Storytelling
Week 4

“Believe me when I say we have a difficult time ahead of us.  But if we are to be prepared for it, we must first shed our fear of it!  I stand here before you now, truthfully unafraid.  Why?  Because I believe something you do not?  No!  I stand here without fear because I remember.  I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me! “(The Matrix Reloaded).
                     -Morpheus 

“Each individual story is powerful.  But the point about the stories is not that they simply tell a story, or tell a story simply.  These new stories contribute to a collective story in which every indigenous person has a place…storytelling is a useful and culturally appropriate way of representing the ‘diversities of truth’…” (144-45).
                     - Linda Tuhiwai Smith 

“It is important that the message comes in story form, for the story is a source of power.  ‘It is important to the Navajos when you know these kind of stories.  They can keep you going.  These are brave stories, and knowing them can make you brave’” (xxiii)
                     -Tiana Bighorse 

“They believe home is a place where one is enclosed in endless stories.  Like arms, they hold and embrace memory.  We are only alive in memory.  To remember together is the highest form of communion” (16).
                        -bell hooks 

“Because we produce and communicate stories within a social context, the stories we tell are those that are ‘culturally available for our telling’ and so reflect and reproduce existing social relations.  This is as true for the subject of race/racism as for any other topic of storytelling” (4).

“Storytelling is a political act.  How we portray the past, ourselves and our fellows can defend or contest social arrangements” (14).
                     -Lee Anne Bell