“Our stories could kill you”: Storytelling, healthcare, and the legacy of the “talking cure” in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998) and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls (2005)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe notion of indigenous intergenerational historical trauma, developed by Native American engagements with trauma studies, has influenced bicultural or multicultural healthcare systems in New Zealand and Hawaiʻi. Beliefs that indigenous storytelling facilitates healing underpin these discourses, a premise shared by postcolonial trauma scholarship addressing Pacific literatures. This article questions underlying – and romanticized – arguments that Māori and Hawaiian storytelling heals. It analyses how storytelling is re-envisioned as a potential rather than realized space of healing in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes and Georgia Kaʻapuni McMillen’s School for Hawaiian Girls. It contends that the legacy of the “talking cure” obscures issues of responsible telling and listening, intergenerational respect, and silence in Māori and Hawaiian iterations of health and well-being. By reframing storytelling as a precarious, even dangerous, route to well-being, these readings demonstrate how Pacific literatures might contribute to culturally nuanced appraisals of oral rites and their relationship to colonial trauma.