Voices of the Elders: Huu-ay-aht Histories and Legends (Amazing Stories)

Voices of the Elders: Huu-ay-aht Histories and Legends Bridge, Kathryn/ Neary, K

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UBC Theses and Dissertations. The University of British Columbia June If cultural strategies were persistent and fundamental to the survival of a people, it would seem that understanding Nuu-chah-milth learning orientations would provide emancipatory insight for First Nations learning in contemporary educational settings. Understanding what was and what is allows an envisioning of what could be. Therefore narratives about Umeek, the "community provider", the archetypal "go-getter", were read as a conceptual framework in which to identify learning orientations of Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.

The investigation had three foci. First, a protocol for First Nations cultural work was formulated and elaborated. This protocol was used as an overarching framework for the gathering of the stories, the interview process and the narrative analysis. Second, ethnographic and oral versions of Umeek narratives were gathered. Third, these narratives were read Nuu-chah-nulth elders cultural beliefs about learning for past and present success in a Nuu-chah-nulth life career i. Narrative deconstruction and metaphorical mapping served to identify and describe aspects of learning salient in the teachings of Umeek narratives.

A full complex of learning archetypes emerged balancing innovation and conservation in an economy of change. Eight archetypal learning models were identified: Themes which emerged central to Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations learning ideology and knowledge construction were: Nuu-chah-milth learning theory was articulated in a storywork framework that provided insight into Nim-chah-nulth pedagogy: First Nations educational theory and learning models that are operating in communities need to be understood in the context of current education. Western schooling may not satisfy Nuu-chah-nulth learning needs for transformation and strategic knowledge.

Storywork is important in de-colonizing First Nations sensibilities in the process of self-determination in education, counseling, life career development, and healing. Changing Life Careers 45 Container Logics: Movies, Appliances and Tupperware 55 Embodiments of Landscape: Embodiments of Text 57 A Postcolonial Order: Hair Seal Spearing Chiefs Umeek: Innovator and Transformational Learner Umeek's Wife: Collaborative Transformational Learner Oyephl: Developmental Learner The Whaling Crew.

Resistant Observational Learner Tsdhwasip's Wife: Securing, Creating and Sustaining Tyee Ha? This work is in recognition of the ancestor Umeek and the many incarnations those who have made His name great. Most particularly, this is dedicated to my Umeek, Eugene Richard Atleo, the long-suffering partner in my work, in dedication to his steadfastness and endurance over 35 years of partnership in producing children and hunting whales. This work is produced in hope for our children, Shawn and Nancy, Taras and Lorena, and their children, Tyson, Tara, Alexandria and Kwin, as well as their relatives and generations to come.

This work is also dedicated to three remarkable elders: Neen, Margaret Grace Charlie Atleo, who wove us together into a truly innovated basket that would keep secure the family legacy she had to pass on. Ah-up-waa-yeek, Mark Atleo, who helped me conceive this study but was not able to see its conclusion. Adam Fiilber, my Opa, the tool and die maker for transparent products, from whom I learned how to learn from the queen seat of his shoulders.

I appreciate the unique personal and professional histories each contribute to the texture of my basket. Shields, my advisor, contributed her deep listening, appreciation of tropes, and experience in qu'aas country. Jo-ann Archibald contributed the knowledge and patience of her Eldership. Sharilyn Calliou contributed through her candor, wit and resilience, in both her presence and absence.

I am grateful to the members of communities to which I belong that have lent their support. Many Nuu-chah-nulth friends and relatives freely encouraged me with personal and cultural reflections in the process of my work: I am grateful to the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and the Ahousaht Education Committee for their financial, administrative, and personal support for the duration of my program. I am grateful for support over the years by my community of sister writers: Thanks go to Pam Neel Creasy and the company of women of "Indigena" who afforded me the opportunity to grow in strength and humility.

I am grateful to a group of women, steeped in mythology, earthworks, and artistic innovation, who gifted me with their inspirational companionship on a transformational walking tour of official and personal sacred sites during a week in Paris at UNESCO: The many others who pachitl me with their gifts of support, friendship and resources over the years include the always gracious Nancy Turner; the ha?

I am thankful for the many others the Creator placed in my life that provided solace and encouragement on the more solitary nights of my journey. To my families, the Atleos and the Fulbers, I thank you for your love, understanding, and patience. To my husband, lover, friend, Richard, I thank you for your perseverance and faith, particularly in those times when it seemed hardest to bear. As with other Northwest Coast First Nations, in the Nuu-chah-nulth traditional ecological system of knowledge, the cedar tree is considered the "tree of life" Stewart, Humiis red cedar is a wholistic source of spiritual connection and identification with territory, housing, medicine, canoes, paddles, fishing and hunting implements, fabrics, containers such as boxes, baskets, and bowls, cordage, house posts and totem poles, and other life maintaining products.

