What Stories Teach Us with Kade Ferris

As far as you know stories around anywhere is how do those stories kind of either teach us or instruct us but what I found interesting just the other day was a story that did neither now that’s where you where you can average from myth and legend which always has that teaching component to what is this it was a it was a Windigo story so there’s this old man who’s a lorac it’s a name from around Belle Kart this is a long time ago but he was fishing and he had set some nets out in the water and he was busy on the shore fixing of a net and he heard something splashing so he turned and looked and there was a weird woman grabbing fish out of the out of his net and eating them raw and he grabbed his gun and shot her and his wife came out of the lodge and she said you got a chopper up she’s a Windigo and so he did there’s no moral to that story it’s just a story about that thing that evil creature and I was like looking at they’re going you know people are like this is a great story yeah it is but it’s missing that and so it brings you the point of is this a legend or is this an accounting of something real because there was no moral and so I think that’s the funny thing when you look at history or look at any kind of story is there’s that story arc but when those stories lack that you still they still a value they don’t teach you anything but they do because all sudden you have this real this real event around a mythical creature that might not be mythical because I found another one which talked about a Windigo and there was another guy who was hunting he’s a mate Eamon mixed blood person and he was along the slough hunting ducks and he heard us kind of a swishing behind him and he kind of glanced over his shoulder he saw Winn go butthis Bendigo had a gun well the guy had this gun so he just kept kind of walking and he raised his shoe duck turn around and shot the Windigo who got up and ran away now is this Windigo a monster or was this an enemy that was gonna kill him it’s those kind of things it’s like well it’s an event and so I think that those are kind of fun stories when I find those because there is no logic also conversely we need to make sure that we don’t clean up history too much because there’s that idea we have to sanitize things to make them more palatable and less painful but really we learn about a lot about ourselves and about our history by looking at painful things the maytee rebellion in Canada in 1885 there were more crimes committed I found a story which horrified me there is a general who when they defeated the maytee he wrote an account about you know we won the men fled and we you know we took our war spoils every man who wanted a pony could to have won and they rode those ponies all night he wasn’t talking about ponies he’s talking about with rape and it was a euphemism and I mentioned this on a story that I wrote about how their world war crimes committed and people are like how can you say that and when how can I not say that if we don’t bring that out we don’t call that out we’re doing a disservice to those people to those people who suffered we’re letting their memory be sanitized or whitewashed but we can’t do that because the more we know about that the more we talk about that then we can start to heal but if we hide those types of things in our history it does nobody any good and so I always have that moral dilemma it’s like do you know how do you do that you know manner as best you can but you have to do it because it’s never clean but also I’m trying to get the public to see these things too so it’s like you have to make sure that it’s you know publicly acceptable so I do a lot of these stories like those posters is here’s what you know here’s what we have and again there’s no moral to that story the moral is something you drive so when you read that story about the war crimes during the uprising in Canada the moral is that you know this guy was a murderer and the general was or the way major I guess is they’re a major Bolton he was a murderer he was a rapist and he wrote a book about it and he talked about it in that book with a cute euphemism they were writing these ponies it’s like they were riding horses you know and everybody knows that there’s a man was tortured and killed during that same campaign and if you don’t look at that it’s just like now we turn our blind eye we don’t want to think about these bad things that happened especially when domit society doesn’t want to see them that’s the danger because for them it’s like well you’re making us feel uncomfortable well we’re not here to talk about your comfort we’re going to talk about this event or this pipeline or this you know murder and missing and murdered women indigenous women we need to talk about those things because there was make society uncomfortable if they’re uncomfortable society forgets about them they forget about black lives matter they make it about all lives matter murdered missing and murdered indigenous women he gets swept under the rug but yet girl goes missing and she’s blonde and blue-eyed it’s national news thousands of Native women go missing it’s all about making sure that we’re telling our story we’re taking control of our story our narrative and I think that’s what it comes down to is as Native people is we need to be the ones in control of the narrative yeah we waited long enough we’ve let somebody else tell our story now we’re gonna take control and our hand is going to be on that pan