Storytelling in a digital age: digital storytelling as an emerging narrative method for preserving and promoting indigenous oral wisdom

Introduction: the future of narrative research is … now?

According to Denzin and Lincoln (2005, 2008), we are currently enmeshed in the eighth movement—‘the future’—of qualitative research. This stage represents the evolution of qualitative methodological thought and builds from the foundational understanding that qualitative research studies ‘the value-laden nature of inquiry’, while emphasizing ‘how social experience is created and given meaning’. In so doing, qualitative methods aim to understand the ‘socially constructed nature of reality, the intimate relationship between the researcher and what is studied, and the situational constraints that shape reality’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005: 10).

This ‘future’ moment, this present time, has seen a burgeoning of innovative research methods that focus on community participation, capacity development, social justice, and the decolonizing of research, knowledge, and method. In particular, this movement in qualitative research has witnessed an increasing amount of research activity and writing around indigenous methods, particularly from indigenous scholars (Bishop, 1998, 2005; Cram, 1993; Pidgeon and Hardy, 2002; Smith, 1999, 2005), for there is the awareness in the field that ‘from the vantage point of the colonized … the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, “research”, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous vocabulary’ (Smith, 1999: 1). For scholars working in this field, research conducted within an indigenous context requires an understanding of the myriad and overlapping ways in which the pursuit of research is a project full of power dynamics, colonization, knowledge appropriation, and the recognition that ‘the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices’ (Smith, 1999: 2). As such, one of the main foci of the ‘8th movement’ is the dedication to decolonizing research, knowledge, and methods, both from indigenous scholars conducting their own research and writing from with/in indigenous positions and cultures, and from nonindigenous researchers working in partnership with indigenous individuals, communities, organizations, and governments.

This process of ‘decolonizing research’, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2005) argued,

Is not simply about challenging or making refinements to qualitative research. It is a much broader but still purposeful agenda for transforming the institution of research, the deep underlying structures and taken-for-granted ways of organizing, conducting, and disseminating research and knowledge. (p. 88)

Connected to this decolonizing project is the need for methods that not only work to deconstruct power dynamics between researchers and researched and indigenous and nonindigenous but also are respectful of and resonant with the rich oral histories and cultural practices of indigenous communities. Narrative- and story-based methods are particularly beneficial and respectful strategies for engaging in research with indigenous communities and in indigenous contexts. Indeed, ‘narrative research’, Hendry (2007) explains, ‘has been characterized as providing a method for sharing stories, giving voice to those traditionally marginalized, and providing a less exploitative research method than other modes’ (p. 489). Yet, if not used carefully, and with great sensitivity, narrative research—particularly within historically silenced or marginalized communities—can be used to reify, objectify, essentialize, and/or further marginalize individuals and communities (Hendry, 2007); as a result, some narrative methods are in danger of becoming strategies that allow nonindigenous researchers to say what they want to say in a particular context, rather than really listening to what is being said. Indeed, when conducting narrative-based interviews and

listening to stories we are often engaged in a dual conversation. One conversation with the interviewed and one in our own head where we are constantly engaging in a meta-analysis of the story. What is really going on here? What is the meaning? How might I get more? What am I missing? We are in a state of doubt in relation to our interviewee. Our stance is one of distrust. So busy capturing ‘experience’ that we can’t listen. We have so many strategies for ‘getting it right’ that the real experience is obscured. (Hendry, 2007: 494)

When this dual conversation translates into the analytical process, there is a danger of creating even further distance between the interviewer and the storyteller, and at times, the analysis and interpretation of research results can even be ‘an act of colonization, of violence’ (Hendry, 2007: 493).

Despite these concerns about narrative research, our team still felt that there was great importance to engaging people through stories and respecting the stories of others, and we held the position that narratives had the potential to illuminate lifeways and lifeworlds of those telling the stories. Mindful of the possibilities and pitfalls of narrative research, our team endeavored to find an approach that was respectful and resonant with the oral storytelling history of indigenous populations, and was also a strategy that had the potential to move away from some of the challenges of interview-based narrative research toward a new way of participant-created story-centered narratives. We looked for another approach, which was still founded in storytelling and oral wisdom, but worked to alleviate issues in representation, objectification, reification, colonization, and violence. As such, we found our way to digital storytelling, which we believe can sit at the nexus of research, community engagement, and narrative. In so doing, this approach is an important addition to indigenous methods and strategies when conducting indigenous-led research projects and/or when working in partnership with indigenous communities, as well as to the oeuvre of qualitative methods. Using a case study that illustrates the usage of digital storytelling within an Inuit community, this article will demonstrate how digital storytelling can be a participant-led and participant-created story-based data-gathering strategy, which begins to address the limitations of interview-based narrative research, the issues of colonization of research, and the Western analytic project; it is also a strategy that simultaneously understands the need for indigenous communities to take control of the research process and to create their own research platforms, in their own voices, sharing their myriad, rich, and nuanced lived experiences.

