer worlds. They are the glue that joins the two together and brings us fully into the present in a holistic and healthy way. Knowing our stories gives us tremendous power: we are clear about who we are, how we make meaning of the world around us and we know how that world has been interpreted through our real or metaphorical ancestors. We are able to benefit from our unique inheritance and work to create an even better one for our descendants.

Our job is to take all of this and be in the world in such a way that the stories that are told about us give hope and power to those who inherit our legacy. It is no small challenge, but it is within each of us. All we need to do is to remember what we are doing right now, so that when the time comes we can say “once it was like this…” We will all be Elders at some point and we will be called upon to share our life’s lessons with others. How will we benefit those people?

What will our story be?