Jo-Ann Archibald

What does it mean to be Secwepemc? And how can an autobiographical journey to recover Secwepemc identity inform learning and teaching? Drumming Our Way Home demonstrates how telling, retelling, and re-storying lived experiences not only passes on traditional ways but also opens up a world of culture-based learning.Georgina Martin was taken from her mother not long after birth in a tuberculosis hospital. Her experience is representative of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by the Canadian state on Indigenous Peoples. Here she tells her story and invites Elder Jean William and youth Colten Wycotte to reflect critically on their own family and community experiences. Throughout, she is guided by her hand drum, reflecting on its use as a way to uphold community protocols and honour teachings. Her journey provides a powerful example of reconnection to culture through healing, affirmation, and intergenerational learning.Drumming Our Way Home is evidence of the value of storytelling as a tool for teaching, learning, and making meaning.

What does it mean to be Secwepemc? And how can an autobiographical journey to recover Secwepemc identity inform learning and teaching? Drumming Our Way Home demonstrates how telling, retelling, and re-storying lived experiences not only passes on traditional ways but also opens up a world of culture-based learning.Georgina Martin was taken from her mother not long after birth in a tuberculosis hospital. Her experience is representative of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by the Canadian state on Indigenous Peoples. Here she tells her story and invites Elder Jean William and youth Colten Wycotte to reflect critically on their own family and community experiences. Throughout, she is guided by her hand drum, reflecting on its use as a way to uphold community protocols and honour teachings. Her journey provides a powerful example of reconnection to culture through healing, affirmation, and intergenerational learning.Drumming Our Way Home is evidence of the value of storytelling as a tool for teaching, learning, and making meaning.

In 1884, the Canadian government enacted a ban on the potlatch, the foundational ceremony of the Haida people. The tradition, which determined social structure, transmitted cultural knowledge, and redistributed wealth, was seen as a cultural impediment to the government’s aim of assimilation.The tradition did not die, however; the knowledge of the ceremony was kept alive by the Elders through other events until the ban was lifted. In 1969, a potlatch was held. The occasion: the raising of a totem pole carved by Robert Davidson, the first the community had seen in close to 80 years. From then on, the community publicly reclaimed, from the Elders who remained to share it, the knowledge that has almost been lost.Sara Florence Davidson, Robert’s daughter, would become an educator. Over the course of her own education, she came to see how the traditions of the Haida practiced by her father—holistic, built on relationships, practical, and continuous—could be integrated into contemporary educational practices. From this realization came the roots for this book.

Indigenous oral narratives are an important source for, and component of, Coast Salish knowledge systems. Stories are not only to be recounted and passed down; they are also intended as tools for teaching.Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.