Background and context

It’s ‘My Word’: participant responses and experiences

As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2005) wrote, ‘An important task of indigenous research in “becoming” a community of researchers is about capacity building, developing and mentoring researchers, and creating the space and support for new approaches to research and new examinations of indigenous research’ (p. 92). As we moved through piloting this approach in Rigolet, we engaged the participants (n = 26) in interviews about their perceptions not only of the digital storytelling process itself but also of the actual stories created, to discover whether participants found this approach valuable or useful, and whether it created ‘new approaches to research and new examinations of indigenous research’ (p. 92). In addition, we also interviewed a number of individuals who had not created digital stories but who had attended story nights or viewed the created stories (n = 10). Through these results, it became clear that from the interviewees’ perspective, the process of digital storytelling dovetails, overlaps, and complements several of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) interconnected and overlapping ‘indigenous projects’: storytelling, creating, remembering, connecting, sharing, representing, networking, and intervening. As such, we use these categories to share and frame key responses from participants, surrounding the use of this method within the community of Rigolet, and to examine the ways in which digital storytelling can address some of the limitations of interview-based narrative research.

Lessons learned

When undertaking this type of research and working with an emerging method, there are inevitably unexpected and unanticipated moments and outcomes. One of the first issues we encountered was around access to technological resources, and the use of this technology to create, edit, and produce the digital stories. In many indigenous communities, access to funds to purchase technological resources is often difficult to obtain. As such, a significant portion of the grant money was used to purchase all needed digital equipment—laptop computers, digital cameras, digital video recorders, computer and editing software, printer, scanner, and traveling cases—in order to create a technology resource library in Rigolet, as well as a traveling media lab, which could be brought to other communities. By investing in physical resources, which would remain within the community for community use, the project was able to create a mobile digital media center ⁴ and to set-up the foundations for a lasting technological impact. This highlights the importance of ensuring that all needed equipment and technologies not only be purchased to conduct the workshops but also be available after the completion of the project, so that technological capacities can be built and the community can benefit from this investment in the years to come.

Connected to the access to technology is the ability to use it. For some individuals in the community, particularly Elders, the needed skills and level of comfort to create, edit, and produce their digital story were not yet developed nor was there necessarily significant interest in developing these skills. While the workshops did not require any previous experience with computers, digital cameras, or software, we found that individuals who were already using and/or comfortable with this type of equipment were more apt to participate. To alleviate this issue, our community digital storytelling facilitators used various techniques to engage participants, from working one-on-one with Elders to record their stories and assist with the technology, to recording oral histories, to co-editing the stories with the participants. We are also aware that in some indigenous communities, the recording of a voice or the creation of a video may not always be appropriate and/or desirable. While we did not encounter this situation in our own research—and indeed found that people of all ages found this an excellent platform to unite oral storytelling with newly emerging digital technology—it is important to ensure that all participants and the community are comfortable with audio and video recordings and an understanding of their expected use.

Another unanticipated yet very significant issue we encountered was around the use of a not-for-profit organization to facilitate the first sets of workshops in the community, while simultaneously training the community facilitators. While the organization provided an essential service to the project, in hindsight, it would have been more effective if the community members had been trained in the digital storytelling process and techniques before the first workshops. Training prior to the beginning of the community workshops would have allowed all the workshops to be facilitated by the newly trained community members and would have established the workshops in the community as solely community run. In addition, by having the community digital storytelling facilitators trained and ready to coordinate workshops from the beginning, the adjustments and modifications that evolved as the project continued to meet the local needs and nuances would have emerged in a more immediate and organic manner. This process would have also further removed any nonindigenous influences and/or underlying values and assumptions that implicitly or explicitly impacted the story content, design, or structures. ⁵

In addition, some unexpected challenges emerged around the types of stories that participants created. While the focus of the workshops was on the connections between climate change and human health in order to fit within the framework of the larger project, as the workshops evolved, several people felt the urgency of sharing personal trauma narratives (Colvin, 2008), centered around alcoholism and sexual assault in the community. For these individuals, the workshops and the process of creating these personal narratives were both empowering and healing, which we celebrated. From a project-specific research perspective, however, this created a challenge to ‘meeting the mandates’ of the larger project topic, and of trying to provide a topical framework to the creative story process. We quickly realized through the process that many people needed to share particular personal or traumatic stories first, before they were able to discuss other experiences more connected to the climate–health field. While we still believe there is great value in using digital storytelling as a community-engaged method for specific topics or themes, the facilitators and the researchers need to remain open to and respect the need that some participants will have to create stories beyond the workshop topic.

