(Source: Ben Nelms/CBC)
Yesterday was the first ‘National Day for Truth and Reconciliation’ in what is known as Canada. It was not like most holidays filled with an air of celebratory notions, but a day of deep sadness, tension and reflection on what is being described as genocide of Indigenous Peoples in this country with the lost lives and survivors of residential schools (Reuters, 2021). Therefore, making this day an important day to reflect on the power of stories. Specifically the power that stories hold for mass destruction, including colonization and ecocide, as well as the power that stories hold for great transformation in society at large.
Ben Okri, an African novelist, describes this phenomenon as sick storytellers vs. healthy storytellers that have the power to make a nation sick or healthy (as referenced in Sium & Ritskes, 2013, pg. V). The ‘sick stories’ can serve to legitimize old paradigms and oppressive power structures. For example, I would argue that the Government of Ontario, and provinces like it, that blatantly ignored this day as a holiday are ensuring the maintenance of the dominant meta-narrative of colonial history as a ‘sick story’ that erases Indigenous stories and ignores the dark history of settlers. For as Sium & Ritskes (2013) argue in these kinds of meta-narratives, “the colonial controls the national (or in this case provincial) story, which characters are introduced and how they are constructed” (pg. VI). In this way, stories are about power in so far as who controls the mainstream consciousness, and therefore masters over society’s beliefs, norms and values.
Yet the ‘healthy story’ in contrast can be an act of ’creative rebellion’ as a relational, political and sacred act that legitimizes the knowledge and voices of marginalized peoples, lands or even imagines new worlds possible outside the colonial realm (Sium & Ritskes, 2013). Take for example the seismic shift in the belief systems in Canada’s colonial legitimacy and a pull towards Indigenous rights after the story of residential schools opened up a national wound with 1300 unmarked graves and the countless lives lost of Indigenous children (Mosby, 2021). Moreover, this example is also why some Indigenous scholars call for storytelling and oral traditions to be understood as legitimate forms of knowledge production, or epistemology (Iseke, 2013; Sium & Ritskes, 2013). For Indigenous Peoples in this country have been calling out the atrocities of residential schools far longer than when the news broke out about the unmarked graves, and their stories tell us about the inter-generational pain and suffering of this long-standing practice.
This gives pause for deeper reflection. Reflection on decolonizing the old stories that no longer serve us, such as stories that normalized residential schools. These are old paradigms that maintain our multiple and intersecting crises, from colonization to climate change. These are wicked’ problems, which are described simplistically here as ‘dysfunctionality within a complex system’ (Bunch, 2021a). Yet according to systems thinking, there can be rapid and far-reaching shifts, or ‘threshold’ surpassed, in a complex system that changes the entire system practically overnight (Bunch, 2021b). This can happen to belief systems too, or rather the stories we tell ourselves.
Take for example the climate crisis and how this wicked problem has been framed, or what the dominant story is. For we know that climate change is a product of the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere from our reliance on fossil fuels, in which the science is ‘unequivocal’ (Masson-Delmotte, et al., 2021). However, there are ‘two-eyed ways of seeing’ this problem, as according to many Indigenous scholars, the climate crisis is merely another manifestation of colonization of both people and the planet (Goodchild, 2021; Gram-Hanssen, Schafenacker, Bentz, 2021). The former story frames the climate crisis in terms of a mechanistic worldview, in which the problem fits in the box of western science that reduces the world to the sum of its parts like a machine (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 2003). It’s a worldview that for far too long has told us that we can solve this wicked problem with techn-economic solutions, while the maintenance of the colonial paradigm is sustained (Young, 2021). Yet, the later position re-frames the crisis as a symptom of a much larger problem, even perhaps larger than colonization itself, with the meta-narrative that severed the natural world with the human world (Kimmerer, 2014; Sium & Ritskes, 2013). In many ways, it is the ultimate story of Western ontology, that we are the masters of our ‘own domain’ in which we ‘naturalized’ people, animals, plants and the entire biosphere into the domain for an elite empire.
Hence, colonization may have brought forward the mindset that has led us to the climate crisis, but it is this essential story of Man vs. Nature which is the Ontology that spreads sickness onto the world. If it is our time to return the gift, as Robin Kimmerer (2014) asks of us, then it is time to pay deep attention and foster deep relationships with the living world around us (pg. 20). This ‘life-centered worldview’ is a story of responsibility, restoration and reciprocity from the human to the more-than-human world (Ibid.). So the question becomes how do we enact a story revolution that passes the threshold of our collective consciousness into an entirely new worldview?
