Storytellers can make a life-changing difference [column]

WOLF SONGS & FIRE CHATS

Here, in Cowichan Valley, B.C., in this wide verdant valley, the Strait of Georgia  undulates in close proximity and the elegant fingers that become big bays poke into the ribs of Vancouver Island. Great rivers and streams tumble out of the highlands where salmon run each year. The forests are rich and thick. Framed by mountains, the Cowichan might seem a paradise.
It is. The land has spawned successful farms, and fruit grows abundantly. In towns like Mill Bay and Cowichan Bay, expensive oceanside condos stand in stark relief to the charming, rustic intertidal life of wharfs and marinas dotted with old fishing vessels limned by a ring of expensive yachts. It is a land that draws people. It’s a tourist mecca.

Yet for the Cowichan people who have called this valley home for thousands of generations, paradise remains fraught with serpents. These are a people whose suicide rate remains one of the highest in the country. They are a people who spring from a heritage of great carvers and storytellers. They are a people rich in vital ceremony, song and ritual. Yet for them, paradise remains elusive.

Their people die by their own hands far too often. They live their lives in states of quiet desperation and the final struggle is too great for some to take. It’s not a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for a long, long time. In the end, what evolves is a peoples’ story colored by the dark legacy of despair. It’s a sad, dismal tale that newer generations learn to carry in their hearts.

I’m here to speak at the Cowichan campus of Vancouver Island University. This campus hosts a great number of Cowichan students. They want me to speak on the power of story and its ability to teach, enlighten and empower. They’ve studied my books for many years now and they come to the auditorium eager to hear the words of a man they regard as a cultural icon.
I am not that. I am only an ordinary person. I am only someone who came to realize the nature of the gift Creator graced me with and began to use it. I am only someone fortunate enough to have had my eyes and ears open to heed the call to my future when it came. But I am also someone who worked his tail off to marshal the scope and the extent of that gift.

So I speak to them of story. I speak to them of the idea of literature and its magical ability to allow readers to see themselves within the stories that are created. Specifically, I speak to them of Native stories and how important it is for our young people to be able to see themselves in the stories we Native writers create. If what we are doing is working to create a literature of and for our people, that task is of utmost importance.

If we can write stories that have nothing to do with pain and loss and suffering, if we can write stories instead that have to do with love, romance, successful families and a heritage of hope, we change the nature of the stories our young people see themselves in. That’s the vital role of storytellers.

I tell them about my own story. I tell them how for years it was just a morass of bleakness, despair and pain. I tell them about how I worked in order to change the way I saw that story. I tell them about a search for light in all the gloom. I tell them how, when I found that light, my story and my life changed forever.

We are all storytellers. We are all capable of changing our own stories. But it takes the willingness and the courage to shine a light into the darkest corners to see what huddles there. It takes a desire to want to be free from a legacy of misery. It takes the belief that we were always meant for more than just tales of being survivors because we are more than that. As writers and storytellers that is the nature of the stories we need to be telling.

I had no idea how long I spoke. I only know that when I finished to long sustained applause and many tears and hugs that I had told a story that had impact and resonance. People were changed. They left that auditorium bearing the seeds of new stories. Paradise may have moved a little closer to being.