Negotiating with Narrative: Establishing Cultural Identity at the Yukon International Storytelling Festival

Abstract

Contemporary circumpolar indigenous peoples are experimenting with venues where issues of cultural, economic, and political importance can be translated to broad audiences. This paper examines intercultural transactions occurring at one public festival in northern Canada: the Yukon International Storytelling Festival. Challenging the idea that these performances can be understood as "texts" or "representations" standing outside the daily lives of participants, the author analyzes contemporary public storytelling as a tangible form of social action by performers well attuned to the complexity of their audiences.

Respecting the Language of Elders: Ideological Shift and Linguistic Discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community

“…This is very important for speakers in the context of ongoing land claims negotiations. Public performances of historical narratives (Cruikshank 1997(Cruikshank , 1998, evidence of land use, and the documentation of kinship (Nadasdy 2003) were all pertinent to these negotiations. Since these language varieties indexed family relationships and alliances, alliances which came to have legal and material consequences, the act of correcting someone's pronunciation became a proprietary act that re-aligned the errant speaker with his or her own family and their right to particular material assets.…”

The “Wild” or “Feral” Distraction: Effects of Cultural Understandings on Management Controversy Over Free-Ranging Horses (Equus ferus caballus)

“…Social and economic trends can also have a large influence on how people conceive of nature, wilderness, and wildlife (Hovardas and Stamou 2006;Rinfret 2009). Even allowing for individual variations in perspective, and after over a century of cultural mixing, there remain some fundamental differences in worldview between how many First Nations people perceive and relate to the idea of wilderness in general, and how Euro-Canadians do so (Bertolas 1998;Castleden et al 2009;Nadasdy 1999;Cruikshank 1997).…”

Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power, and Residential Schools in Central Siberia

“…These women's narratives prompt a reexamination of understandings of relations of power in binary terms of homogenous indigenous communities as oppressed and the state as oppressor. A number of scholars (Cruikshank 1997;Krupnik and Vakhtin 1997;Nadasdy 2003;Morrow and Hensel 1992;Warren 1998) writing about indigenous communities have sought to destabilize such a binary model of power. They have also pointed out that the term community itself is contested and defined in a myriad of shifting configurations, as mechanisms of "the state" are indigenized to fit local needs.…”

“…This exchange reminded me of how these accounts were very much tailored to the audience. As Cruikshank (1997) has demonstrated, oral tradition is shaped by the context in which speakers interact. Had Nadia been absent, Galina Petrovna might have chosen to keep to the story of the reindeer dying from disease; my identity as a U.S. researcher was often weighed carefully by those I met as they considered what they wanted to become part of a story about their lives and their ties to local structures of power.…”