Representations of natural environments, recurring characters and ways of living with the land in children’s retellings of First Nations oral narratives

Abstract

We report on an analysis of the ways that children in five elementary school classrooms engaged with oral narrative patterns that they experienced through their participation in a First Nations cultural education program. Our analysis focuses on the use of a pattern of “measured descriptive elaboration”, that we argue functions to create vivid and memorable representations of local natural environments and of recurring characters in the stories. This form of narrative patterning is described and situated in relation to research from Indigenous scholars and allied researchers who have discussed the role of relational epistemologies in how we understand our experience of the natural world. A verse analysis of oral stories told by a cultural educator and of the students’ retellings of these stories suggests that children echoed many of these patterns of measured descriptive elaboration in their story retellings. A close analysis of two retellings displays how these patterns were being used by children to share memorable lessons with a listener, and how these patterns could support personalized experiences of natural environments. We conclude with a discussion of ways this research could applied in developing educational spaces that provide children with experiences of multiple and diverse narrative resources.