Indigenous anthropologist Darrel Manitowabi, PhD is the inaugural occupant of the AMS-Hannah Chair of Indigenous Health and Traditional Medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University in Sudbury Ontario. He has launched “Indigenous Medicine Stories,” a podcast series of interviews with a wide array of First Nations people — elders, health-care providers, residential school survivors, and more. In our interview he talks about his inspirations, his goals, and his ideas about the nature of “medicine” and the use of stories as a form of knowledge.
This is an edited transcript of the zoom interview.
JD: Hello, everyone. I’m Jacalyn Duffin at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I’m a retired hematologist and historian. Kingston is situated on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg peoples. And today I’m chatting with my friend and colleague, Darrel Manitowabi, who is a professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University.
Darrel, tell us about yourself and your job.
DM: Greetings, everyone. I would say in Anishinaabamowen [indigenous language]. Thank you all for listening to this. My name is Darrel Manitowabi. I am Three Fires Anishinaabe from Manitoulin Island. More specifically, Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, which is on the eastern end of Manitoulin Island and Georgian Bay.
I currently live in Whitefish River First Nation, which is just across from the island on the mainland in the traditional territory of the Robinson-Huron Treaty. And I am currently the Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Indigenous Traditional Medicine and Indigenous Health in the Human Sciences Division at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University. The acronym for short is NOSM [pron: naw-zim]. And that’s who I am.
JD: Thank you. I’d like to mention also that it’s a very beautiful, sunny, but extremely cold winter day here in Kingston. We’re at minus 16 degrees centigrade. How about you?
DM: We are about minus 20 Centigrade, I believe the last I checked, I’m in Whitefish River First Nation as I shared and so, it’s rather cold here, and it’s the coldest time of the year thus far.
JD: Yes, for us too. And for the Americans listening, that’s about zero degrees Fahrenheit. Can you tell us a bit about your job. You started in 2020. That was right in the middle of the pandemic, basically. And you are the inaugural professor in that chair. Can you tell us about what you were supposed to do at NOSM?
DM: As you stated, I joined in the time of COVID, which is a less than ideal time, especially when you’re starting a new job. There’s intermittent openings, which is very difficult for someone who needs to access a library.
One of the more recent collaborations I had just by way of example is with Dr. Geoff Hudson, who is a historian of medicine at the medical school, we have a chapter in the book, An Accidental History of Canada [McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024). And we wrote about Manitoulin Island accidents from settler and indigenous perspectives. And it was the most difficult chapter I’ve ever had to write because I couldn’t access anything. Everything was closed. And when it was open, it was only for a narrow window. It almost felt as though you needed to expedite your process, right? And that’s how I would describe that initial experience just by way of example.
A lot of my work involves working with elders and traditional healers. My approach to this Chair is quite a bit different than it has been in the past. I’ll just give you another example of that. When I first started this chair, I went to the indigenous community to help inform the kind of work I would do. Typically, an academic embraces autonomy and academic freedom and all those sorts of things and goes about doing things that are in part conditioned by the academy and the expectations of that. I reversed that and I took an approach wherein I am conditioned and in sync with community. And one of the things that community determined to be important is to build capacity in understanding traditional healing and its place within contemporary society and that involves coming together. So, since 2020, I’ve been consulting with elders, traditional healers, and we’ve been determining a pathway forward. And it’s a continuous preparatory aspect of the work that I’m doing, I’ve been focused mostly on that.
I consider my approach to be a kind of a two eyed seeing, which is this perspective of blending Western knowledge with indigenous knowledge. But the way that I’ve operationalized it is I’m blending university logic and expectations with community logic and expectations. And I try to do enough of the university stuff to satisfy those eyes and I also concentrate the balance of my time with community. So it’s a juggling act. It’s a balancing act, recognizing that there’s an incompatibility in essence with how community sees knowledge production and would like to see it done and how the university does. The university is a hierarchical individualized process whereas in community it’s more of a collective process. We do things together. We are a collective group of authors and collaborators rather than a hierarchical individual leading a group. I’m not leading anyone when I’m in community. I’m working alongside. That’s what I’m doing there. And Indigenous Medicine Stories –what we’re going to talk about here– is the essence of what that means. It’s a kind of bridging of those two worlds. It’s like bridging those two ways of experiencing and practicing knowledge.