The cedar roots which form the warp3 of the qa? Withes, air roots, provide strength and flexibility to the weft of the qa? The withes are branchlets or air roots with a cell structure that makes 1 See Appendix A for Glossary of Nuu-chah-nulth words used in this study and Appendix B for commentary about the orthographic usage. This name was selected to correct the historical error of being labeled Nootka by Captain Cook based on the answer to his request for directions at Friendly Cove.

They saw he was lost and told him, nuuk-shilth "go around [the island]", and ergo, he called them Nootka. The weft is comprised of the structural elements that are twinned over the warp elements to fill in the structural frame. Between the source and the qa? The distribution of the weight of the burden basket is thus structurally incorporated into the line of the body.

This permits the load to be balanced as part of the alignment of the whole body. Incorporating the burden structurally onto the body through the mechanism of the qa? In this study, I am using qa? Ma 'mook signifies the purposive action process of the creation of usefulness from the spiritual and material world. Twisted cedar withe has been translated as "atlyu" or "atleo" or "atl-liu". It is the "one word denoting action" as a verb and noun with meanings such as: Continuing to quote Eells, Shaw states that it is used generally as a causative verb i. Ma 'mook as a verb or noun is an important signal of action expected to result in utility.

The pragmatic activity in the expanded cultural field of post contact becomes the field in which learning is investigated. Therefore, my investigation of Nuu-chah-nulth learning begins with the self-determination of ma 'mook and the orienting content of stories in which learning takes place from a Nuu-chah-nulth vantage point. Beginning with an orientation to qa'uuc utility basket is a means to foreground Nuu-chah-nulth approaches to learning to permit the exploration of issues that affect Nuu-chah-nulth learning in non-Nuu-chah-nullh settings today. While I am working with my Nuu-chah-nulth qa'uuc utility basket , I nevertheless situate this study in a global indigenous project of de-colonization with Smith, This study is intent upon celebrating survival through storytelling and testimonies, by drawing on landscapes and tradition, as a means to remembering, connecting and revitalizing.

This study is an intervention based on the re-reading of western vantage points by examining the representations of colonization, gender, and class. The study is a site where Nuu-chah-nulth voices can rise to help us protect, name, negotiate, re-discover, re-envision, reframe, restore, return, democratize, re-connect, and share by re-claiming a Nuu-chah-nulth perspective of learning. Bringing together the narratives about the ancestor, Umeek in 4 one place and testing the ethnographic record through the analysis of the Elders and cultural biowers is a critical first step in validating the stories and exploring them for learning theory.

The second purpose is to identify and explore models or iterations of life career including vocational re orientations in these Umeek Narratives. I explored the thesis that Umeek is a Nuu-chah-mdth conceptual framework in which resource attributes are identifiable in the context of social expectations in a manner that constitutes strategic learning. This indigenous conceptual framework has interpretive value for Nuu-chah-nulth adults in that it is comprised of learning archetypes, models, or iterations identifiable as strategies for achievement in the life career development of ancient and contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth.

Because these archetypes, models, or iterations have adaptive, and survival value, they have explanatory power for Nuu-chah-nulth learning theory, Nuu-chah-nulth education and Nuu-chah-nulth life career counseling. Explanatory power is needed for Nuu-chah-mdth to reduce the ambivalence of the colonial experience by a revitalization of a Nuu-chah-mdth perspective that may serve to bring more balance into social and cultural life through bi-focal vision Archibald, that moves beyond orality and textuality into different ways of perceiving the world. Consequently, in this chapter, I begin my project by presenting the vision of my ma'mook by introducing the problem and purpose of my study, providing an overview and situating myself in a reflective field of cultural meanings.

The second chapter prepares the ground through re-readings of historical and cross-cultural vantage points. The third chapter explains the development of a methodological framework in which several approaches are delineated with which to explore the historically and culturally situated stories about Umeek. The fourth chapter introduces and presents the narratives. The fifth chapter includes interviews with the Elders in which they comment on Nuu-chah-mdth beliefs about learning relative to the stories. This chapter also contains an 5 analysis of the narratives.

The final chapter presents a discussion of the findings, conclusions about how understanding First Nations learning models may be useful in achievement motivation, and recommendations intended to illustrate ways and means to incorporate the learning models of First Nations people into existing social, educational, health, and career programming.

Background to the Problem The absence of Nuu-chah-mdth learning theory in current educational literature is a problem for Nuu-chah-mdth educational participation and achievement. The problem of learning by aboriginal people in a formal education setting has historically been framed from a deficiency perspective based on formal school performance in a Euroheritage tradition. The Canadian school system has historically framed the misfit between First Nations students and schooling as a matter of inherent competencies.

