The Power of Stories: Examining the Impact of Storytelling on Learners

Indigenous story-telling is vital for the transmission of oral histories from generation to generation. In a local First Nation, storytelling comes in the form of creation stories and individual stories. A Land-based Healing Cultural Support Worker and community partner has been working closely with a UVIC Environmental Sciences student on the translation, preservation, and revitalization of her individual story, “My Search for My Way of Being” for many years, detailing both positive and negative human experiences and the treasure box of teachings that have come from her life. This project created a thematic analysis and framework for the story to be used as a tool for the community partner to teach to a broad range of audiences and environments. This project used a Two-Eyed Seeing approach to analyze a recorded sample of the community partner’s teachings, including translations of key words in her language. Four main themes were synthesized and organized into a table with relevant info for teaching and discussion questions: 1) Family and Ancestral Connections, 2) Language, 3) Intergenerational Trauma, and 4) Spirituality.