I recently had the opportunity to attend a storytelling workshop by Te Reo Wainene o Tua. It was a great event and attendees got to think about Māori storytelling, stories in general and who has the right to tell stories.
Stories are essential – without them nothing really has any meaning. But stories and meaning and knowledge are being lost all the time.
We were honoured to have Charles Te Ahukaramū Royal as one of our presenters. He spoke about how the exact meaning of some words to describe Māori types of story has become unclear, and how he is trying to reconstruct this meaning by analysing stories.
In a similar vein I heard Paul Tapsell talk at National Digital Forum in 2013 about using digital channels to connect Māori in urban areas back to communities and places they are associated with.
This shift from urban to rural made me think about how in Britain, where I am from, there was a huge move in population to growing cities in the Industrial Revolution. What was lost in terms of communities and shared heritage that was never recovered? What have I lost?
A book that I read a couple of years ago that has really stayed with me is Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake. It really isn’t an easy read. It tells the story of the aftermath of the Norman Conquest (it’s never the Norman Colonisation, is it?), 950 years ago this month. 1066 is a huge watershed in British history and sometimes what came before gets a little lost. The north of England resisted and were savagely put down in the ‘harrowing of the north‘, and sometimes I wonder if the region has ever truly recovered. There really is a reason the north remembers.
The Wake reminds us of the human impact of the conquest and provides a glimpse of an older world going back into pagan times.
So, stories: they connect us to people, places and culture – both our own and ones we are learning about, they get lost, they get recovered, they can be very ancient, they lead us to different places, they make us think, they make us.
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