The Metamorphosis of an Oral Tradition: Dissonance in the Digital Stories of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada

Abstract

Storytelling, as an oral tradition for Aboriginal peoples in Canada, is considered an ancient art form (Cruikshank 1990). Aboriginal peoples’ communities are often founded on stories that are characteristically sustaining: communicating the epistemologies and norms that constitute their worldviews (see Valdes 2004; Dei 2000). Digital storytelling is understood as a form of short narrative told in the first person and enhanced by visual text and symbolic imagery (Ohler 2005; Salpeter 2005; Weis et al. 2002). It is considered an extension of oral storytelling, is welcomed by Aboriginal peoples, and represents a “continuation of what Aboriginal people have been doing from time immemorial” (Hopkins 2006:342), and complements the preferred values and styles of interaction innate to Aboriginal pre-colonial education paradigms (Battiste 2000a and b; Barman et al. 1986). The metamorphosis of the oral tradition of storytelling into the digital medium creates a sense of audience for the elders who self-profess to be intermediaries from one generation to the next. As John Miles Foley (2008) insightfully suggests, oral tradition and digital technology are the frameworks to the fading era characteristic of the printed page. Digital storytelling situates the elders in the line of public gaze, where once their audience was more immediate and culturally relative. The presumed influence of their stories involves the variation of exposition, the representational language, and the latent relationships between the human and spiritual realms according to Aboriginal peoples’ worldviews. The elders’ role is to sustain the continuity of belief and so accept the digital as a means to reach a broader audience and illuminate a complex system of interrelated values. By employing a reflexive ethnographic framework to examine selected digital stories from the Omushkegowuk area in Ontario, Canada, a core interpretation of these worldviews emerged; namely, the presence and exploitation of western colonial influence has caused the profound dissonance experienced by Aboriginal peoples’ cultural, civil, symbolic, and spiritual paradigms, resulting from the presence and exploitation of western colonial influence. In turn,