Amplifying Indigenous voices through a community of stories approach

Too often who gets to tell stories and how stories are told depends on power—most often telling and reinforcing dominant narratives (the stories of those who hold power). During the NoDAPL movement, for example, Indigenous people who rallied around the battle cry of “Keep it in the ground!” were painted as radical environmentalists by the most powerful, including the scientific authorities and political pundits. The dominant narrative dwarfed the counternarrative, allowing non-Indigenous decision makers to marginalize dissenting voices. Using the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) controversy as a case study, I argue that not only do counter narratives need to be told, but a reframing of storytelling toward what I call a community of stories approach is needed in order to amplify marginalized voices, particularly those of Indigenous people.

The amplification of Indigenous peoples, who for centuries have suffered the erasive effects of settler colonialism and cultural marginalization is at the center of my dissertation research. In an effort to understand how to amplify Indigenous voices in counter narratives, I designed a research study that relied on antenarrative analysis, storytelling, and listening. My findings suggest that conceptualizing stories as interrelated communities provides a strategy for amplifying Indigenous voices and revising Western approaches to environmental risk.

My dissertation offers three different approaches to understanding the relationships among stories. The first is the dominant narrative versus the counter narrative, the second is the layered narrative, and the third is a community of stories. Each of these three approaches offers an increasingly complex way of thinking about stories and storytelling, the relationships between power, and which stories are amplified and which ones are not. In the dominant vs. counter narrative approach, the one-dimensional dominant narrative is confrontational, has all of the power, and amplifies its own narrative while subjugating and muting counter narratives. In the layered approach, power is distributed across a multi-dimensional metanarrative that attempts to equalize power and story amplification among dominant and counter narratives. A community of stories approach takes the layered approach a step further. It isn’t just that there are multiple layers or a collection of poly-phonic voices in the narrative, but that the stories work together to form a community of stories that shift the focus away from power and toward honoring the stories important to a given community.

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