How do you go about finding a story to craft and tell that is both right for you as a storyteller and ethical for you as a person in this time and place?
Selecting the story is the first and most important step in telling a story. The bottom line is this: Choose stories that you like. Really like. Ones that jump in your head and that you know you will be able to tell. When you learn a story that you have a genuine affection for, it’s much easier to imagine telling it. There is no point in putting in the effort to learn and hone a story that you don’t like.
Beyond that, think about these things:
- Do you have a specific audience or context in mind? Do you want to tell in a meeting at work, at your church, in your child’s classroom, to a friend over coffee? All those things will influence which story you choose and when you tell it.
- Do you have the right to tell the story?
Thinking through whether you have the right to tell a story ensures that you don’t engage in cultural appropriation. Here is the Storytelling Institute’s statement on cultural appropriation: The SMCC Storytelling Institute asks that you be mindful of cultural appropriation as you select stories to tell. Please choose stories that are from your ancestry, cultural tradition, or regional heritage when you can. If you do choose a story from a tradition other than your own, please do the research to ensure you can tell it respectfully and responsibly.
Since the beginning of the Storytelling Institute, the faculty have stressed the importance of respecting the ethics that frame the telling of stories, both from one’s own ancestry and from cultures other than one’s own. If anything, the need for that ethical orientation is even more important today than it was when we started the Institute 20+ years ago. Cultural appropriation, or mis-appropriation, “is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures." (Wikipedia(Links to an external site.) It happens in storytelling, music, fashion, dance, and food to name a few. For example, Kim Kardashian was called out a couple of years ago for wearing dreads to a fashion show in Paris. Alison Roman, a food writer for the New York Times, had her column suspended for her unwarranted criticism of two women of color, and was subsequently also deeply criticized for appropriating ethnic recipes without acknowledging their origin.
While cultural appropriation is most problematic when members of a dominant group take from one with less perceived power, in storytelling we apply it more broadly. We ask that you very carefully consider the stories you tell, and when you can, choose ones from your own ancestry. The point of this is not to stifle you, but to help you prepare yourself to work with stories responsibly in and out of class, and especially if you ever plan to tell the story in a public or professional context.
And there is some middle ground. Educators and librarians at all levels of education often have the obligation of presenting stories from cultures not their own to meet the objectives or standards of the course. In a classroom setting both beginning storytelling students and faculty members work with and tell stories from a range of cultures that they may or may not be affiliated with. The point of this is to provide exposure to the beauty and diversity of the world’s storytelling tradition. While you are learning, it’s okay to experiment with the stories you like, whether they are from your own heritage(s) or not. But if you think you might ever tell the story you learned in class in a professional or public context, you will want to engage in deeper research to make sure that you can tell it with respect.
One of the Storytelling Institute's mentors, renowned storyteller Donald Davis, has said that we can tell any story that we can demonstrate to our audience that we have a deep connection to. To start a story, “My ancestors came from Chiapas, and this is a story my grandmother used to tell me,” would make such a connection very clearly. But we don’t always have a personal or familial relationship with the stories we want to tell.
So, if you find a Bantu story in an anthology, take some time to research the Bantu before you tell it. Same for the Irish, or the Korean, or the Aztec. What is the landscape like? Where do the people live? What is their social structure like? Why do they tell this story? How are the names pronounced? Can you tell the story respectfully and accurately? Can you integrate that information into the story to bring it to life? The more we can know about a tradition, through consistent and respectful research and experience, the better and more relevant our telling will be.
The exception to this is the telling of Native-American stories by non-natives. For those of us living in the Southwest, respecting the ethics of telling Native-American stories is an ethical, artistic, and human imperative. There are very few, if any, contexts in which it is appropriate for a Non-Native person to tell a Native-American story. In general, just don’t do it. Dovie Thomason addresses this in more depth in the “How to Tell a Folktale” chapter from The Oral Tradition Today.
So, what do you do if you fall in love with a story from a people you aren’t related to? The easy answer is to respect the thing you love! Do your due diligence to determine if you can tell the story at all, or what research you need to do to tell it respectfully. The good news is that thousands of folktale types have been documented and have local variants pretty much wherever there are humans. For example, there are hundreds of versions of Cinderella, each reflecting the culture they occur in, told all over the world. If you recognize or can find the folktale type to which the story belongs, you may then find a similar story from a culture you can tell from.
To summarize:
- Do choose stories that you really like and can imagine yourself telling.
- Try to choose stories from your own ancestry and heritages.
- Don’t tell Native American stories if you aren’t Native American.
- When you do choose a story outside your cultural heritage, do some research to make sure you can tell it responsibly. Start by making sure you can pronounce the names and know where it is on a map.
The picture at the top is of Kyle Mitchell, Diné (Navajo), telling the story of The Hero Twins. Kyle wove together Diné creation myths with his own experiences as a veteran to create a story that touched on subjects that affect all warriors in time of war.
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