JD: Well, right away you’ve kind of explained to me the origin of Indigenous Medicine Stories they seem to be an extrapolation of what you envisaged your job to be. Did you have the idea before you went for that job or was it something that came to you while you were inventing what you should be at NOSM?
DM: I’ll come back to COVID. COVID explains a lot. During COVID, we needed to modify our curriculum to reflect remote learning. And given the work that we were doing, we do a lot of experiential stuff, having elders come into the classroom.
At the medical school in year one, there was even an indigenous placement that that became a bit of a challenge. We ended up doing things like everyone else in front of a computer screen. And that’s a challenge with learning. It’s exhausting. I remember those long days of just staring at my computer screen doing presentations and not having that human connection. And a few of the students had raised a question that we should consider alternative ways of experiencing this learning.
And one or more (I can’t remember if it was one or two or more than that) mentioned podcasts. And I thought, that’s an interesting idea. And at the same time, I was thinking about a project that involved collections of life histories of elders and healers akin to a book by David Newhouse and Don McCaskill, that was, In the Words of Elders Aboriginal Cultures in Transition [U Toronto Press, 1999). They essentially traveled across Canada and they collected life stories of elders from across Canada. And it’s literally their life story. It’s their narrative that forms the basis of each chapter. And also this other project that took place, the Indian Film Project that was at the University of Regina, the Canadian Plains Research Center. And what they did is they traveled across …or someone traveled across Canada. It wasn’t always the same person. And they sat down with people of significance of indigenous ancestry who might have been an elder or a leader or a healer, and they just asked questions, and they collected a transcript of what their experience was like. And it almost seemed as though it was a bit of a random process that you weren’t quite sure what the purpose of that interview was, but it produced a lot of important information and an important historical record. Many of those individuals are no longer with us now. It’s become an important archive. And so when I was thinking about those three things all at once, the concept of a podcast came about and I thought I could have guests speak about their experiences in their own words. And I could generate an archival record by way of the voice, but also by way of the transcript.
I was having a conversation with Anne Avery at the Associated Medical Services, and she had mentioned that they had done a podcast. We continued talking and came to the conclusion, why not collaborate? Why not work together on this? That’s how it all came about. But it was it was the intersection of all of those things that were happening that led to this.
As I thought about it further, and I’ll just expand upon this, one of the things that I consider to be an interesting aspect of the podcast and of the approach that I take is having the guests speak about themselves in their own words, which also reflects back to what I mentioned before in the sense that I try to speak as little as possible and I try to highlight the voice of the person, have the person talk about their life in their own words, on their own terms. And I’m merely a conduit to that or a bridge to opening the door of understanding.
It also reflects the fact that academia traditionally and in the research that I’ve done, I do a lot of oral history research where I speak with elders. And one of the frustrations I’ve always had is that they have so much important ideas to share. But I must edit things down to one or two sentences or perhaps if I’m lucky, five sentences. And I thought, there needs to be a mechanism or a medium by which that comes to an end. That was also an aspect of it. But it’s also that relationship. I don’t see this as being the authority over. I see this as a visit, a way to learn and to engage. And I also specifically approach it by way of highlighting the life history. Quite often elders, academics, and others are called upon to do something specific to their job, whether if you’re an elder, you’re doing a teaching, or if you’re a researcher, you’re discussing your research. Rarely do we ever have a chance to understand where are you coming from? Who are you? Where did you grow up? Who were your teachers? What was that like? And so it’s really about them telling their story. It became a way for me to to navigate or balance or weave in this interface of the university and the community in a creative way that allows for that outcome. And one of the significant aspects as well is the educational component. And it links to my chair, the AMS chair. One of the features of it is to help –And you might have your own perspective on this, Jackie, because you’ve had a longstanding chair–is to [help] find ways of inserting these kinds of perspectives in medical school curriculum by way of encouraging research with students or advancing curriculum in a particular kind of way. Doing scholarly activities and creative work such as this helps to demonstrate to biomedically inclined future physicians that there is a humanistic aspect to healing and medicine and also an historical aspect. Those are all coming together and are all influencing how things came to be. So that’s a little bit of an insight into the origin.
