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Becoming the Storyteller: Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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265 On winter evenings He would tell stories or fairytales Oh, I tell you He was really good at that He had a knack for telling stories —Elsie Cavender about her grandfather, Inyangmani Hoksida As a child of an Indigenous oral tradition, I am now completing the transformation into the storyteller. I have become a bearer of our family and tribal stories. The challenges of this evolution have become apparent as I work with my grandmother’s oral narratives to complete my forthcoming project, When the Plum Trees Blossom: Indigenous Survival Strategies Passed On. The original recordings of my grandmother, Elsie Two Bear Cavender, were completed in 1990, but it is only now that I am coming into my own with the stories she transmitted, owning them in a way that would have been impossible for the young woman I was then.While always committed to their repeated transmission and continued veracity, my own intellectual and creative development, combined with a sense of ownership of the stories, allows for a newfound flexibility with the narratives. I can experiment in meaning making as I work to transfer the oral world into the written and sometimes visual worlds while also engaging in a textual dialogue with my grandmother. Engaging narratives in this fashion allows me to assume another responsibility of the storyteller : to re-imagine, re-create, and re-articulate the essence of the original stories and thus effectively maximize their impact on the intended audience while also renewing Indigenous commitment to our nations and homelands. My grandmother’s narratives offer a particularly compelling opportunity for broad-based storytelling because they not only detail the horrors perpetrated upon Dakota people through the processes of invasion, conquest, and BECOMING THE STORYTELLER Meaning Making in Our Age of Resistance Waziyatawin 266 Looking Beyond: Reintegrating the Visual colonization, but also provide direction for Indigenous resistance. Further, in the narratives discussed here, my grandmother’s storytelling offers a powerful counter to colonial myths. That is, she employs truth telling as an active agent of decolonization. Consequently, the broad-based re-creation of such oral narratives becomes exponentially more important in the context of Indigenous liberation struggles and necessitates moving beyond the transmission of accounts from our tiwahe (family) to our Oyate (Nation) more broadly, and to those from settler society who might also become our allies in our struggle to be free from oppression. Seven generations after our ancestors were militarily conquered during the United States–Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people are ready, once again, to challenge wasicu (white) hegemony in our ancestral homeland. The stories of the ancestors form the basis of knowledge regarding all that has been lost and thus also form the basis of our vision for reclamation . For the sake of our own liberation, we too must work to become master storytellers. When we imagine warriors in a liberation struggle, we typically do not envision elderly Indigenous women. Yet I have come to view our master storytellers in such a light, including my own grandmother, who was the first to ingrain in me the importance of our stories. Kunsi Elsie was born in 1906 and raised on the Upper Sioux reservation in southwestern Minnesota by her Figure 1 Elsie Two Bear Cavender with great-granddaughter, Autumn Cavender-Wilson (1991) [44.210.237.223] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:35 GMT) Becoming the Storyteller ■ Waziyatawin 267 grandparents, both of whom were also expert storytellers. She lived a life of hardship and poverty and, in that difficult context, worked tirelessly to transmit as much knowledge and wisdom to her children and grandchildren as she possibly could. Many of her teachings were passed on through the stories. Widely known as a storyteller in our community and in the state of Minnesota , Kunsi Elsie believed in educating as many people as she could about the history of Dakota people, knowing fully that it challenged the colonial status quo and hoping that it would lead to a better future for our people and homeland. She worked tirelessly to subvert the Euro-American master narrative surrounding the Dakota historical past with each new generation of Dakota children in our family. From the time we were born, she held us in the rapture of her stories, restoring our humanity and solidifying our identity with every word. During quiet afternoons and late nights, she filled our ears with expressions of Dakota pride, strengthening our attachment to our ancestors and our nation. Her stories allowed us entrance into a...