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Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit
Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Coast Salish Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.
192 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2007
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April 29, 2022
"Live in such a way that anything you would admit to yourself could be admitted to an audience of anyone." Seneca, the Roman Stoic who was teacher to Nero wrote those words. Live in a way where you trust your statements and feel solid enough about them that you could share them with an audience, even an audience of potential enemies. His admonition is found in a letter to a young Sicilian statesman named Lucilius whom he was mentoring. What he suggests in the letter is to be open and trusting with those we would share intimacy with as friends. As you enter into relationships, intimacy is created through trust, but don't stop there - also trust that who you are can be authentic and appropriate for every audience. If you can simply admit to yourself what might be thought of as "the truth of yourself, your position, or story" is appropriate to also be admitted to a wider audience. Seneca's deeply crushing proposition requires personal courage, self knowledge, reflexivity and humility. It requires knowing how to tell and read your own stories in relation to the audience you must brave.
I live and think and feel in two worlds. I work in a what are thought of as "newly representative" positions within higher education that reflect Indigenous Knowledges. I also work as a Renaissance scholar in English Literature. Intellectually, I have been brought up within the academy, culturally and familially I've been brought up inside of a very mid-Western Canadian religious foundation in Protestant Christianity. My ancestors include British citizens who seized an opportunity to become colonists. History calls them "pioneers," they simply call themselves "farmers." And, yet into this dominant mix, there are also Indigenous people. My mother is Indigenous, I am indigenous. I'm, what in settler-colonial periods in Canada, would have been referred to as a halfbreed, because there are generations of intermixed lines running through my past, my present life and my future. Over the slow movement of history, a different set of stories rose within me streaming from my mother and her experience. What I find most as I have heard more of her stories, is that I do not want to exalt one position, one side of me, over the other. In seeing and hearing my maternal stories, I see my mother and so also long banished and hidden aspects of myself. How do I first read our stories, tell our stories, then share our stories with a wider audience? How do I balance personal courage, humility and the reflexive spirit of what Jo-Ann Archibald explores in her own research: connecting how educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit requires "storywork." Storywork is a relational sharing that is built upon trust. The intimacy of many relationships, the trust built over many encounters, and also the courage to share those stories with new generations of both indigenous and non-indigenous students.
My own journey rests in learning how leading a good life. Nothing grand, just continuing to learn how to be a human "being." It is a student's journey, a journey into the personal aspects of education that allow someone like me with each foot in different worlds to achieve a tolerable sense of balance. A kind of balance that does not require that I live in a state of inner contradiction, but rather with a patient and holistic groundedness, and a strong commitment to continued learning. I am a student by character and that means I read a lot - and one of the first works of Indigenous scholarship works I read in my own journey is Jo-Ann Archibald's Indigenous Storywork. Upon opening the books particular journey the readers is offered a written story that has become very personal to me: Coyote's Two Eyes.
Coyote's "Two-Eyed Seeing" has risen strongly as a guiding principle in Canadian-Indigenous scholarship. The concept is often credited as coming into view around the fall 2004, with eastern Canadian Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall's discussion of "etauptmumk."
Etuaptmumk is the Mi'kmaw word for Two-Eyed Seeing, and it is often explained within the academy as "learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing ... and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all." Two-eyed seeing within this paradigm is thought of as the "gift of multiple perspectives." If there was someone who embodied a practice like this in higher education, I would lean toward Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist by Western training, and also a searcher who incorporates indigenous wisdom and "teachings" from the plants. I put "teaching" in quotes, because it's not exactly like teaching as we know it in the dominant view. I think of it as the rigors of a topic paired with stories that add "chicken soup for the soul." Even writing that phrase "chicken soup for the soul" - I feel tension - as that marketable inspirational genre is not what "indigenous teachings" are, because teachings resist the marketable and are not striving to be inspirational.
