man this has been said before by cleverer folks than me, but sometimes you have to sit down and let the sheer size and age of the storytelling tradition just completely overwhelm you, ja feel?
like– think for a second about how mind-bogglingly incredible it is that we know who osiris is? that somebody just made him up one day, and told stories about him to their kids, and literally thousands and thousands of years later we are still able to go “there was a god whose brother cut him into pieces”, it’s so arbitrary, it’s so incredible
that in talking about scheherazade and her husband, you are doing something that someone in every single generation has done since it was written– you are telling stories that have lasted an impossible amount of time
can you conceive of telling a story, and then traveling into the future and hearing that same story told– with alterations, and through media that you could not possibly conceive of, but your story– in the year 3214?
the fact that we! as a species! have been telling the same damn stories for so long– the fact that we’ve seen homer’s troy and chaucer’s troy and shakespeare’s troy and troy with fucking brad pitt because we never fucking stop telling stories! never ever ever!
we never stop caring about stories, or returning to the same stories, or putting our own spins on stories. we never stop talking about the characters as if they were real, or asking what happened next, or asking to hear it again.
generation after generation, they never ever ever stop mattering to us.
Aboriginal Australians have passed down, though their tradition of oral storytelling, information about the changing sea levels around the Australian coast. These stories are scientifically accurate over at least 10,000 years. Aboriginal people have stories of their ancestors living where the Great Barrier Reef now stands. The GBR has existed in its current form for 8,000 years.
Never underestimate the power of storytelling.
http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010
Another item for this feast: 23 words that have been in use for about 15,000 years
And Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work, the first 20,000 years gives me the same vast sense of wonder and awe that OP expresses so well
Tag: storytelling
In narrative therapy, Māori creation stories are being used to heal
The boy sits there, his head down. He feels stink; he knows all the adults are there to talk about him, about what’s wrong with him.
He’s always been told off for being so fidgety, for not paying attention. He knows it’s a bad thing.
But when the talking begins, it’s not about how to fix him. They’re telling a story about atua, the gods, and one of them sounds exactly like him! He’s called Uepoto, and he’s always curious. He’s full a mischief, a tutū.
The boy looks up.
“That’s where the healing starts, with an exchange of words,” says Poutu Puketapu, 25, a mental health worker at Gisborne service Te Kūwatawata. Only, that’s not his title here – in this space he’s a Mataora, or change-maker.
And the boy isn’t a patient, or client, or even a consumer. He is simply whānau.
“Instead of labelling them and making them feel like they are part of the mental health system, we reach them with these narratives. When they hear the pūrākau (stories) you see a little spark in them.”
Mahi a Atua is a form of narrative therapy that focuses on recovery from the trauma of colonisation. Māori creation stories are used as a form of healing, connecting alienated Māori to their whakapapa.
The pilot programme began in August last year as a response to the disproportionate mental health issues among Māori, and is backed by the Ministry of Health’s innovation fund and Hauora Tairāwhiti District Health Board.
Māori youth are two-and-a-half times more likely than non-Māori to commit suicide. Māori in general are more often underdiagnosed, and once in the mental health system are more likely to be secluded and imprisoned.
Mahi a Atua is driven by Dr Diana Kopua, an Otago University Māori health academic and clinician who is Head of Psychiatry at the DHB, and her husband Mark Kopua, a tohunga and Tā Moko practitioner.
We, as colonizers, have spent generations engaging in a project of destruction and suppression of indigenous languages and stories. We have dismissed them as mere superstition, instead of highly conserved forms of identity and epistemology. Indigenous knowledge of identity, local flora, fauna, and the Deep Time of the landscape, narratives of self-and-Other providing insight into complex ecological relationships – all these are beginning to be (grudgingly) acknowledged as not only useful, but in some sense ‘necessary’ for wellbeing.
The mythopoetic arises from gnosis – the point of contact between living environment and humanity. For indigenous peoples, I suspect the gnostic interplay stretches for hundreds if not thousands of years – or at least would have, had we not, as colonizers, attempted to break and shatter those links which ran throughout Deep Time in an effort to reduce those peoples in service to capital and authoritarianism.
Ironically, we have even had these weapons turned back upon ourselves – the colonizing peoples having their own localised and highly specific forms of knowledge destroyed or dismissed unless their narrative power could be made to serve State or Corporate Imperialism.
To quote Ursula K. Le Guin: “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
Long live the tales of the Maori – and their tellers!
In narrative therapy, Māori creation stories are being used to heal
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