Our team also experienced unexpected personal and professional challenges around facilitating, witnessing, and engaging with these trauma narratives. Unexpectedly, the facilitators of these workshops became almost viewed as personal counselors, which was a role for which they were both unprepared and untrained. This highlighted the need for awareness of, and clear guidelines around, dealing with deep emotional issues that could emerge during such a process, as well as further training in participant referral for the community digital storytelling facilitators. To support this training, the community digital storytelling facilitators participated in a two-day intensive training session with mental health and addiction experts from the Nunatsiavut Government on topics such as sensitivity to individual and collective trauma, referring to professional services, and confidentiality. Self-care was also important, as bearing witness to the cathartic process of the storyteller and continually confronting the trauma through the stories themselves was a challenging and emotionally fraught process. This topic was also emphasized in the training from the mental health and addiction experts, and community facilitators continue to receive ongoing advice and mentorship about patient referral and self-care from health professionals in Nunatsiavut.

In hindsight, however, it would have been valuable for all members of the team to openly and regularly discuss issues of client support and referral and self-care, as well as to discuss ongoing strategies for working through the affective dimensions of qualitative research. Rager (2005) suggests that when engaging in emotionally laden research, ‘journal writing, peer-debriefing, personal counseling, member checking [participant verification], and maintaining balance [in other nourishing life activities]’ (p. 25) can all be extremely helpful to mitigate the effects of painful stories and research. Despite the inherent challenges in working with and through these emotions—our own and others—we believe that it is important to engage with these stories and to deeply value these emotional experiences in order to produce quality research and stories (c.f. Behar, 1996; Harris and Huntington, 2001; Rager, 2005; Sciarra, 1999).

Once the stories were created, and our team and the story creators were discussing when, how, and where to make the digital stories public, we were confronted with the ‘burden of representation’ (Fine et al., 2003: 169). Indeed, our team became acutely aware of the responsibility held by the community, the facilitators, and ourselves over story dissemination, as issues and questions around participant privacy and the potential for the perpetuation of stereotypes were foremost in our minds. The participants and our team were proud of the stories that were created. We were committed to sharing those voices and lived experiences with others. But we wanted to ensure that through sharing, and through subsequent research, we did not structure the stories to glamorize, pathologize, and/or neutralize the voices and lives of the Inuit. As Fine et al. (2003) explained, we were grappling with ‘how best to represent the stories that may do more damage than good, depending on who consumes/exploits them’ (p. 183).

Given this potential of digital stories to both give voice to often silenced stories or to lend fuel to damaging social representation (Fine et al., 2003), when using this method, it is critical to address a number of challenging and tricky personal and political questions: Which stories should or should not be made public through websites or DVDs? Does the project research team have the responsibility or the right to set parameters around what personal narratives can be created in these workshops? What message, or narrative, do these types of digital stories tell about the community in which they were created? Do they further perpetuate stereotypes? Or give voice to silenced peoples and issues? Is it justified to consciously leave out stories that have the potential to be ‘used against’ the community? Will some stories contribute to collective misunderstandings? These questions are challenging, and fraught with tricky personal and political terrain. In many cases, we are still actively grappling with them. We have broached these topics openly with various community members, health professionals, academics, and other stakeholders, and our team continues to engage in dialogue around these complex issues. While there are no firm answers to these questions, we, like Fine at al. (2003), take the position that ‘it is up to all of us to figure out how to say what needs to be said without jeopardizing individuals and feeding perverse social representations’ (p. 184).

On a larger theoretical and methodological level, while digital storytelling provides the platform for individuals to share their personal stories and lived experiences, there is also a narrative structure that underlies the digital storytelling process. This narrative structure follows a very Western approach to storylines, which sees the story ‘wrap up’ neatly within 3–5 minutes. While this approach to creating digital stories is indeed pleasing to listen to and follow, it does not necessarily resonate with non-Western storytelling forms or traditions, which celebrate stories-in-process and do not require stories to conclude succinctly and fully by the end. This issue is currently being addressed by community digital storytelling facilitators, as they attempt to extend and challenge the boundaries of digital narratives, and seek to find alternative ways of sharing stories using the digital media.

Concluding thoughts … the future of narrative research is now?

