Some of you will remember my Fall Diaries which dried up due to Holidays, Political Stress, Business demands, Medical tourism in Southern Ontario where all the specialists live, getting sick with what is now called Flu but we used to call a cold and adjusting to winter which I have now done, so by popular demand, I resume with Winter Diary which changes the scene and subjects. When I say “popular demand” I should to be honest and not include everybody since one relative has asked to be removed from my recipient list since I refused to preselect for her those entries that confine themselves to “family news” and withhold those that refer to my feelings and experiences about my own life interactions in my setting in Canada. Family news is part of a complex life which I am privileged to live and which I hope entertains you and maybe if I am very lucky might inform and be of use to you. But since everything human is a story and everything that is a story is human I take pleasure in sharing my story with you.
There is a remarkable movie called “Before Tomorrow” which gives a picture of the moment so to speak when Inuit Culture is poised to make first contact with Europeans who bring the first of a thousand curses with them. But what is most eloquent and informative and unique to this film is the discussion relating to stories because these people don’t write, don’t have movies or books but they have the forerunner to all of these which is story in the brain and this story making ability and memory and this way to hold and carry and transfer experience to others, to tell stories is highly valued and terribly important and they actually discuss the status that will accrue to HAVING EXPERIENCES TO TELL AS STORIES. When you get back home think about the stories you will have to tell! To be continued, I have to go to bed.
I love “Before Tomorrow,” so much that I’ve included it in my “First Nations Literatures” course. The course as a whole is interested in the ways in which stories function epistemologically. For Native writers, there’s no difference between history and story. There’s no binary and the two can’t be separated. Oral stories are living things that change with each telling. Meaning lies not in the facts but in the relationships between things. Anyway, I loved the ways in which the movie engaged with storytelling. I also found the relationship between the boy and his grandmother deeply moving. I’m curious to see how my students will respond to it.