JD: Well, for those who haven’t been to look at Indigenous Medicine Stories–and we will certainly explain at MedHum how to find them–they are a wonderful cluster of podcasts. They’re not short. They run up to an hour or so. And right now there’s about 22 of them there You’ve already answered some of my questions about not only where it came from, but how it can be used. I’m interested in if it is difficult to get people to talk. I know you have a PhD in anthropology, and I believe you used oral history to get there when you were writing your thesis. But is it difficult to encourage people to talk, especially if they’re being recorded?
And one quick question. Tell us about that beautiful image you have behind you, which is the title page of Indigenous Medicine Stories.
DM: let me get to the title page, the artwork first, then I’ll jump into that. I needed a logo and at the time I was searching for ideas and one of one of the initial concepts I had was to take a picture of medicines. And so I did that but there’s a young community member where I live here, Whitefish River First Nation, a young aspiring artist by the name of Nevada Anwahtin. Nevada had a collection of paintings, and I just was interested in seeing if she had something that kind of really connected. And once I saw this, I knew right away that it was the perfect piece of art that would serve as a logo. And it also represents the future because it’s from a young Indigenous artist who’s a female.
And also, it reflects ceremony. The image is of us, of what we understand to be a sweat lodge. There’s different words for that word. But anyways, it’s a sweat lodge and there’s a vision that is coming out, this is my interpretation. Nevada will have her own inspiration and interpretation. But this is what I saw when I looked at it. It’s engaging with the spiritual essence of ceremony and it’s in beautiful colors. So I thought, this is the art work that I needed. That’s how that decision was made. And to answer your next question about Is it difficult? I would say in part what I’m trying to do is to capture different stories and experiences. I’m looking for different standpoints, right? you might be a practitioner, or you might be balancing for instance, a social work perspective to helping and including indigenous knowledge and indigenous helping in that.
You might be a researcher, for instance. You might be from a different locale or a cultural experience or group. Those are all kind of factoring in. And it’s also about convenience. , I’m doing this alongside my everyday work. If I happen to be in a part of the province where I know somebody lives, I’ll try to make that connection. One of the essential aspects of this is to have that face to face. And so it’s a blend. The ideal for me is to do an in-person recording if that’s possible. But I’ve also done them remotely, remote recordings through Riverside, by way of example, if I know it’s going to be Riverside, I make it essential that I meet with them in person beforehand.
The more challenging part is to build that relationship because there needs to be some work invested into that. I’m not saying a whole lot, but there needs to be some kind of connection because as human beings, we interact face to face and communicate in those kinds of ways. So the initial first grouping was a bit of a balance between those who had somewhat known or had known of me. I had met them before and in some instances that might not have been the case, but it was mostly that scenario. They were comfortable with me.
I also emphasized the spirit and intent, right? It’s about education and they …the guests on the podcast recognize the context in which things are, where indigenous peoples are not understood. There’s a lot of discrimination, a lot of conscious and unconscious bias in social interactions. There’s an exclusion of these ideas in the formal education. All Indigenous peoples are experts in these things. They know it. They know it from their inner essence and their being. They understand the potential that education can have in trying to address this. From my perspective, they see themselves as trying to change things, as am I. We both recognize that.
I centralize education because with education, I’d like to humanize an understanding of traditional healers. I’ve been talking about indigenous issues for my entire teaching career. I’ve been mentoring. I’ve just passed 20 years of doing that now. And since the beginning, there’s this reaction towards anything indigenous. You could just say the word “indigenous,”–I’m going back 10, 15 years–and you can trigger a response by some people. You could trigger a physiological response just by mentioning “Native,” “First Nations,” “Inuit,” “Indigenous”, etc. I’ve always known that and I’ve experienced that in the classroom.
