Indigenous narratives, sovereignty and narrative sovereignty
Sovereignty over Indigenous stories is as important as sovereignty over Indigenous lands
On a frigid February day in 2020, when Nicolas Renaud heard the news of an injunction to clear a rail blockade in Kahnawake, he was angry.
The Mohawk people had been protesting in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en communities in British Columbia, opposing the construction of a gas pipeline in their territory for over two weeks.
His anger, though, was directed at the media coverage.
The grand chief of Kahnawake at the time, Joseph Tokwiro Norton, had issued a statement asserting that the Kahnawake Peacekeepers—the only police agency with jurisdiction over the territory—would not carry out the injunction.
While the media reported the grand chief’s statement, there was little explanation of the historical context of the chief’s statement. Missing was also any reference to the Great Law of Peace in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy—considered the political constitution of Kahnawake and five other nations—that granted free movement and other rights that pre-date the confederation of Canada.
Renaud, an assistant professor of First Peoples studies at Concordia University, was disappointed with the media coverage.
“It just came across as nonsense,” said Renaud, who is of mixed Quebecois and Huron-Wendat heritage. “It's not just how it does harm, but that there will be a chance to educate and [the media] won't take it.”
The 2020 rail blockade and the political debate around it had echoes of another Mohawk resistance movement from 30 years ago.
Gage Diabo, assistant professor in the English department at Concordia and a Kahnawake Mohawk, said that during the Kanesatake resistance, popularly known as the Oka crisis, in the summer of 1990, the media didn’t really tell the story of those protesting the encroachments into Indigenous lands.
Diabo believes that the 78-day violent standoff that ended with the Canadian Armed Forces being brought in was driven by manipulated narratives about the protesters.
“In that sense, it [became] like a violent invasion of national borders,” Diabo said, “but also a fundamental misunderstanding or willful misrepresentation of the narrative that those land defenders were trying to share with the rest of the world.”
Like many Indigenous cultures, Diabo’s Mohawk tradition prizes storytelling. They grew up in Kahnawake hearing tales passed down generations through oral traditions. A lot of these come from or are about the natural world, such as the creation story.
In the Mohawks’ telling of the “greatest story,” as Diabo puts it, a woman named Sky Woman falls through a hole in the sky on the back of a turtle in a giant ocean.
“And as that story develops, she meets other animal players,” Diabo said, “and together they build up that back of a turtle into what we now know as Turtle Island (North America) or the Earth itself.”
Diabo explained that storytelling is the repository of Indigenous knowledge, history and peoplehood.
“The rules by which we come into being as a political group or as a community of minded people all emerge from those stories,” Diabo said.
According to Renaud, the stories teach that humans and the natural world are connected. They informed generations on how to coexist and operate in the land.
“An important part of the heritage of traditional Indigenous cultures is that the dimensions of ourselves are not separated,” Renaud said. “You have to inscribe in human action a balanced web of relationships and connections. So spirituality and politics are kind of instructed by the same values.”
To many Indigenous Peoples, when the media covers these protests and neglects to provide the full picture, the issue becomes as much about being able to exercise narrative sovereignty as it is about land sovereignty.
“[Narrative sovereignty] is having the ability to tell your own stories the way you want to tell them and to some extent to control stories that are told by others about you,” said Monika Ille, chief executive officer of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN). “So that means you're controlling what you want to say and what you want to share in your own way. It is not manipulated by a third party.”
However, it is not just about who tells the stories, but also whose voices are left out.
Often, the media repeats a certain narrative that starts with political leaders and makes its way to the general public without much analysis or Indigenous voices, said Renaud. “Or the media will show one side and then relay the other side, but not really dig in and deconstruct and analyze and allow people to understand,” he added.
That kind of deeper narrative can only come with fostering relationships, says Oswald Michelin, an Inuk journalist who directed the award-winning podcast Telling Our Twisted Histories. Michelin spent five years with APTN.
During his time working for the APTN in Kahnawake, he saw firsthand the reception he and his crew got compared to other mainstream outlets.
“We had our APTN news vans and when we were there, people were like, ‘Oh, what's going on, what are you guys talking about?’” Michelin said.
In contrast, a Kahnawake community member once told him that their reflex when they saw the vehicles of other media outlets like CBC or CTV was to say, “Uh-oh, something bad is happening.”
Michelin believes having Indigenous-led media like APTN is a form of narrative sovereignty as it makes community members feel represented and trust that a fuller and more nuanced picture will be shown.
“I always say if you're there for the triumphs, then people will be more receptive to you when you're there for the tragedies as well,” Michelin said. “If you only show the tragedies, you're not doing your job.”
When it came to missing an opportunity to tell a fuller picture, Diabo felt that the example of the movie adaptation of the novel Indian Horse by Ojibwe writer Richard Wagamese was particularly illustrative.
In the Clint Eastwood executive-produced movie, Diabo said that the three-part structure became a two-part story. It excluded the protagonist Saul Indian Horse’s childhood immersed in Ojibwe culture. It also missed the mark on the final part about healing and reconciliation after he becomes a hockey star and deals with substance abuse problems.
“[The filmmakers] instead emphasize the horrors of the residential school system, which for their purposes is more cinematic, it's more explosive, it plays better,” Diabo added. “There's a loss of rhetorical sovereignty there […] their intentions were probably as good as they could be, but something got lost when they warped the story into something else.”
Despite the struggle to hold onto narrative sovereignty, Renaud believes that the wisdom of Indigenous storytelling contains lessons for the current world fraught with climate crisis, political divisions and inequalities. However, he conceded that it might be “utopic” to think that Indigenous philosophies can change the world right now.
Nonetheless, Indigenous stories—like the creation story that Diabo and Renaud grew up with—have survived centuries. Renaud believes that this is because the stories hold a lot of wisdom and are adaptable to different contexts despite their perceived simplicity.
“[T]he more you look at it, it packs so many ideas,” Renaud said. “It actually holds instructions about how to make the world: What is inclusion? What is cooperation? What is a circular relationship with everything that lives? What [does it mean to respect] women at the centre of the human world for the power to give life? What gratitude do we owe to animals because they sustain us?”