But the failure goes deeper than assessments of de-legitimation Goddard, , cognitive style, power relations, community control or lack thereof, or emic curriculum development which have typically been framed as a matter of competence. Cultural learning strategies can only be recognized as "styles" without substance when taken out of cultural contexts. First Nations achievers speak of wresting their learning from often hostile and alienating contexts, "word warriors", achieving despite the educational system Huff, Atleo said that traditional education produced Nuu-chah-mdth people who functioned successfully in a changing world because they knew how to get what they needed through cultural means of learning.

The problem is that such cultural orientations to means of learning are not systematically acknowledged or considered in the construction of First Nations education that begins with a Euroinstitutional perspective of the world. This metaphor could then represent a central cultural orientation. As the provider, Umeek, is an archetypal Nuu-chah-mdth "getter"; consequently, stories about Umeek should provide some clues about learning strategies for achievement, "getting".

In this investigation, I read the Umeek narratives for ways and means of Nuu-chah-nulth learning. This is introduced in a storytelling context of ma'mook, as an organizing script, and qa? The utilitarian nature of the basket was intimately tied to instrumental activities, imbuing it with powerful meanings. Nan Margaret Atleo my husband's paternal grandmother had a qa? She easily caught them, glued their eyes shut with pitch and carried them in her giant qa?

Because of the open weave, the water could drain from the foods and they could be washed clean of sand and extraneous debris. The open weave allowed the air to circulate around other gathered material such as reeds, and grasses, or cedar that needed to dry. Into this receptacle would be gathered large quantities of resources from the field or woods or seashore to be brought home for processing into 7 products useful for cultural life. While materials that were gathered for processing into cultural goods were often material resources, sometimes they were symbolic resources such as the narratives that abound in the storied territories and lives of Nuu-chah-nulth.

The technological complex in which the qa? Women not only used the basket but also embodied the very form, shape and design for technically specialized baskets. They would produce and animate these containers with the characters of their own sensibilities and stories. In her thesis, she develops the relationship between the intricacies of weaving and the intricacies of storytelling to illustrate the intertwining of the material and symbolic aspects of cultural life.

Baskets represent both the material and symbolic realms of culture. Baskets are of the earth from which their components are harvested. Baskets are borne of technology, art through the hands that process the materials, and weave them. Baskets provide cultural meaning through their utility and their production. Finally, baskets are biodegradable, returning to the earth when their usefulness is over.

Baskets can also be seen figuratively. They can be a metaphor for both the cycle of material and spiritual culture. The act of weaving a basket is simultaneously a metaphor and a metonymy, the outcome of which demonstrates material cultural competency. The 8 act of weaving a story may be seen as an act of symbolic cultural competency.

In this work, I draw on Archibald's trope8 and seek to extend it. While Archibald and I both employ basket tropes, what she and I do may be seen as similar on one hand and different on the other. Archibald discusses a way to create stories in the Salishan cultural tradition as a means of bringing contemporary Canadian justice issues into the curriculum of a modern classroom shared by both First Nations and non-First Nations children and teachers.

In my interrogation of the stories that I have gathered over the years in my qa? These stories remain in my qa? The principles of these stories shape the utility basket of my life and cultural work from the standpoint of being an Ahousaht-achtsup Ahousaht woman. As a woman originating outside Nuu-chah-nulth culture who has been explicitly schooled in cultural expectations through lineage participation, food gathering, marriage, and parenthood, I acknowledge such stories as they have been given to me as learning tools for my living, my Nuu-chah-nulth storywork.

In , while working in Ahousaht as the Director and Program Coordinator of the Ahousaht Holistic Society, I observed a discrepancy between the learning approaches of funded programming and community learning requirements. The discrepancy was between learning approaches prevalent in the social programs based in western models of 8 The anthropological theory of tropes and the conceptualization of polytropes, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony are central to the management of cultural production from spiritual to material product.

The Elders who were to provide cultural guidance and legitimacy continued to provide stories with cultural approaches to learning. At that time, I approached four lineage Elders to ask whether they thought it might be useful to investigate issues of Nuu-chah-nulth learning. They were very encouraging. Moreover, while two of the Elders, Mark Atleo and Roy Haiyupis have since passed on; I comfort myself that they are with me in spirit as I complete the work.

Thus my basketwork focuses on weaving an understanding of aspects of learning in the context of traditional narratives about acquiring and securing new food resources in the social and material context of Nuu-chah-nulth culture in the storied past and asking whether they would be applicable today. Lessons about creating new stories and being able to perceive particular aspects of traditional lineage stories are different but complimentary aspects of both Salishan and Nuu-chah-nulth cultural work.