As I read and re-read Archibald's book - I think that's one of the fertile areas to consider Indigenous storywork: how should it sound as it reaches and is practiced by a new generation of Indigenous scholars? Through one eye it appears to be simply marketable inspiration story, and through the other eye? How does that eye see? I've come to realize through Archibald's sharing of the story, that "how to see" is only one question - another equally important question is "which is the eye that sees?"
That is what I love about the west coast version of Coyote's eyes, it provides rich detail about the experience of two-eyed seeing. What might it be like to see "with two eyes"? Archibald relates the story based on an earlier telling of the story by Terry Tafoya, a Taos Pueblo indigenous storyteller of New Mexico. The first interesting aspect to note, is that the story has a very large and expansive territory. A Mi'kmaw elder on the east coast, a Sto:Lo educator on the West coast telling a story drawn from New Mexico has a vast continental coverage, it does not originate in a single origin, this is a story with many tellers, multiple perspectives immediately.
The story tells of how Coyote comes upon wabooz, or rabbit, singing his spirit song, which allows wabooz's eyes to fly from their head and up to a tree branch. Impressed by this, coyote begs wabooz to teach him the "trick," which rabbit reluctantly does with the warning of not to perform the spirit song more than three times in a day. Coyote learns, practices a few times and then has the idea of showing the nearby villagers his new trick. As he sings the song and his eyes fly up to the branch, he calls them back for an audience - and the eyes do nothing but stare at him from the branch. A bird eventually comes along and eats them. Coyote is left blind. As he wanders into his newly bedarkened world he is aided by the kin-relatives around him: mouse and buffalo, who each share one of their eyes with Coyote. The result? Coyote, indeed, now has two eyes - however, one is the size of a mouse's eye rolling around in his overly large socket and the other is the oversized buffalo eye bursting and drooping out over the edges of his lids.
I like this story a lot because it offers me a way to understand my own journey into two-eyed seeing. I feel a distinct imbalance between two mismatched eyes and the need to hold -balance- as best as possible. I like to discuss the story from how challenging it is to hold Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge only through either myopically small or glaringly large views. Is there no "naturally" balanced place from which to stand, observe and view something? That question rests inside the reading for me always. Other times I read the story I see the "trotting out of tricks" as a coyote teaching around blindspots. This morning, I see "he called his eyes back for an audience"...and nothing happened. What happens when you want to incorporate two-eyed seeing as a concept inside your classroom, inside your teaching - is there a warning in the story about the presentation for an audience? How might the audience respond? In the Archibald story the nearby villagers laugh at coyote and walk away. Notably, none offered their eyes in that encounter.
I feel that's a valid fear through one eye. Through the other eye, however, there is a shared history on this continent that I find in another story called "An Offering" - a chapter from Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass." She relates how her family grew up camping in the Adirondacks, and how her father would rise early, start a fire and make coffee in a fire-blackened aluminum coffee pot. In the coldest part of the morning, watching that percolation in the dome of the lid I also have sat watching the bubbling water shift from clear to a rolling brown liquid. Kimmerer's father would take the coffeepot from the fire and pour some coffee on the ground before pouring out the cups. A kind of offering to Tahawus. "Tahawus" being "an Algonquin name for Mount Marcy," the highest peak in the Adirondacks. The history of the name itself has two different eyes, and bears looking at its own storied name, translated "Cloud-Splitter."
The personal story of Kimmerer's father was gifted to her and her siblings through camping experiences. Although she knew long-ago her people raised their thanks in morning songs, prayers and offerings of sacred tobacco, her own family history didn't have sacred tobacco, they didn't know the songs, but they were still a generation that returned to loon-filled lakes of her ancestors, back to canoes. The offering, spoken only in English, "the language of exiles," at certain points in Kimmerer's experience seemed like just a second-hand ceremony. There wasn't even any tobacco offered! However, over years Kimmerer came to feel that the solitary familial ceremony had at its base a meaningful ritual: respect and gratitude for the earth and its place names. Resilience, perseverance, an ancient ceremony turned personal for a family. Within the act was what Kimmerer calls "that which cannot be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land that we were the people who knew how to say thank you." A deep blood memory of the land, the lakes, and the spirit it holds for indigenous groups more broadly.
