How Stories Teach Us

by Serena Francis

I wanted to talk about stories and I will start with the stories that my parents told us as we were growing up.

We learned about The White Bull, John Collin. I call this one The Test of Love cause we really didn't have names for the stories and The Quest for Mothers Eyes are the four that I remember. They are all very long and the thing that they have in common is that it involves a quest and it involves travel and they all involve consulting somebody who is wise.

I was talking to my brother after re examining the stories and was trying to figure out what it was that my parents were trying to share with us or what it was that we needed to learn from these stories because stories have a purpose and that is to pass on information. Then I realized that in most of the stories, the characters are involved in or come across trauma in their life to a point of loosing everything and restarting all over again. The story talks about how they struggle with that and once they have decided that they wanted to do something, in all four stories, it involved an intervention. It involved finding someone who could help them find the answers they were looking for. Often in the stories they would find characters who are able to shift change. It involves a set of instructions that they needed to follow and the right action. In thinking about that, it occurred to me that much of our own history as Mi'kmaq people is about that.

Pre-contact, we had a different lifestyle. During contact we lost most but not all and in our struggles, we often seek to find answers and when we do this we look to our ancestors we go into ceremonies. Ceremonies like the sweat lodge. We also look to our dreams for answers. we have a question in mind and we fall asleep and there's some clarity. Just like the stories that my mom and dad told us, there are steps that we need to take to get to the solution. All the while as a nation we never forget who we are. We never forget our Ancestors and we work towards creating a better life which that too is common with the stories we heard as children.

It’s about resiliency, it’s about looking for and finding answers. It’s about not giving up no matter how difficult the journey is. and know that we will in the process of our journey we will find people who will help us, who will guide us, who will give us directions and so that's what stories do. We also look at the stories we tell now and it has to do with the connection with the stars. I think those are important because we also believe that whatever happens in this world also happens in the world above It's no different than what people call parallel universes. Our ancestors understood that. They also understood that we would look up into the sky and we would find our stories. We talk about the spirit world. The stories tell us that these are our ancestors journeying. 

In this project one of our main goals is to revitalize our stories so that we can have a better understanding of where we come from and it is our hope that once we gain the understanding, we will be able to pass it on to the future generations and so we do that.