Introduction
Canada’s first people include the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. They are known as the Aboriginal or Indigenous people. Aboriginal refers to people who lived in an area or a geographic location before individuals from various ethnic backgrounds arrived. They established social, historical, political, and economic traits unique to those of the prevailing communities wherein they reside through pursuing ancient culture. For many years, the phrase, indigenous, has been used as a general phrase. Other words such as clans, first peoples or nations, natives, and ethnic communities may be preferred in some nations.[1] Indigenous peoples have unique dialects, philosophies, and customs. They have a significant awareness of protecting and conserving their natural resources sustainably. Oral storytelling is an essential aspect of their culture. Ethnohistory, a discipline that examines indigenous people’s cultures and customs by looking into various information sources, including historical records, helps understand multiple aspects, such as oral storytelling in indigenous tradition. Hence, this paper will evaluate the significance of oral storytelling in indigenous tradition and how ethnohistory has contributed to the discipline of history.
Significance of Oral Storytelling in Indigenous Tradition
The indigenous peoples of Canada, often known as aboriginal peoples, are the country’s first settlers. The First Nation’s, Inuit, and Métis peoples are among them. The majority of the Inuit people now live in northern Canada, and they identify with their motherland as Inuit Nunangat. In the direction of the Arctic, this region comprises physical elements such as rivers, vast land, and snow. Métis people are descendants of European and native peoples who live in Canada’s Prairie and Ontario Provinces. However, unlike Inuit, Métis inhabitants are more likely to live in other nation areas.
During the colonial era, the original inhabitants were subjected to various hardships. Stronger and more resistant to the colonialists’ repressive inclinations, they were relocated, intimidated, suffocated, and murdered. Currently, the indigenous community faces various obstacles due to their current cultural prejudice. Some of these issues are poor health, housing issues, limited education, limited wage, increased rates of incarceration, and unemployment. On the other hand, the indigenous peoples have great potential to solve these issues through the government’s legislative and legal framework actions aimed at protecting indigenous people’s rights.
Oral histories are essential in Native cultures, such as the aboriginals. They pass on essential messages, cultural ways, and lessons. The native people could treat their cultural forms to the upcoming generation using oral tales. Artifacts from chronological Aboriginal communities, for example, are another type of primary source that transmits understanding regarding Native narratives and ways of life. These sources are used by scholars, researchers, and art historians to showcase Cultural awareness. According to the Oral History Association, oral history is a procedure of assembling, preserving, and analyzing the opinions and remembrances of individuals, societies, and parties involved in past events. It is among the earliest types of historical recounting.[2]
Despite some cultures’ dependence on historical tales, data, and reports, oral history is essential in all generation sand societies. This illustrates how the various things happen, and they help in the children’s education as they educate them about the vital life lessons. The oral tales could be used as alternative non-vocal methods of collecting and transmitting the various perceptions because they are organized and told voluntarily without modification. While oral histories can she various contradictions like the historical writings. In this sense, the potential oral culture could be easily transmitted through the different lifetimes, although some minor details could change. Thus, the oral cultures that relate historical actions and have also been transferred from one age group or generation to another cannot be rejected as a myth because Western society divides myth from science or fact.
Tales, mythologies, folklores, and memorials are distinct oral traditions. A memorate is a private account of a paranormal encounter or experience, such as a horror story or other manifestation of the soul to a human being. Fables are oral cultures about specific places that frequently include cultural heroes, sorcerers, ghosts, or other occurrences associated with that location. They can be from the recent or previous century, but they’re most helpful in connecting people to the land.
