SHAMANISM AND STORYTELLING

In the SHAMANISM UK facebook group (which I admin) John Payne put up a post asking about the place of storytelling, song and poetry within Shamanism. And I think if you view Shamanism as a culture - and as a term that has come to refer to all indigenous traditions - then storytelling etc would naturally be a part of that. And it made me think about the nature of traditional storytelling.

A Chippewa Cree teacher/storyteller used to visit me. And his storytelling was very particular: he had been trained over a long time to get the stories exactly right, and how to explain their meaning. There was a strong vein of psychological understanding running through them, particularly to do with self-importance, and making fun of it. So that explicit didactic element - always done with humour and entertainment - had a different emphasis to the way stories are told nowadays in our culture, where we often back off from the didactic, maybe in reaction to our religious background. But all this term means is that we're being shown, via story and maybe its explanation, how to be a human being.

And nor would he come with a story prepared. It was not like that. It was responsive to the people present. So he would get people to ask questions, and eventually a story would occur to him in response to these questions.

So these 2 elements - the didactic, and the responsiveness - are not really how we do things. But maybe they would be the norm in a traditional culture?

Here is a link to an interview on Storytelling with Ron Evans, the Chippewa Cree guy I was talking about: http://montrealrampage.com/ron-evans-teller-teacher-elder-explainer/ The picture is of his English pupil Josie: Ron prefers not to do photos 😏
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