I Have Many Sick Hearts

Abstract

Abstract We live in cultural worlds abounding with stories of health and sickness and many shades in between. This chapter makes the case that it often is difficult, if not impossible, to clearly distinguish between illness narratives and narratives that tell how illness is interwoven with life and its challenges. Whatever else illness is, it is always interwoven with people’s personal experiences, evaluations, and emotions. It is endowed with meaning and sense making that cannot be distinguished from the significance illness has within a given culture. Drawing on resources from narrative psychology, narrative medicine, cultural psychology, cultural anthropology, and critical health studies, the authors elaborate this point in studying the stories told to them in interviews with Canadian Indigenous women who, living on reserve, suffer from heart disease. In particular they look at one multilayered narrative that gives a drastic example of the well-known cultural hybridity of life lived on indigenous reserve within a settler culture.