At this point in the story, I feel the inspiration of investing a moment with the sacred in her writing. The eyes are upon the branch. Her trust in her reader gives us what we most expect - Indigenous knowledge invested with sacred blood memory, no matter if dislocation, exile and loss are the main history. Kimmerer writes: "years later, *with my own answer already in place,* I asked my father, "Where did the ceremony come from - did you learn it from your father, and he from his? Did it stretch all the way back to the time of the canoes?" Wouldn't it be lovely if he said, yes! Exactly. Isn't that what an audience might suspect?
He thought for a long time. Some weeks went by. He answered one day that, "It was boiled coffee. There's no filter and if it boils too hard the grounds foam up and get stuck in the spout. So the first cup you pour wouldn't get that plug of grounds and be spoiled. I think we did it to clear the spout."
She responds, "It was as if he'd told me that the water didn't change to wine - the whole web of gratitude, the whole story of remembrance, was nothing more than a *dumping of the grounds*?
The spiritual mingles within us, Kimmerer says, just like coffee grounds. Seneca suggests, returning to his letter, that before you can admit your own truth openly to others, examine yourself and your actions in light of "consult[ing] with nature: it will tell you it made both day and night." Anything you might admit to yourself, in spite of *answer already in place and in light of the practicality of *clearing the spout, might be admitted to an audience if you can see it's not just a single and settled upon story with only one view. There are many eyes in this story and the work of the story is to have the courage to maintain balance through a candid honesty - allowing for the connections between the mundane to the sacred to co-exist. The water can turn to wine, the coffee can through even the most mundane ritual of pouring off the grounds also be an offering.
I live and think and feel in two worlds. I work in a what are thought of as "newly representative" positions within higher education that reflect Indigenous Knowledges. I also work as a Renaissance scholar in English Literature. Intellectually, I have been brought up within the academy, culturally and familially I've been brought up inside of a very mid-Western Canadian religious foundation in Protestant Christianity. My ancestors include British citizens who seized an opportunity to become colonists. History calls them "pioneers," they simply call themselves "farmers." And, yet into this dominant mix, there are also Indigenous people. My mother is Indigenous, I am indigenous. I'm, what in settler-colonial periods in Canada, would have been referred to as a halfbreed, because there are generations of intermixed lines running through my past, my present life and my future. Over the slow movement of history, a different set of stories rose within me streaming from my mother and her experience. What I find most as I have heard more of her stories, is that I do not want to exalt one position, one side of me, over the other. In seeing and hearing my maternal stories, I see my mother and so also long banished and hidden aspects of myself. How do I first read our stories, tell our stories, then share our stories with a wider audience? How do I balance personal courage, humility and the reflexive spirit of what Jo-Ann Archibald explores in her own research: connecting how educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit requires "storywork." Storywork is a relational sharing that is built upon trust. The intimacy of many relationships, the trust built over many encounters, and also the courage to share those stories with new generations of both indigenous and non-indigenous students.
My own journey rests in learning how leading a good life. Nothing grand, just continuing to learn how to be a human "being." It is a student's journey, a journey into the personal aspects of education that allow someone like me with each foot in different worlds to achieve a tolerable sense of balance. A kind of balance that does not require that I live in a state of inner contradiction, but rather with a patient and holistic groundedness, and a strong commitment to continued learning. I am a student by character and that means I read a lot - and one of the first works of Indigenous scholarship works I read in my own journey is Jo-Ann Archibald's Indigenous Storywork. Upon opening the books particular journey the readers is offered a written story that has become very personal to me: Coyote's Two Eyes.
