Telling Our Stories Of Home

Since the 1970s, Louis Bird, a distinguished Aboriginal storyteller and historian, has been recording the stories and memories of Omushkego (Swampy Cree) communities along western Hudson and James Bays. In nine chapters, he presents some of the most vivid legends and historical stories from his collection, casting new light on his people’s history, culture, and values. Working with the editors and other contributors to provide background and context for the stories, he illuminates their many levels of meaning and brings forward the value system and world-view that underlie their teachings. Students of Aboriginal culture, history, and literature will find that this is no ordinary book of stories compiled from a remote, disconnected voice, but rather a project in which the teller, deeply engaged in preserving his people's history, language, and values, is committed to bringing his listeners and readers as far along the road to understanding as he possibly can.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

What is home? The answer seems obvious. But Telling Our Stories of Home, an international collection of eleven plays by and about women from Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Uganda, Palestine, Brazil, India, UK, and the US, complicates the answer. The "answer" includes stories as far-ranging as: enslaved women trying to create a home, one by any means necessary, and one in the ocean; siblings wrestling with their differing devotion to home after their mother's death; a family wrestling with the government's refusal to allow the burial of their soldier-son in their hometown; a young scholar attempting to feel at home after studying abroad; a young man fleeing home due to his sexual orientation only to discover the difficulty of creating home elsewhere, and Siddis (Indians of African descent) continuing to struggle for acceptance despite having lived in India for over 600 years. These are voices seldom represented to a larger audience. The plays and performance pieces range from 20 to 90-minute pieces and include a mix of monologue, duologue, and ensemble plays. Short yet powerful, they allow fantastic performance opportunities particularly in an age of social-distancing with flexible casts that together invite the theme of home to be performed and studied on the page. The plays include: The House by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon), Happy by Kia Corthron (US), The Blue of the Island by Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti), Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni (UK), Leaving, but Can't Let Go by Lupe Gehrenbeck (Venezuela), Questions of Home by Doreen Baingana (Uganda), On the Last Day of Spring by Fidaa Zidan (Palestine) Letting Go and Moving On by Louella Dizon San Juan (US), Antimemories of an Interrupted Trip by Aldri Anunciação (Brazil), So Goes We by Jacqueline E. Lawton (US), and Those Who Live Here, Those Who Live There by Geeta P. Siddi and Girija P. Siddi (India)

Five decades ago, I was challenged to read the Moynihan Report (1965). Then and now, I take issue with much of the content, which smacks of deficit thinking, blaming the victim, and a blindness or almost total disregard for how systemic racism and social injustices contribute to family structures. I recall being professionally and personally offended by interpretations of single?parent families, which were often negative and hopeless. Moral development, criminal activity, poor educational outcomes, poverty, and apathy of many kinds were placed squarely on the shoulders of these families, especially if the families were/are headed by Black mothers. Eurocentric and middle class notions of ‘real’ families like those depicted on TV shows and movies dominate, then and now, what is deemed healthy in terms of family structures – with the polemic conclusion that nuclear families are the best and sometimes only structure in which children must be raised. These colorblind, economic blind, and racist blind studies, reports, theories, and folktales have failed to do justice to the families in which there is one caregiver. Their stories of woe and mayhem make the news and guide policies and procedures. The stories of children who have been resilient have been unheard and silenced, they have been under?reported and relegated to the status of ‘exception to the rule’. Perhaps they are exceptions, but there are more exceptions than we may know. This book is designed with those stories of resilience and success in mind. The book is not an attempt to glorify single?parent families, but such families are prevalent and increasing. High divorce rates are impactful. And some parents have chosen to not marry, which is their right. While not glorifying single?parent families, we are also not demonizing them or telling their stories void of context. Yes, income will often be low(er), time will be compromised when divided between offspring, work, and other obligations. Likewise, we are not glorifying two?parent families as being ideal; their context matters too. How healthy are married couples who don’t really love or even like each other? How healthy are those parents who have separate sleeping arrangements/bedrooms? How healthy are those families who have oppositional parenting styles and goals for their children? This is the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan Report, and I am concerned that another 50 years will pass that fails to balance out the stories of single?parent families, mainly those whose children succeed and defy the odds so often unexpected of them. I agree with Cohen, co?author of the updated report: "The preoccupation with strengthening marriage as the best route to reducing poverty and inequality has been a policymaking folly”. Further, 50 years after Moynihan released the controversial report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a new brief by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) and the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) titled, "Moynihan's Half Century: Have We Gone to Hell in a Hand Basket?," finds that the changes in family structure that concerned him have indeed continued, becoming widespread among Whites as well, but that they do not explain recent trends in poverty and inequality. In fact, a number of the social ills Moynihan assumed would accompany these changes in family structure—such as rising rates of poverty, school failure, crime, and violence—have instead decreased. (see this)

Stereotypes of Mexican American women and the lack of their representation in research literature contribute to misrepresentations of Mexican American culture and their invisibility. In this qualitative study, Mexican American women were interviewed and their life histories were examined using an ethnographic and hermeneutical phenomenological approach.

This book presents the collaborative work of two professors, one in Mexico and the other in the United States, and their respective students, participants in a Ph.D. course called “Critical Autoethnography.” The chapters emerged from virtual conversations as doctoral students and professors examined the intersections between critical pedagogy and autoethnography. They problematized the cultural and theoretical intersections between the participants in both countries, questioning whether their differences were causes or results of power and privilege. They used dialogue as inquiry to interrogate the theoretical perspectives that framed their prior experiences. They realized that these perspectives reflected their cultures, and that although they often intersected, they diverged at times. The fluidity of the learning experience shaped the chapters that form the book sections, including the theory and the praxis, or exemplars, of performing critical autoethnography. Each author explores personal experiences or events through the lens of critical pedagogy, underscoring the problematization of the cultural and societal context that shaped their actions, in particular as they performed in racial, ethnic, and religious settings that reflected power and privilege. The two professors served as editors and authors, as they engaged in constant iterative peer review and dialogue. Both the Mexican and the United States perspectives are reflected throughout the book, and it is this global perspective that separates this book from others that deal with similar topics.

"The Storytelling Non-Profit is a portable consultant for fundraisers, communicators and executive directors who want to tell great stories. In this book, professionals will learn a process for telling a story that inspires and resonates with a target audience."--Back cover.

Telling Our Stories investigates the continuities and divergences in selected Black autobiographies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The stories of slaves, creative writers, and political activists are discussed both as texts produced by individuals who are products of specific societies and as interconnected books. The book identifies influences of environmental and cultural differences on the texts while it adopts cross-cultural and postcolonial reading approaches to examine the continuities and divergences in them.