References:
- Bunch, M. (2021a). Week 1: Class Recording (e-lecture video recording). E-Class: ENVS 5081 Systems Thinking (course). York University, Toronto, Canada.
- Bunch, M. (2021b). ENVS4523-5081 L2-Systems Thinking Concepts and History (e-lecture video recording). E-Class: ENVS 5081 Systems Thinking (course). York University, Toronto, Canada.
- Funtowicz & Ravetz (2003). Post-Normal Science. In International Society for Ecological Economics (Eds.). Online Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics. Retrieved from: http://isecoeco.org/pdf/pstnormsc.pdf
- Goodchild, M. (2021). Relational Systems Thinking: That’s How Change is Going to Come, from Our Earth Mother. In Journal of Awareness Based Systems Change 1(1), pp.75-103. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i1.577
- Gram-Hanssen, I., Schafenacker, N. & Bentz, J. (2021). Decolonizing transformations through ‘right relations.’ In Sustainability Science. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00960-9
- Iseke, J. (2013). Indigenous storytelling as research. In International review of qualitative research 6(4), 559-577. Retrieved from: https://go.openathens.net/redirector/royalroads.ca?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1525%2Firqr.2013.6.4.559
- Kimmerer, R. W. (2014). “Returning the Gift.” Center for Humans and Nature. Retrieved from: https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift-article-177.php
- Masson-Delmotte, V. et al. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (Summary for Policymakers, Working Group I). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Retrieved from: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#SPM
- Mosby, I. (2021, April 1). Canada’s Residential Schools Were a Horror (Opinion). Scientific American. Retrieved from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canadas-residential-schools-were-a-horror/
- Reuters. (2021, September 30). Cultural genocide’ and abuse: Inside Canada’s notorious residential school system. Reuters. Retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/cultural-genocide-and-abuse-inside-canad-idUSRTXHVDCQ
- Sium, A., & Ritskes, E. (2013). Speaking truth to power: Indigenous storytelling as an act of living resistance. In Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), I-X. Retrieved from: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/1962
- Young, A. (2021). Episode 232: Gopal Dayaneni on the exploitation of soil and story. In For the wild. [Podcast]. Retrieved from: https://forthewild.world/listen/gopal-dayaneni-on-the-exploitation-of-soil-and-story-232
Thanks for this thoughtful entry on Truth and Reconciliation day, and the power of stories. You’ve included a lot of great research here, and I was delighted to see Mosby’s work! He’s a fantastic scholar and continues to do powerful anti-colonial work. To push your line of thinking even further, I would suggest to return to your final question to consider the specific role of specific places in changing the stories we tell ourselves. So in your future posts, consider the place you work from, consider your role in the ecologies of your sit spot, and see what that might yield in terms new (or remember old) stories with the potential for the shift you describe.
Hi Shandell,
I’m just getting a chance to respond to your comment (and the comments of others) on my blog site now. Better late than never, they say. But thank you so much for your feedback and encouragement. I actually have been thinking a lot about the question I started with in my first Tiny Ecology post (and your comment) about ‘how do we enact a story revolution?’ In many ways, over the course of my Tiny Ecology project, I’ve been trying to answer that question and getting a bit closer each time with place-based pedagogy. Especially with part 4 of my Tiny Ecology series, in terms of ‘healthy stories’ that go past apocalyptic narratives like the inspiration from Hopepunk and Solarpunk (Hull, 2019) and the medicinal power of plants and stories. But thank you for encouraging me to go further in my thinking. There is still, of course, much more work to do in the ‘story revolution.’ Perhaps it will be a life-long pursuit. But this course has certainly opened me up to new narrative possibilities, including how those narratives may affect our cognitive and physical worlds in this collective life-sustaining work and time of unfolding transformation.
Thank you, Emily
References:
Hull, A. (2019). Hopepunk and solarpunk: On climate narratives that go beyond the apocalypse. LitHub. https://lithub.com/hopepunk-and-solarpunk-on-climate-narratives-that-go-beyond-the-apocalypse/