Symbolic aspects of culture manage material dimensions of culture. In turn, material aspects of culture manage symbolic dimensions of culture. The dynamic is mediated by the technology and art of culture. In the process of storywork, the technology and art, the symbolic and the material all need to be considered in the context of a worldview which is overseen by a Creator and a philosophy ofHishuk-ish-ts'awalk Atleo, M. The material can be simultaneously symbolic or concrete. The social and mythic dimensions of reality interpenetrate each other to the extent that protocol is required to manage their interpenetrations and interactions.

Voices of the Elders: Huu-Ay-Aht Histories and Legends

Consequently, there is a cultural imperative that this work of managing the sacred and profane, symbolic and material be managed by a protocol of Esaak respect , in which the power of these continua be conserved rather 10 than dichotomized and disempowered. A protocol of Esaak respect aids in exploring Hisuk-ish-ts'awalk as conceptualized by Nuu-chah-mdth but also evidenced in other Northwest Coast cultures such as the multiple realities of the Haida Boelscher, A protocol of Esaak respect is used to reverently approach the power that exists in the synergistic management of such simultaneous, multiple realities of the worldviews of First Nations people of the Northwest Coast.

Raising the Muyapilum - A Conceptual Map of this Study Raising the visual metaphor of respect to show ones position is the first order of a formal public feast. The muyapilum is a ceremonial curtain or screen used by Nuu-chah-mdth during public ceremonies to signify the conceptual positioning of the host in the multidimensional contexts in which the ceremonial activities take place. A speaker stands with the host and his or her family to announce the business of the day. Before the potlatch was banned, the muyapilum was a screen visually depicting the history and tupati privileges of the hosts that allowed the hosts to situate themselves, combined with seating protocols, relative to all of Nuu-chah-mdth people, history and territory.

After the banning of these ceremonies, screens were replaced by readily concealable curtains made of canvas or cotton that was easily transportable. The curtain or screen may be seen as a visual metaphor9, which stands for the lineage claims and achievements. In Nuu-chah-mdth public ceremonies, the songs, dances and chants reenacting the claims on the curtain support the display on the muyapilum ritual curtain. The muyapihim 9 St. Clair explores the visual metaphors of indigenous cultures with oral traditions as a different way of knowing.

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Quaternity, with its common theme of the sacred number four fits prominently in depictions of indigenous ways of knowing and may best be understood as a spaciotemporal starting point. Consequently, it makes sense that the equivalent to my muyapilum ritual curtain , an overview of the current study be provided to allow the reader to make conceptual sense of this study and guidelines about the organization of the process by which it is conducted.

While this study is anchored in Nuu-chah-nulth perspectives, there will be a liberal use of formal textual sources used to provide conceptual bridging, illustration, and clarification of the subject. Limitations of the Study This study examines the learning orientations from the perspective of a small group of First Nations people living on the West Coast of Vancouver Island by examining the Umeek Narratives.

As a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation of Ahousaht, these narratives have been of particular interest to me because they seemed to contain a Nuu-chah-nulth model of learning and orientation to life career i. While these interests may present biases, they may also present a perspective from within the culture that I expect to be valuable for the interrogation of the text for structure, plot, story line, surface themes and patterns of learning.

Viewed from the seashore, the seasoned eye recognizes the environment in which that which is sought can be found. A special tree or shrub or rock crevice may only be discernable to the seasoned eye. The seasoned eyes of Elders, and those to whom they passed the orientations, guide us to the stories through a process comprised of principles of storywork. Archibald's close work with the Elders allowed her to become aware of and systematize a protocol for storywork starting with the principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, wholism, inter-relatedness and synergy.

She distilled these principles as a conceptual framework for understanding storywork as "cultural work", the creation of cultural products. She used the principles to "weave stories" for purposes of teaching in the public classroom both for a First Nations and non-First Nations audience.

As such, the stories are formally transported in the curriculum across both cultural and institutional boundaries. I reorganize these principles into structural and dynamic aspects as a means to illuminate movement across cultural and institutional boundaries. I then differentiate between the context in which the stories are embedded, historically and contemporarily u In Nuu-chah-mdth, Ha-maa-tsup is the formal revelation of anything that is usually hidden or out of ordinary perview.

The Hamatsa has been called the "cannibal dance" in the anthropological literature Boas, Since both Kwakwakawakw and Nuu-chah-mdth have Wakashan linguistic roots it may be possible that there is a connection between the ritual of revealing the transformation of the initiant from a "wild" flesh eater that is outside of the culture i. Hamatsa may be seen as a way to ha-maat-sup the reality that as qu'aas we need to understand our relationships with the spirit of the resources and each other if we are to survive.

In this way, the context of the story may reveal the components, dynamics, assumptions and principles that the story is conveying. Consequently, to distinguish between the principles that permit the creation, articulation and conservation of structures, I re-systematize Archibald's principles into the "Four Rs" Respect, Responsibility, Reverence, and Relations. The latter entails the "Four Ds" or system dynamics of reciprocity, wholism, inter-relatedness and synergy.

