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Activating the Heart is an exploration of storytelling as a tool for knowledge production and sharing to build new connections between people and their histories, environments, and cultural geographies. The collection pays particular attention to the significance of storytelling in Indigenous knowledge frameworks and extends into other ways of knowing in works where scholars have embraced narrative and story as a part of their research approach.
In the first section, Storytelling to Understand, authors draw on both theoretical and empirical work to examine storytelling as a way of knowing. In the second section, Storytelling to Share, authors demonstrate the power of stories to share knowledge and convey significant lessons, as well as to engage different audiences in knowledge exchange. The third section, Storytelling to Create, contains three poems and a short story that engage with storytelling as a means to produce or create knowledge, particularly through explorations of relationship to place.
The result is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue that yields important insights in terms of qualitative research methods, language and literacy, policy-making, human–environment relationships, and healing. This book is intended for scholars, artists, activists, policymakers, and practitioners who are interested in storytelling as a method for teaching, cross-cultural understanding, community engagement, and knowledge exchange.
Julia Christensen is a geographer and creative writer born and raised in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, on the ancestral homelands of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Northern Governance and Public Policy at Memorial University. She was previously a Trudeau Foundation Scholar.|Christopher Cox is an assistant professor of Indigenous and Minority Language Issues in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University. His research focuses on issues in language documentation, education, and revitalization, and he has been involved with community language programs in western and northern Canada for the past twenty years.
|Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer and Trudeau Foundation Scholar, holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and teaches literature at John Abbott College. She is co-editor of Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (WLU Press, 2015).
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction / Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox, and Lisa Szabo-Jones
Section One: Storytelling to Understand
Chapter One
Finding My Way: Emotions and Ethics in Community-Based Action Research with Indigenous Communities / Leonie Sandercock
Chapter Two
Notes from the Underbridge / Christine Stewart and Jacquie Leggatt
Chapter Three
Re-valuing Code-Switching: Lessons from Kaska Narrative Performances / Patrick Moore
Section Two: Storytelling to Share
Chapter Four
Art, Heart, and Health: Experiences from Northern British Columbia / Kendra Mitchell-Foster and Sarah de Leeuw
Chapter Five
“Grandson, / this is meat”: Hunting Metonymy in François Mandeville’s This Is What They Say / Jasmine Spencer
Section Three: Storytelling to Create
Chapter Six
sleepless in Somba K’e / Rita Wong
Chapter Seven
Old Rawhide Died / Bren Kolson
Chapter Eight
Métis Storytelling across Time and Space: Situating the Personal and Academic Self between Homelands / Zoe Todd
Conclusion / Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox, and Lisa Szabo-Jones
References
About the Contributors
Index