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  • Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, and Relationship ed. by Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox and Lisa Szabo-Jones
  • Julia A. Boyd (bio)
Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, and Relationship edited by Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox, and Lisa Szabo-Jones Wilfrid
Laurier University Press, 2018

WHATEVER POSITION WE TAKE in the vital debates surrounding the decolonization of the academy, the scholarly use and misuse of Indigenous storytelling present crucial challenges. How can we forge spaces for Indigenous epistemologies within institutions shaped by Eurocentrism? What methods might turn community-facing research into a tool for justice and reconciliation, not domination? Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, and Relationship engages these questions through a series of cross-cultural case studies from Canada before and during its truth and reconciliation era, stemming from a multilingual, Elder-facilitated workshop hosted on Yellowknives Dene (Weledeh) territory in 2012. Together, the eight interdisciplinary contributions argue that storytelling, or narrative research, is a way of knowing, “a mode of knowledge production,” and a vehicle for communicating research with two key potentials (xii). First, it can “take back and hold space for Indigenous epistemologies” in the academy (175). Second, it can foster cross-cultural dialogues with the capacity to create “relational, reciprocal, and respectful” Indigenous-settler relationships (175). But to do so, storytelling cannot be “a formulaic method . . . slotted into a research proposal to satisfy cross-cultural research requirements” (178). Instead, it needs to uproot the “colonial ways of seeing and knowing” entrenched in conventional Eurocentric methodologies, especially assumptions that research should extract “information” from Indigenous communities rather than build “open-ended, long-term relationships” (xi). Christensen, Cox, and Szabo-Jones describe this methodology as “activating the heart,” an approach that “places emotion, relationships, reciprocity, recognition, and justice at the centre” of cross-cultural research and education (178).

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Activating the Heart is how it models these commitments through the dialogues among its contributors. Ranging from linguistic anthropology and literary research to creative scholarship, poetry by Rita Wong, and a “short memoir” by the late Metis (affiliation as spelled in the book) author Bren Kolson, the collection suggests that narrative research can only “advanc[e] responsibility and relationship” (xiv) by maintaining rather than flattening “the multiplicity of its objectives and outcomes” (171). The conversation between planner Leonie Sandercock [End Page 188] and Métis/otipemisiw anthropologist Zoe Todd offers one anchor for these exchanges. Both scholars blend theory, first-person narrative, and poetry to, as Sandercock describes, redirect the “researcher’s gaze . . . inward” (3). Where Sandercock recounts her collaboration with Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation and Cheslatta Carrier Nation on the 2010 documentary Finding Our Way, which was designed to facilitate settler-Indigenous dialogue in the “deeply divided” town of Burns Lake, British Columbia, Todd explores her use of storytelling to situate herself as an Indigenous woman scholar working “within another Indigenous people’s homeland” (162). For Sandercock, storytelling functions as a dual methodology that operates as both an external structure and an internal process, challenging non-Indigenous scholars to rethink “the all-but-guaranteed / evidence of paternalism / disguised as expertise” embedded in her discipline’s assumptions about its relationship with Indigenous communities (22). Todd similarly uses personal narrative as a tool for methodological intervention, but for her, integrating storytelling into research and publication forges space for an “emerging ‘Métis methodology’” that reimagines anthropology’s capacity to build “reciprocal learning and partnership” among Indigenous researchers and communities (165, 167).

This focus on storytelling as a tool to “engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous epistemologies in conversation with one another responsibly” structures the collection (xvii). Patrick Moore’s work on Kaska-English code-switching by expert storytellers and Elders Maudie Dick and John Dickson intervenes in the common scholarly assumption that code-switching is a “contamination” of Indigenous-language storytelling (66). In chapter 4, Kendra Mitchell-Foster and Sarah De Leeuw extend Sandercock’s insights to postsecondary education by reporting on ArtDays, a research and education partnership that uses arts activities to build “positive (non-deficit-based) health-focused understandings between undergraduate medical students, health researchers, and First Nations people” on a northern B.C. reserve community (94).

As the editors...

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