Four is a sacred number for Nuu-chah-mdth12; four is an optimal memory byte. Consequently, my reorganization of these principles provides an heuristic, a mnemonic device, for cultural creation or articulation as well as cultural change with transformations. Oral tradition that relies on memory bytes abounds with cultural heuristics as a way of unlocking systems of meaning. When applied to Nuu-chah-mdth social systems, the 4 Rs and 4 Ds provide clues about social protocols in which the "figure of the story" leaps out of the background of the cultural context so that it an be examined for learning strategies.

Reaching into the Past to Find the Future My understanding of the principles of First Nations storywork stems from my more than thirty year participation in Nuu-chah-mdth culture in my role as "Mrs. Richard", the wife of the third chief of Ahousaht, Eugene Richard Atleo, the mother of his two sons and heir , grandmother, niece, auntie, cousin, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, relative and friend. As from time immemorial, women who married into Nuu-chah-mdth households were socialized into the rights and responsibilities of the lineages into which they married.

Such women were expected to participate with their husband in his rigorous ritual duties and personal sacrifices, as partners in cultural work for the benefit of the lineage membership Marshall, And while there are stories about the difficulties women had in that role, Nan Margaret and the rest of the women and men of the Atleo lineage readily began to sensitize and orient me through storywork into the ethos and social protocols of that position so that I could fulfill the demands of the role. This acculturation into Atleo family roles fit well into an ethos of orality that was familiar and comfortable to me because it was framed in the cultivation of identity in a storied family tradition.

I was born in the post WWII years into an extended household on the edge of the Diissel, once a salmon river, which enters the Rhine at Diisseldorf. My roots are of Germanic stock. On my paternal side it is Rheinish, deeply entwined with the rootstock of the grape vines in the steep western slopes of the Rhine near the legendary siren rock, Die Lorelei, and the towns of Bacharach and Bingen before the Rhine widens into the moors and floodplains, further north. On my maternal side, the stock was shallowly rooted in the Eastern most reaches of the Prussian region of Silesia.

It was to Silesia that my mother's maternal stock fled from England during the Jacobean era because of their Protestantism. They went into the service of Protestant Germanic landed gentry in successive principalities as managers of forests, households, and in the modern era, as accountants and managers of fabric and steel mills. My mother's paternal stock was from the "melting pot" of that region and carried the dark good looks and almond shaped eyes of the Mongol.

Both my maternal 1 3 Based on the Moachaht narrative about acquiring an Ahousaht wife, Marshall suggests that the attributes of the wife were a key aspects of the whaler's success. Jonaitis includes the story oftowek and his Ahousaht wife in which a remarkable partnership is founded that produces whales and hairy wolf-children.

These families had suffered in the birth pangs of nationalist claims. During centuries of wars, the Rhineland seemed to change hands regularly in distant agreements about their futures. During the First and Second World Wars, their men saw combat action and their women and children became homeless refugees. The Peace of Versailles redrew the boundaries of a post WWI Germany and the boundaries of the homelands of all of my grandparents changed.

My maternal grandparents were given a choice to return from Silesia to a German homeland they had never known or become Polish nationals. My paternal grandparents in the Rhineland were relocated by Allied troops, the terror of which never faded for my father who was 2 years old at the time. These are families that the nation state defined, redefined and failed, repeatedly, even though their household heads served dutifully for Kaiser and country.

These families depended upon their own remembrances for their lives. This is my inheritance. My husband's paternal grandmother, uncles and aunts conveyed clear social attitudes about the role they expected me to play as the wife of the lineage heir. The legacy of the whaling tradition carried the responsibility of caring for the resources of the Ahousaht his?

The cultural expectations for role behavior as a wife and mother were articulated through myth, family stories, their own modeling in tangential roles and behavioral expectations reciprocal to those of my partner. How I would act in the role was, and is, very much an interaction between the cultural expectations for the role and how I bring myself to that role, both my strengths and weaknesses, to make the role rather than merely take the role.

As a transcultural person, by the age of eighteen, I had yet not found a social "Home" in which to articulate myself. Consequently, I was ready to become embedded in this position which seemed 16 so familiar and comfortable, for which there were expectations for role behavior, scripts, plots, themes, in short a story in which I could creatively participate by picking the basket material of a cultural tradition and to weave it into a life. Moreover, while I had been born into an entirely different culture, here were some strong structural parallels to my earliest experiences, particularly the early socialization by elders.

I had had the earliest advantage of being socialized by my paternal grandparents into an extended family household that provided a warm, welcoming emotional gestalt for my Nuu-chah-mdth experience. This household was headed by my paternal grandparents, he, a highly respected retired Master tool and die maker and his ex-shopkeeper wife. Their eldest daughter, her husband and son occupied the upstairs of the duplex in which we lived.