Mythologies can be very significant in influencing and taking on cultures in society because of their right to control how things ought to be. Myths depict the earliest possible moment, such as creation stories. Other legends explain how the world and humanity are organized, such as how sexes were established and why they diverge from each other. Unlike different oral histories, Folktales are accepted as stories about events that did not occur but help impart moral lessons or enjoyment.[3] Once upon a time, there were stories with imaginary characters. A culture hero in oral traditions is a human or supernatural figure who plays a significant role in the society’s cultures and whose life, doings, and explorations have shaped how things are. For several Native Canadian communities, the traditional protagonist was both a source of pleasures of life, bringing agriculture and teaching hunting, as well as a deceiver or misguide who thrilled in showing the public that they would be not as essential or as intelligent as they thought. Oral histories play an indispensable role in the civilizations of the native Canadians, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. For centuries, oral histories, also known as oral cultures, have been a crucial technique of handing down stories, historical events, divine learnings or doctrines, songs, poetry, devotions, and survival methods. Many Native peoples have entrusted the communication and preservation of historical accounts to essential people such as seniors or hereditary rulers. Regardless of the type of statement the hearing audience requires, they may also internalize oral histories. This method of conveying oral traditions has been critical to Native populations on a multigenerational level, as elders transfer crucial data to the younger generation.
Oral tales can only be mentioned at certain moments and places, by particular people, for specific audiences. Chiefs, for instance, have special privileges among the Kwakwaka’wakw and Mowachaht and some other societies with hereditary leaders, such as the right towards certain oral traditions and cultural standards. Sure, tales were only notified during the cold season in some Plains Native groups as it was believed that ghosts sleep during most of that moment of the year and would not hear these stories that might enrage them.
Colonization has significantly affected the native people. For a while, the misleading foreign beliefs that the modern stories are more valid and reliable than the oral tales have adversely affected the conventional knowledge transfer systems; the native people have also been affected by the various policies and laws that bring them together. The communication of common oral customs and traditions was restricted by laws such as the Indian Act and domestic schools. The native people have been affected due to these actions, which have had significant repercussions.
Oral histories are used to achieve independence in Canadian history beyond the Aboriginal countries and societies. This implies reattaching Aboriginal narratives that traditionally have been neglected or overlooked. It also means recognizing the adverse effects of colonial expansion on Aboriginal communities.[4] Multiple scholars, historians, and conservators showcase historical accounts to provide first-hand profiles and understanding of Aboriginal lifestyles and viewpoints. Numerous exhibition programs and policies have urged being encompassing of Cultural peoples. Correspondingly, the decision to be much more comprehensive of historical accounts has been accepted by reviewing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Honoring the Truth and Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Some exhibitions have attempted to repatriate ancient Aboriginal artifacts to their different localities as a reunification method.
Material culture study can be utilized in various artifacts and reveal additional revelations about Aboriginal pasts, cultures, and lifestyles. In addition to oral traditions, other classifications source materials, such as historical apparel, armaments, jewelry, and other relics, can also liberate the Canadian past. So rather than depending exclusively on knowledge about relics from their hoarders supposedly of decent European investigators can reap sensitive details about Aboriginal culture from the dinosaurs themselves. For example, an assessment of a pair of Tribal slippers, usually involving analyzing the materials, embroideries, and creation of the shoes, can define the Aboriginal peoples to which it originally belonged and the estimated date moccasins were produced. This is recognized as fabric culture research, and it allows users to gain more knowledge about the interactions between humans and their material possessions.
Material collected in Euro-Canadian ancient records, like the documents, notepads, journals, correspondence, or images of preachers and colonists, can also be valuable in studying history. As in any scenario, the viewpoints of the scriptural references’ creatives have to be regarded, as most of these source materials were produced by colonial government workers or potential allies of conquest.