‘Methods are not passive strategies’, Fine et al. (2003: 187) write, ‘They produce, reveal, and enable the display of different kinds of identities’ (p. 187). Our task and our responsibility as social science researchers, then, is to continue to search for and work with methods that ‘produce, reveal, and enable’ the voices, stories, and lived experiences of the participants in as unhindered and uninhibited manner as possible. Through our experiences piloting the use of digital storytelling as a narrative-based social science method, we believe that digital storytelling opens up some exciting and innovative new terrain for conducting and sharing narrative research, particularly within indigenous communities. As a method, it not only addresses the conceptual and practical issues and limitations associated with narrative research but it also works to alter, reverse, and/or disrupt the power dynamics often inherent in the research process and in the very roles of the ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. The stories created, and the voices and lived experiences within, are an important, rich, and powerful source of data that have not been written, prestructured, or altered by the researcher.

Digital storytelling, and the process involved in the creation of a personal video narrative, begins to dismantle the hyphen between ‘researcher-researched’ and ‘teller-listener’, and can place the researcher into the position of a ‘listener’, rather than a ‘verifier’ or an ‘analyzer’. Digital storytelling removes the researcher from a position of ‘narrative creator’, and instead, places the power of creation with the individual workshop participants. In this situation, the researcher is removed from the storytelling and facilitation process, and instead assumes the role of listener. This positioning is very different than the majority of the narrative research, where researchers become collectors, or gatherers, and then story re-creators (Hendry, 2007). Digital storytelling, then, allows the creator–tellers to share stories in the first person, which are entirely their own. While interpretations and analysis can certainly be made of these digital stories, the voices, experiences, and wisdom belong to the teller. And as viewer–listeners (or in some cases, researcher–listeners), we are tasked with the responsibility and the privilege of listening deeply and collaborating in the communion that occurs when sharing and bearing witness to stories (Hendry, 2007).

By placing the creative control with the community, and by providing a platform to tell and share one’s own story while listening to the stories of others, digital storytelling ‘can influence indigenous healthiness and resilience by offering a means of owning and being able to tell one’s own story’ (Gubrium, 2009: 187). Importantly, the digital stories created transcend the boundaries of research and academic institutions; the stories themselves move beyond merely a form of data to be analyzed (although they are indeed fruitful and fecund sites of analysis) and become digital narrative opportunities for individuals around the world to encounter the stories, voices, lives, and experiences of people with whom they may not otherwise interact or have contact.

When working with indigenous communities, research methods should first and foremost be about ‘establishing, maintaining, and nurturing reciprocal and respectful relationships, not just among people as individuals, but also with people as individuals, as collectives, and as members of communities’ (Smith, 2005: 97). It is within this understanding of, and commitment to engaging with people and communities, and situated within the ‘8th movement’ of qualitative research, that social science and humanities researchers—indigenous or nonindigenous—can use research methods and methodologies as the opportunity to encourage critical dialogue and develop individual and collective capacities (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008). As a narrative-based participatory research method, a capacity-building strategy, a dialogue inciter, and a community collaboration and cohesion enhancer, digital storytelling is a powerful strategy for engaging individuals who have been historically silenced, marginalized, and/or tokenized. From our experience, these digital stories can provide rich, culturally relevant first-person visual and aural depictions of life: of triumphs and failures, fears and hopes, and laughter and pain. They open up worlds of affect and intimacy, and they share—through sound, pictures, voice, and video—a glimpse of another life, with whom we can commune through the platform of a digital narrative, with whom we can listen, and from whom we can learn.

As Munro Hendry (2007: 495) illustrated,

through telling our lives we engage in the act of meaning making. This is a sacred act. Stories are what makes us human. … We are our narratives. They are not something that can be outside ourselves because they are what give shape to us, what gives meaning.

Stories are the outpouring of lived experiences, are ever in process, and always, already embedded within deep sets of cultures, values, epistemologies, and ontologies. Digital stories, then, can be understood as existing within this ‘sacred’ terrain of narrative, culture, and epistemic and ontological values, and, as such, perhaps the least we can ‘do’ with them—which may turn out to be the very most—is to listen, to learn, to reflect, and to trust.

We ‘currently situate narrative within the metaphor of research’, and in so doing, reduce narrative to ‘methods, verification, validity, ways in which we as researchers can legitimate it as a means of research that tells of something about the world’ (Hendry, 2007: 497). The process of digital storytelling, however, offers something different to the narrative research project, and may, in some sense, begin to dismantle the idea of research as a site of production, toward a process of research as a ‘site of communion’ (Hendry, 2007), particularly when working with/in an indigenous context, with indigenous partners and collaborators. Following Munro Hendry (2007), we suggest that narrative research ‘is not ultimately about interpretation, but about faith. Trusting in the stories and the storyteller’ (p. 494). Digital stories can provide us this opportunity for faith in individuals and their narratives, and, in so doing, create the opening to listen, reflect, learn, trust, and then listen again.