Their youngest son, my father, and his wife, my mother, slept on the pullout couch in the kitchen sitting room. I shared my grandparents' bedroom. They occupied my life with their stories and their grandparent sensibilities and unconditional positive regard for me. Tool and die makers are technicians who create positive and negative moulds for precision instruments for highly specialized tasks. Then retired, my grandfather would conceptually take anything apart, turn it inside out and invent new marvels moment by moment just as he may have done in the glass factory where he worked.

The conceptual realm provided none of the structural constraints of the steel and glass with which he had worked. As he wove his thoughts in the air for me, everything was possible. My grandmother came from a glassblowing tradition. She too loved complexity, intricacy and transparency. She was famous in that working class cooperative for her voracious appetite for books.

My grandparents had a passion for games and mental challenges which was so constant that the chessboard and cards were never far from the kitchen 17 table. They were always ready to play grown-up games with me even when the pediatrician warned them that they were probably emotionally and mentally over stimulating me. Oma and Opa Fiilber knew everyone in the little settlement where we lived next to the bus stop and everyone it seemed knew them and consequently me. Opa took me along to tend the allotment garden and tether the ewe in roadside ditches.

I helped Oma chase the chicken hawks away from the newly hatched chicks and pick the ripe red currants in the backyard. Everyone in the family could imitate the twitchy rabbit noses as they nibbled the grass with which we fattened them up. Best of all these grandparents wove my world together with stories, lots and lots of stories. My life was a sweet, active narrative with them for the first year and a half.

Then my grandfather died suddenly and the world shrank to include just grandmother and me. Nevertheless, the stories continued. The settlement folk still stopped to talk and wave as they boarded the bus and again as they saw us on their return. Sometimes they stopped long enough to share a story. These tradesmen settlers were steeped in the oral tradition of storytelling as a remnant of their guild tradition.

Their many experiences as journeymen during the itinerant phase of their training before they had acquired a home, family and factory job were important aspects of their occupational learning and teaching. Such remembering was also a way of socializing family members, wives and children, and potential apprenticeships into the situated context of a particular trade.

They gathered in a weekly ritual at their local 18 public house to tell their stories. They told stories of the hardships on the factory floor and the process of unionization. They spoke solemnly about their survival during the depression because of the self-sufficiency ethic of the settlement for which they had planned and struggled. They whispered stories of the terror of the Nazi regime. Stories about how their enclave had not been bombed when the city around them had been flattened were told in wonder. Their stories helped them remember whom they were in a period when their community history had been formally denied under the Nazi regime.

Account Options

I was a witness to the way in which stories provided the foundation of identity, resistance and ideals for the people of the venns of the Rheinland, "Die Freiheit. Then, when I was almost three, I immigrated to Canada with my parents and younger brother. Even though our household grew over the next 10 years by four more siblings, I yearned for the place and people and being that we had left behind.

The loss of grandma and grandpa stories, their wisdom, knowledge, curiosity, and sociability, made me feel poor even as my parents were working for better material opportunities for our little nuclear family. The poverty was about a loss of culture, stories, people, place and history.

My loss was so poignant that everywhere we moved, I was a three year old searching for parts of that distant place. Each new town was an opportunity to find grandparents because they were the key to past riches. Sometimes I would find older men and women that served as ersatz grandparents. Moreover, while they had stories, there were many other missing aspects,, as my heart was looking for its Home.

By the time I was a teenager we had lived in many cities and towns across Canada. My parents had immigrated to Canada to find a new home but could never replicate the financial and social success of their thriving little tobacconist shop in "Die 19 Freiheit". Both parents had trained in the apprenticeship system that is still prevalent in the highly industrialized Germany of today.

My mother had trained as a bookkeeper in a wallpaper factory. My father had trained as a tool and die maker, like his father before him. Both were employment ready for an industrial economy based in manufacturing. In a newly industrializing, post WWII Canada, those opportunities were narrowly defined and linguistically circumscribed. My parents were Germans in a post war Ontario where an Allied British ethos prevailed.

I was a 3-year-old "Nazi" on a playground in southern Ontario. The social and occupational opportunities for our family were very poor compared to that of the Marshall plan boom of the post WWII German economy my parents had left. In Germany, we had to share a place to live but my parents had work and the family a social milieu that gave life meaning. In Canada, we could readily find a place to live but my parents could not find employment opportunities equal to those in their homeland.

The family had no local social milieu in which to develop social sensibilities around family and work roles. Consequently, as a family we wove our own stories as we journeyed westward and my parents tried to make a life. Cochrane's song Life is a Highway14 could have been my parents' theme song and I was a reluctant passenger. By the time I was in my senior year of high school we had moved more than twenty times and I was still searching for a story in which I could participate. The CBC had done an exemplary job of providing a framework for Canadian culture with 1 4 "Life is a highway..

