Last night again, as Vickers was introduced and welcomed by the Kwantlen People and also when he spoke I had a new appreciation for the fact that stories belong to a people and ought not to be given away lightly. I think our indigenous peoples have always known this. “The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own, says author Laurens Van der Post. Westerners are more careless about this, probably to our peril.
It may come from the fact that we are inundated with story, there are too many to sort out which ones we belong to and are ours. Sam Keen says, “We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many authorities, none of which are our own. The parable of the postmodern mind is the person surrounded by a media center: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we’re saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don’t have a point of view and we don’t have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.”
I wrote last week about the resilience of people who know their family narrative. It gives a sense of belonging and purpose. I think this is what Roy Henry Vickers was talking about last night; finding your story, hearing it over and over and then living out of it.