Coyote's "Two-Eyed Seeing" has risen strongly as a guiding principle in Canadian-Indigenous scholarship. The concept is often credited as coming into view around the fall 2004, with eastern Canadian Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall's discussion of "etauptmumk."
Etuaptmumk is the Mi'kmaw word for Two-Eyed Seeing, and it is often explained within the academy as "learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing ... and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all." Two-eyed seeing within this paradigm is thought of as the "gift of multiple perspectives." If there was someone who embodied a practice like this in higher education, I would lean toward Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist by Western training, and also a searcher who incorporates indigenous wisdom and "teachings" from the plants. I put "teaching" in quotes, because it's not exactly like teaching as we know it in the dominant view. I think of it as the rigors of a topic paired with stories that add "chicken soup for the soul." Even writing that phrase "chicken soup for the soul" - I feel tension - as that marketable inspirational genre is not what "indigenous teachings" are, because teachings resist the marketable and are not striving to be inspirational.
As I read and re-read Archibald's book - I think that's one of the fertile areas to consider Indigenous storywork: how should it sound as it reaches and is practiced by a new generation of Indigenous scholars? Through one eye it appears to be simply marketable inspiration story, and through the other eye? How does that eye see? I've come to realize through Archibald's sharing of the story, that "how to see" is only one question - another equally important question is "which is the eye that sees?"
That is what I love about the west coast version of Coyote's eyes, it provides rich detail about the experience of two-eyed seeing. What might it be like to see "with two eyes"? Archibald relates the story based on an earlier telling of the story by Terry Tafoya, a Taos Pueblo indigenous storyteller of New Mexico. The first interesting aspect to note, is that the story has a very large and expansive territory. A Mi'kmaw elder on the east coast, a Sto:Lo educator on the West coast telling a story drawn from New Mexico has a vast continental coverage, it does not originate in a single origin, this is a story with many tellers, multiple perspectives immediately.
The story tells of how Coyote comes upon wabooz, or rabbit, singing his spirit song, which allows wabooz's eyes to fly from their head and up to a tree branch. Impressed by this, coyote begs wabooz to teach him the "trick," which rabbit reluctantly does with the warning of not to perform the spirit song more than three times in a day. Coyote learns, practices a few times and then has the idea of showing the nearby villagers his new trick. As he sings the song and his eyes fly up to the branch, he calls them back for an audience - and the eyes do nothing but stare at him from the branch. A bird eventually comes along and eats them. Coyote is left blind. As he wanders into his newly bedarkened world he is aided by the kin-relatives around him: mouse and buffalo, who each share one of their eyes with Coyote. The result? Coyote, indeed, now has two eyes - however, one is the size of a mouse's eye rolling around in his overly large socket and the other is the oversized buffalo eye bursting and drooping out over the edges of his lids.
I like this story a lot because it offers me a way to understand my own journey into two-eyed seeing. I feel a distinct imbalance between two mismatched eyes and the need to hold -balance- as best as possible. I like to discuss the story from how challenging it is to hold Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge only through either myopically small or glaringly large views. Is there no "naturally" balanced place from which to stand, observe and view something? That question rests inside the reading for me always. Other times I read the story I see the "trotting out of tricks" as a coyote teaching around blindspots. This morning, I see "he called his eyes back for an audience"...and nothing happened. What happens when you want to incorporate two-eyed seeing as a concept inside your classroom, inside your teaching - is there a warning in the story about the presentation for an audience? How might the audience respond? In the Archibald story the nearby villagers laugh at coyote and walk away. Notably, none offered their eyes in that encounter.
I feel that's a valid fear through one eye. Through the other eye, however, there is a shared history on this continent that I find in another story called "An Offering" - a chapter from Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass." She relates how her family grew up camping in the Adirondacks, and how her father would rise early, start a fire and make coffee in a fire-blackened aluminum coffee pot. In the coldest part of the morning, watching that percolation in the dome of the lid I also have sat watching the bubbling water shift from clear to a rolling brown liquid. Kimmerer's father would take the coffeepot from the fire and pour some coffee on the ground before pouring out the cups. A kind of offering to Tahawus. "Tahawus" being "an Algonquin name for Mount Marcy," the highest peak in the Adirondacks. The history of the name itself has two different eyes, and bears looking at its own storied name, translated "Cloud-Splitter."