There's no load I can't hold, Road so rough this I know I'll be there when the light comes in, Tell 'em we're survivors" Tom Cochrane When I was seventeen, I was introduced to a man who could tell stories that had a familiar underlying appeal. He was a university student. He was dark, with almond eyes like my maternal grandfather. He was lean and quick like my paternal grandfather. He was an outstanding storyteller.

It was the foreshadowing of our story. We married and had our first son, who inherited the names of the ritual pieces of the saddle of the whale, the Chakwasi fin of the whale. The man took me to his home, his territory on the furthest reaches of the sea-lashed west coast of Vancouver Island. It was a place I recognized, with my heart, across cultural boundaries. He brought me to a place where stories were the foundation of history, identity, resistance and ideals.

He was the third chief of Ahousaht, who brought me to his territory, which became my Home. Here our two stories became one story. Our progression of ritual names situates us in the work of a deep heritage and in contemporary roles whereby we can actively contribute to the heritage by investing in the names of the ancestors in a storybasket of names. It is a storybasket in which the challenges of the bi-cultural heritage of our relationship could be elaborated and differentiated in a plot where meaning making and social action would provide a place in which children, our grandchildren and we can live.

We were both rich with stories that could provide guidance for our lives together through the traditions and protocols of storywork. In addition, Nan Margaret was our storytelling Elder, who first showed me how to weave our stories together, to shape a storybasket of our lives. Consequently, it behooves me to create a space of respect in this investigation in which both traditions can shed light on each other in a framework of such protocols. This opening chapter provides an introduction of thick description of the space in which this study takes place so that light can penetrate and the sorting of stories can begin.

In the Socio-cultural Territory of the Story Nuu-chah-nulth narratives have sustained the life careers of Nuu-chah-nulth people since time immemorial. Nuu-chah-nulth erroneously known as Nootka are today an indigenous people of approximately 7, who have inhabited the windward side of the West Coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada for more than 4, years according to the archeological record Marshall, The centrality of sacredness to the culture of Nuu-chah-nulth is exemplified by the recognition, even by people outside the culture, of the reverence toward Creation.

Cook proposed that Nuu-chah-nulth be called Wak'ashian because they could be recognized by their welcoming shouts of praise and recognition of wakash Arima, Thus, Wakashan has become the language family designation of linguistics that includes Kwakiutl, Heiltsuk, Haisla, Ditidaht, Makah, and T'aat'aaqsapa Nuu-chah-nulth language.

The greeting is associated with recognition of the role of the Creator for the creation and all good things.

Reverence and respect of the sacredness and engagement in the expression of that awe gave rise to the rich ceremonial life for which 22 the North West Coast is famous. Thus, Wakashan cultures such as Nnu-chah-nulth are organized by language in which reverence, respect, responsibility, reciprocity weaves the social and ceremonial web of life.

Ceremonial expressions of sacredness were and still are central to the cultural lives of Wakashan speakers and their descendants. For a description of the Orthography see Appendix B. The Nim-chah-nulth of Clayoquot Sound, in particular the confederated tribes of Ahousaht who make their current home at Maaqtitsiis on Flores Island, are the people among which this study is situated. The oneness of Nuu-chah-mdth with their homeland is signified by the very name meaning people living along the mountains of Vancouver Island. Ahous-ahts are people originating in Ahous, on the headland of Vargas Island.

The Ahousaht Confederacy claims a territory between Hesquiaht Point and inland reaches of Sidney Inlet in the North and Meares Island to the South, to the East'the west side of the mountain range along the spine of the mountains of Vancouver Island and the ancestral village of Ahous, on the headland of Vargas Island and ocean reaches West and South Lane, An early version of this confederacy was formed during the Oots-hoas-aht war to assure certainty of access to "inside" resources, in particular chum salmon from Atleo River, when the dowry system of economic sharing failed.

Everything is One - Unity of All One-ness with the territory and its history may be understood as the central organizing philosophy of the Nuu-chah-mdth. Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk may be understood, as a philosophy comprised of the cultural elaboration of the history of a People that have lived in a particular territory minimally for more than four millennia. The philosophy of Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk, Everything is One, was translated, expressing central Nuu-chah-nulth beliefs for the first time in English through the work of the Nuu-chah-nulth members of the Scientific Panel for Forest Management in Clayoquot Sound: Co-chair, Chief Umeek, Dr.

The articulation of Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk in this context was particularly focused on the management of resources in the Clayoquot Sound when government, industry, environmental NGOs and First Nations had reached an impasse. The embodiment of territory and embeddedness of Nuu-chah-nulth in the territory demonstrates how the context and the people are conceptualized as One Atleo, M. As such, Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk is a philosophical principle that speaks of how the context is central to understanding the moral and spiritual roles and actions of Nuu-chah-nulth individuals and the group, Ou?

