Book Review: Elena Kingsbury, Director of Holocaust Curriculum and Learning

The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory

By Julie Cruikshank

Published in 1998, Julie Cruikshank’s “The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory” offers a glimpse into the fascinating oral history traditions of Yukon Territory’s Indigenous elders, interwoven with an excellent overview of the history of contact between Indigenous peoples in northwestern Canada and the European-based fur trade and the colonial expansion that followed.

Looking beyond the literal text of a ‘story,’ Cruikshank examines the social and political importance of storytelling, illuminating the ways in which stories and their meanings can shift according to the audience, location and historical context of the telling. Building on decades of personal anthropological scholarship, she argues that Yukon storytellers of First Nations ancestry use narratives to dismantle boundaries and create connection and a modern collective identity. The power of the stories comes not from their literal meaning, but from their social importance.

The book builds upon the testimony of three Yukon First Nation elders: Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Ned, whose unique voices collectively demonstrate that stories about the past can help us to better understand the present. In sharing the these stories, one of Cruikshank’s key goals is to examine the competing systems of narrative and truth Native peoples contend with in modern Canadian society, asking and answering the question, “Why does storytelling continue to thrive?” Of particular interest is Chapter 2: ‘Pete’s Song’: Establishing Meanings through Story and Song, in which we learn about the oral tradition of Yukon elder and educator Angela Sidney, a Deisheetaan (Crow) woman of both Tagish and Tlingit ancestry. Cruikshank’s interpretation of the telling and re-telling of Sidney’s narrative helps beautifully illuminate layered social roles of storytelling for readers who may approach this text with a superficial understanding of oral tradition in northwestern communities.

Interweaving fields of anthropology, Indigenous studies and history, this book is an important contribution to the scholarship on oral traditions among peoples of Canada’s subarctic region. The text may be difficult for young readers due to its abstract themes and complexity of language, but Canadian educators of all backgrounds can gain meaningful insight into the history and cultural traditions of Northwestern Indigenous peoples, whose voices are sometimes marginalized in “eastern” narratives.

‍