Contributions of Ethnohistory to the Discipline of History
Ethnohistory is the investigation of societies that integrates cross-disciplinary methodologies of historical account research and ethnographic research like archaeology, linguistics, anthropology, and ecology to finalize a broad view of a whole cultural context. It utilizes maps, myths, oral histories, folklore, music, and artwork. It typically deals with small numbers that have not authored pasts rather than complex societies. Ethnohistory is an integrative approach to understanding native people, imperial and postmodern culture, and heritage established as a cohesive distinct field in the 1950s[5]. By incorporating the strategies of heritage, cultural studies, and archaeological sites, ethnohistory focuses on rebuilding the heritage of non-white peoples, such as their life experience of British colonization and opposition. Ethnohistory started as an applied field, as scholars and sociologists colluded on U.S. various tribes’ land ownership situations. It soon had already become incorporated in an entity now referred to as the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Oral history, indigenous studies, There are deep links between ethnohistory and specific other structures of cross-disciplinary investigation such as subaltern studies, cultural anthropology, social history, and colonial studies. Ethnohistory spread irregularly into different contexts, particularly in the Southern Asia – Pacific region, but the Americas have remained its center of attention. Even though there are initiatives in ethnohistory in university, memorial, and regulatory situations, most ethnohistorians are educated mainly as archaeologists or historians, so ethnohistory stays a cross-disciplinary endeavor instead of restraint in itself. Still, ethnohistory is an adequately resourced intellectual formation that remains valid to its individualistic and descriptive in nature roots.
Ethnohistorians have gathered countless written sources, including local dialects and cultural pasts of specific indigenous populations. These are essential for creating clear perspectives on aboriginal views and experiences to illustrate significant layers of ethnohistorical fellowship. Ethnohistorians have provided tremendous contributions to ethnogenesis, or the establishment of ethnic groups through cultural forms of civilization interaction and a mixture.[6] Research findings of the Métis of Canada, among others, have utilized this notion constructively.
Conclusion
Before people of diverse ethnic backgrounds came, Aboriginal or native peoples grew up in an area or a physical location. Native peoples have a variety of developmental frameworks based on their cultural practices, aspirations, needs, and interests. Oral narratives are significant in Indigenous cultures, such as the aboriginal culture. They serve multiple purposes, including preserving culture and educating multiple generations regarding cultural beliefs and practices, among other roles. Understanding indigenous people’s cultures and customs requires adequate examination of various information sources, including historical records, through ethnohistory. Ethnohistory has had various contributions to the discipline of history, including collecting information from multiple sources to create clear perspectives on aboriginal views and experiences. For instance, through ethnohistory, one can understand the role of oral storytelling among indigenous people.
Bibliographies
Boyd, Kelly. “Trigger, Bruce G. 1937–Canadian anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnohistorian.” In Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, pp. 1205-1206. Routledge, 2019.
Fernández‐Llamazares, Álvaro, and Mar Cabeza. “Rediscovering the potential of indigenous storytelling for conservation practice.” Conservation Letters 11, no. 3 (2018): e12398.
Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. “Anthropology and ethnohistorians.” In The houses of history, pp. 198-232. Manchester University Press, 2020.
Kunkel, Titi. “Aboriginal values and resource development in native space: Lessons from British Columbia.” The Extractive Industries and Society 4, no. 1 (2017): 6-14.
Merchant, Paul. “Verticalities in oral histories of science.” Centaurus 62, no. 4 (2020): 783-796.
Mustonen, Tero. “Meaningful engagement and oral histories of the indigenous peoples of the north.” Nordia Geographical Publications 47, no. 5 (2018): 21-38.
[1] Kunkel, Titi. “Aboriginal values and resource development in native space: Lessons from British Columbia.” The Extractive Industries and Society 4, no. 1 (2017): 6-14.
[2] Fernández‐Llamazares, Álvaro, and Mar Cabeza. “Rediscovering the potential of indigenous storytelling for conservation practice.” Conservation Letters 11, no. 3 (2018): e12398.
[3] Merchant, Paul. “Verticalities in oral histories of science.” Centaurus 62, no. 4 (2020): 783-796.
[4] Mustonen, Tero. “Meaningful engagement and oral histories of the indigenous peoples of the north.” Nordia Geographical Publications 47, no. 5 (2018): 21-38.
[5] Boyd, Kelly. “Trigger, Bruce G. 1937–Canadian anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnohistorian.” In Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, pp. 1205-1206. Routledge, 2019.
[6] Green, Anna, and Kathleen Troup. “Anthropology and ethnohistorians.” In The houses of history, pp. 198-232. Manchester University Press, 2020.
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