While Hisuk-ish-t'sawalk, can be transliterated as "in common-us-one" and speaks of "Oneness", it is lived in the very principles of the work that weaves lives and stories into mundane, utilitarian containers which become the meaning in daily living. In a traditional context, the sacred would be 24 imbued in the process of meaning making. In the contemporary context, these principles are more likely to sensitize First Nations people to the sacred as they move through the dynamic systems of social life. These principles are also likely to sensitize First Nations people to demands of paradigmatic shifts of epistemic transformations inherent in western developmental logic.

Awareness of the sacred, but lack of embeddedness in the sacred, may be a reason that the exploration of living and working between oral and textual traditions requires a bi-focal vision. In a First Nations tradition, the group sensibilities require that the interconnectedness of all things, Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk All is One , be central to understanding the creation and First Nations people in it.

Thus, all things start with the relationship between the Creator and the creations. To the Creator and creations is due reverence, an awe that is about the wonder of it all, a wonder that requires a mind and heart which is open and compassionate to be able to be receptive to vision. This One-ness requires social and moral responsibility which can provide security, predictability, order and positive expectations about who a person is and what he or she is expected to do. Respect allows one person to see the other and oneself in the context of the web of kinships.

Relations are critical to understanding how to fit in to the family, group, and the world. The dynamics of the interrelatedness are continually balanced through the process of reciprocities in the web of inter-relatedness, which creates a synergy in which the wholism is again One-ness. Storywork, as cultural production in the context of Hisuk-ish-tsa'walk, continuously elaborates the meaning making of a People.

Impact of Colonial Relations on Storywork In the last one hundred and fifty years of the incursion of the European social and educational systems, there has been a serious break in the formal storywork of First 25 Nations people. This has resulted in a cultural gap in the social technology of theory and practice for Nuu-chah-milth by the erasure of Nvu-chah-mdth stories and the suppression of storywork as an active dynamic of teaching and learning.

The colonial erosion of Nuu-chah-mdth frameworks, cultural theory and practice has been accomplished through the dominance of a western system of cultural logic and educational ideology with the inherent ambivalence of colonialism as described in the postcolonial text of the likes of Bhabha and the First Nations specific commentary of Battiste The aftershocks of such "epistemic violence" Spivak, continue to roll through the culture and lives of Nuu-chah-mdth people. The violence by the dominant culture of denying the "ways of knowing" of indigenous cultures continues to separate contemporary Nuu-chah-mdth from the grounded experiences of their own histories and cultural strategies.

This epistemic violence is so insidious that it becomes embodied in the very people whose knowing it denies.

Voices of the Elders

For example, high levels of family violence in First Nations communities is framed as an individual developmental problem rather than a problem of sociohistorical epistemic origins and proportions, confounding the source of violence. Such re-telling may promote re-discovery of the cultural worldview birthed in Nuu-chah-mdth territory over the millennia.

This ambivalence of colonialism begs for an examination of those stories for the promises they held for Nuu-chah-mdth. Such an examination would address the colonization of the mind Battiste, ; , as well as acknowledge afresh the 1 6 The violence of colonialism is internalized by First Nations people and becomes articulated through violence with in the group as domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, etc..

This cultural gap between theory and practice which seems to be managed by "education" as a social technology in the western sense must hold more for the future for First Nations than currently available. The dynamic between teaching and learning that existed in the Nuu-chah-nulth traditions was in some measure mediated through stories that carried critical salient "messages" for adaptive Nuu-chah-nulth cultural, spiritual, emotional, and physical development in the context of Nuu-chah-nulth territories.

According to conservative archeological records Marshall, , for more than 4, years, Nuu-chah-nulth culture evolved in those territories. Lineage histories tell of Nuu-chah-nulth social structures that were complex with richly elaborated political and ceremonial life. The focus of Nuu-chah-nulth life was strategic and dynamic adaptation to the shifting resources of the territory and their ability to sustain the people. Lineage histories tell of the relationships between the people and the territory through a socio-political organization of'haahoothee" a system of hierarchical and hereditary management rights and obligations that assured re-distribution and re-circulation of resources to assure access to all the relations.

As in every complex socio-cultural system, the life careers of individuals may be understood as predictable social trajectories marked by events signifying the points of transformation to a new stage or phase.

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Mammuums vocation was an important dimension of traditional life that located individuals in formal cultural life according to their social position and personal development therein. The Sayings of our People Keitlah, provides an accessible recent rendition of many of the traditional life 27 career expectations for Nuu-chah-milth by contemporary Elders. George Clutesi , provides the most comprehensive and authentic exposition of the life of a young Tseshaht boy's journey into manhood and the more formal world of the potlatch system from first hand experience.

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