The personal story of Kimmerer's father was gifted to her and her siblings through camping experiences. Although she knew long-ago her people raised their thanks in morning songs, prayers and offerings of sacred tobacco, her own family history didn't have sacred tobacco, they didn't know the songs, but they were still a generation that returned to loon-filled lakes of her ancestors, back to canoes. The offering, spoken only in English, "the language of exiles," at certain points in Kimmerer's experience seemed like just a second-hand ceremony. There wasn't even any tobacco offered! However, over years Kimmerer came to feel that the solitary familial ceremony had at its base a meaningful ritual: respect and gratitude for the earth and its place names. Resilience, perseverance, an ancient ceremony turned personal for a family. Within the act was what Kimmerer calls "that which cannot be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land that we were the people who knew how to say thank you." A deep blood memory of the land, the lakes, and the spirit it holds for indigenous groups more broadly.
At this point in the story, I feel the inspiration of investing a moment with the sacred in her writing. The eyes are upon the branch. Her trust in her reader gives us what we most expect - Indigenous knowledge invested with sacred blood memory, no matter if dislocation, exile and loss are the main history. Kimmerer writes: "years later, *with my own answer already in place,* I asked my father, "Where did the ceremony come from - did you learn it from your father, and he from his? Did it stretch all the way back to the time of the canoes?" Wouldn't it be lovely if he said, yes! Exactly. Isn't that what an audience might suspect?
He thought for a long time. Some weeks went by. He answered one day that, "It was boiled coffee. There's no filter and if it boils too hard the grounds foam up and get stuck in the spout. So the first cup you pour wouldn't get that plug of grounds and be spoiled. I think we did it to clear the spout."
She responds, "It was as if he'd told me that the water didn't change to wine - the whole web of gratitude, the whole story of remembrance, was nothing more than a *dumping of the grounds*?
The spiritual mingles within us, Kimmerer says, just like coffee grounds. Seneca suggests, returning to his letter, that before you can admit your own truth openly to others, examine yourself and your actions in light of "consult[ing] with nature: it will tell you it made both day and night." Anything you might admit to yourself, in spite of *answer already in place and in light of the practicality of *clearing the spout, might be admitted to an audience if you can see it's not just a single and settled upon story with only one view. There are many eyes in this story and the work of the story is to have the courage to maintain balance through a candid honesty - allowing for the connections between the mundane to the sacred to co-exist. The water can turn to wine, the coffee can through even the most mundane ritual of pouring off the grounds also be an offering.
December 25, 2013
A couple of years ago, I was making my way through Charles Dickens' tour of the United States (and Canada, an obligatory shout-out for those kinder, loyaler cousins) and was very impressed with the story about meeting a Native American en route to congress, and the disappointing meeting he was about to have. As a world-renown storyteller, Dickens hopefully swapped tales with his fellow traveler, and being mindful of Archibald's storywork research method, kept much of it to himself - although scathing satire on behalf of the native May have slipped into Martin Chuzzlewit.
The work done to establish an academic format for largely oral story tradition is groundbreaking work, and an added bonus that the Indigenous part of this research method is my native home as well - although my ancestors did not have to put up with as much nasty craziness from Dickens' ancestors as the West Coast Native population. With great care and seriousness, Jo-ann Archibald sets up her seven principles and gains much from local and spiritual guides. Nice to see the Trickster Coyote helping her throughout the book.
The work done to establish an academic format for largely oral story tradition is groundbreaking work, and an added bonus that the Indigenous part of this research method is my native home as well - although my ancestors did not have to put up with as much nasty craziness from Dickens' ancestors as the West Coast Native population. With great care and seriousness, Jo-ann Archibald sets up her seven principles and gains much from local and spiritual guides. Nice to see the Trickster Coyote helping her throughout the book.
