Indigenous Digital Storytelling in Video: Witnessing with Alma Desjarlais

Abstract

Indigenous digital storytelling in video is a way of witnessing the stories of Indigenous communities and Elders, including what has happened and is happening in the lives and work of Indigenous peoples. Witnessing includes acts of remembrance in which we look back to reinterpret and recreate our relationship to the past in order to understand the present. Pedagogical witnessing allows my reading, viewing, or listening to be an event in which I allow the understanding of someone else's life to interrupt my own life. This article begins with a discussion of a digital storytelling video project in which an Indigenous Elder, Alma Desjarlais—a Cree/Métis grandmother—shares stories to witness and help us understand the histories of trauma and the resilience and strength of Indigenous peoples. Her stories are interspersed from the film, Grandmothers of the Métis Nation (Iseke, 2010a; to view a trailer for the film see http://www.ourelderstories.com) that is part of the digital storytelling project and provides supplementary background information to support the social, political, cultural, and economic context of the stories. Alma's stories are followed by a discussion of witnessing and the ways that Indigenous digital storytelling, through the digital storytelling project with Alma Desjarlais, involve pedagogic witnessing.