Stories We Didn’t Hear: Controlling Traditional Oral Stories

Mainstream Canadian institutions are not well equipped to engage with highly valued Indigenous narratives that feature talking animals. Such stories are found in mainstream society, but they are classified as fables, fairy tales, folktales and legends, that is, as not true and, therefore, not important. Even in literary studies, such narratives are seen as the heroic origins of national literature, to be succeeded by modern literary forms such as the novel. Our mainstream ways of thinking about literature can be a serious impediment to understanding Indigenous story, as I hope to show in a discussion of the reception of Robert Bringhurst’s three-volume retranslation and contextualization of the work of two Haida men, Ghandl and Skaay.