December 4, 2025
Engaging and smooth read. Good for those looking to incorporate Indigenous stories into their pedagogies. Provides a framework (storywork) for how Indigenous stories can be brought into such a context, with core protocol for how to do so – respect, responsibility, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. Depends on your area of interest, but I thought chapter 5, Storywork in Action, was most impactful because it gave a concrete example of how Indigenous stories can teach about Indigenous justice systems. All too often Native stories are relegated exclusively to “story” classes (and in Western academia, there is a hierarchy of fields, where Lit. – wrongly, of course – is cast lower than, say, stem fields). So showing the holistic way Indigenous stories exist is crucial to intervene in that norm.
I have my critiques, but they are mostly about the ways “tradition” and “authenticity” are intertwined in a way that turns them into a currency in Indigenous communities, which is fraught with power dynamics, and I felt this was reinforced at times throughout the text – this is also clearly not a text meant to engage that conversation, which is like its whole own field of study and could have just distracted from the more pertinent points Archibald was making, so I just suggest that readers consult material that’s critical about romanticization as well.
I have my critiques, but they are mostly about the ways “tradition” and “authenticity” are intertwined in a way that turns them into a currency in Indigenous communities, which is fraught with power dynamics, and I felt this was reinforced at times throughout the text – this is also clearly not a text meant to engage that conversation, which is like its whole own field of study and could have just distracted from the more pertinent points Archibald was making, so I just suggest that readers consult material that’s critical about romanticization as well.
July 11, 2025
Indigenous Storywork by Jo-ann Archibald is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in learning about both the educational aspects of listening, learning, and telling Indigenous stories, as well Archibald’s actual research process of learning directly from Elders and compiling her information in a way that authentically includes their voices.
Though written in the 1990s, I found the book to be very relevant to what I’m hoping to express to my students in class: that cultural and generational learning from others through oral narratives is extremely important, compelling as well as engaging.
Archibald returns to the trickster/coyote figure throughout the book as a way to really get at the heart what the storytelling is about and how different stories are told at/in different times, life stages, contexts and locations.
Most importantly the book introduced me to other important Indigenous voices and writers to extend my own learning, like Jeanette Armstrong and Kimberly Blaeser.
7 key principles of Storywork:
RESPECT
RESPONSIBILITY
RECIPROCITY
REVERENCE
HOLISM
INTERRELATEDNESS
SYNERGY
Though written in the 1990s, I found the book to be very relevant to what I’m hoping to express to my students in class: that cultural and generational learning from others through oral narratives is extremely important, compelling as well as engaging.
Archibald returns to the trickster/coyote figure throughout the book as a way to really get at the heart what the storytelling is about and how different stories are told at/in different times, life stages, contexts and locations.
Most importantly the book introduced me to other important Indigenous voices and writers to extend my own learning, like Jeanette Armstrong and Kimberly Blaeser.
7 key principles of Storywork:
RESPECT
RESPONSIBILITY
RECIPROCITY
REVERENCE
HOLISM
INTERRELATEDNESS
SYNERGY
June 7, 2024
I am really disappointed in the way I was taught about the culture of First Nations people as a youth. Born in 1979 growing up in the 80s and 90s the history was taught to us like it was no longer living, breathing and evolving, rich with values and wisdom that are helpful to all mankind. This and other new publications have really helped set the record straight. I am very thankful for Jo-Ann's diligent effort to revive and share this information with the world.
January 2, 2025
I kept underlining parts of this book and writing "Yes!" in the margin. The holistic view of education is one that I embrace. This book gave part of its name to our writing project site. I can't wait to read it with a group of educators in our next summer institute.
November 27, 2022
Informative and respectful introduction.
September 13, 2013
stories with contextual background
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews