rattling off stories of the land

Sunset/ beginning of evening twilight today, which eventually became a perfect vertical beam of gold light, shooting straight up into the sky.

I had the privilege of meeting with a wonderful woman today at the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Heritage Department, who helped me immensely in my work to locate bone stories connected to the local landscape. Jody Beaumont works as a Traditional Knowledge Specialist for the department, is passionate about traditional myth and storytelling, and was extremely generous in sharing materials from their archives: transcribed interviews, books that record various versions of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in myths, and even her own notes from presentations that she's given on First Nations myth and storytelling. I spent a couple of hours sitting in her office poring over the books and print-outs she piled on the table for me, and digging deep into what they contained. I learned some amazing things, magical things, and things that make such plain and simple sense, including time/space travel medicine using caribou leg sinew. The best story, however, was the one Jody told me herself, in her own words, about a place we could see right out the windows, over the Yukon River. She told me the story of how once there were shoulder bones strung on a line across the river that rattled a warning whenever anyone came down in a canoe. I've read a variety of versions now, tonight, of the same or similar, partial stories from the many photocopied documents and the book she lent me, but her version was the best one. Maybe, because it was delivered to me by being spoken aloud and likely because her version contains the most bones.

One of the most important things that I've come away with from today, is that for the part of my project where I reveal the osteobiographies that are connected with each 'bone' I create and abandon in the landscape, I must share the stories orally. I don't think that written text is appropriate in this case. Almost every bone story I've collected since coming to Dawson has been given to me through speech, not text. A metamorphosis happens to story when it is delivered in such a way: it takes a piece of the storyteller with it, on to its next listener. It has more meaning, is more alive and personal. It creates social adhesion, which is the essential economy/currency of a transient (or nomadic, or non-materialistic) society. Text is a fixed medium for the most part, and I believe that myth and legend should not be fixed.

One page of the first creation myth I ever wrote, in 1979.

Stories are better when someone embodies them. My son has told me that some of his most cherished childhood memories are of listening to the stories I read aloud to him, loving them much more than any story he read himself. When I was an elementary school kid (in Alberta), I was given the extracurricular task of reading stories aloud to kids in the younger grades. One of the first skills I gained through that early storytelling practice was how to keep the various characters' voices distinct from one another, and distinct from my own voice. One of the first written storytelling skills I learned in that same school, that impacted me most, was how to write a traditional creation myth, during a workshop with a visiting indigenous artist. She came back later and taught me how to create beaded stories by sewing seed beads to felted shapes.

In the tissue engineering world, when a (cell) culture is 'fixed', it is dead (killed) and preserved in harsh chemicals. These stories are not meant to be that. So, I will retell my collected bone stories in spoken voice, recorded as audio files and available on the final project website. I've been playing with audio editing since I arrived, recording local sounds/music, so it seems a natural progression for this work. Perhaps some of the audio tracks I've recorded so far during my time here will become the backdrop for the spoken narratives.

Never has research for a project been such fun (and refreshing after so much academic research) -- I've been reading stories all afternoon and evening, laughing to myself with the cleverness and audacity of some of them, and making notes. I've read multiple tellings of the same myths, by different elders in different settlements along the Yukon River -- each one is an adaptation. The story that I construct from these traditional narratives, my own adaptation, will be true to the traditional stories, and acknowledge the story as deriving from the Gwich'in and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in (Yukon) first peoples. I don't intend to appropriate traditional knowledge, but to work with one bone story in particular, the one Jody told me herself (and which I have only given the very bare bones of to you here), and respect that this is the language of the land, and therefore the old way of mapping the land. The traditional stories are the way that the land is known on a subconscious level to the people who inhabit it. This land-based knowledge is critical to the psychogeography of this place now called Dawson City.

A page from a transcribed interview conducted by Jody Beaumont. She gave me this copy today, and this is another version of the same story she told me.