When I speak about Indigenous healing, especially towards a group that has is trained in the sciences, for instance, there’s this instant reaction towards it with the assumption that it’s inherently unscientific, or it’s all made up. It has no place. It’s just this interesting cultural phenomenon or social phenomenon. If you look at it, if you use science to look at it, you could draw the conclusion that there is an essential inherent bias in understanding this because there’s assumptions based on that. Science is not supposed to be based on assumptions and bias.
So, I thought that if people could hear the story of the person, hear their life experience, they could recognize that this is a human being that exists in this world, and they have experiences just like I do. And I have no right to assume that they’re inferior because of the socialization in which I come from in respect to indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples. So that’s part of it. It’s about educating and even, I’ll just add, for indigenous peoples themselves. I see this as a new medium of communication. And it’s a consequence of the impact of a digital world in which we’re faced with. It’s really adapting to that. In times in the past, this knowledge would have been shared by way of storytelling that may have been on the land, it could have been around a table. I grew up at a time when there were very little TV channels. I like to say two-and-a-half channels because the third channel worked half the time. I spend most of the time outside in the community . In the community, I would just be around and in the process of just being around, I learned a lot.
I learned a lot because I would be around stories, around people telling stories, around elders who would be telling stories, and I would just be part of the furniture in that sense. Those days are not here in the present. Maybe they’ll return in the future. So I see this as a new form of storytelling, a digital storytelling, right? And there’s some literature out there on it Jennifer Wemigwans has a book on it [A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Culture Online, U Regina Press, 2018].
I see this as being part of that process, right? It serves a purpose for different audiences in a medium that is compatible with both of those sides, right? And I think that both sides are looking for something different. Those who are just curious about what this all means, for instance, from a non-Indigenous perspective. But from Indigenous perspective, there’s a built-in marketing because many of the people that I’ve spoken to are known. They’re known in the indigenous community, but they’re not known outside of it. That also relates back to your original question about inviting people. I know who these people are. We’re part of a community.
We’re part of people who know somebody, right? We’re not so far removed in this area anyway. And I’m also focusing initially mostly on Northern Ontario, obviously because that’s where I work, but also because there’s a tendency to invest in creative works and knowledge production in places where capital is concentrated. And in the province of Ontario, it’s concentrated in southern Ontario.
So you have this natural tendency, I suppose, within that framework to collect knowledge in those areas. In Northern Ontario, there’s little research in all aspects of research in itself . I think I have a responsibility to reflect and it also comes back to the social accountability mandate of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University, which is to reflect the society in which it is located. And I tried to reflect the work that I do in the society in which I’m located. I’ve said quite a bit of things there. That’s kind of where things are at.
I’m always recording and I don’t know how long this is going to go, but I’m going to take it as far as I can and continue this work because there’s a lot of important lives that are being lived out there that many of us have not learned about or heard about.
JD: Right. Thank you for that wonderful answer. So I understand that, first of all, a lot of people in the community and second of all, all of your interviewees, as well as yourself, feel a responsibility to pass on knowledge. And this educational opportunity is a trigger for why they might accept to be recorded. I have two more questions. They’re “medicine” stories, in looking at some of them, I’m interested in hearing you tell us what you think “medicine” is or is about, because “medicine” is there to treat disease. We take medicine to get rid of disease. And “healing” is a very important word in your podcasts. What is the “medicine”? What is being healed?
DM: I’m glad you asked that question. It brings to mind that I neglected to talk about something else. Traditional medicine or traditional healing is often stated as being holistic that’s maybe a common denominator in most of the definitions you come across or what people have to say. However, the stereotype is that it’s limited to plant medicines. It’s limited to this material consumption of something to relieve something, to have this particular outcome. And that’s a Western paradigm within healing in itself.
And I’ve heard this from healers that it’s more than that. Really that’s what I’m getting at. Really what they’re doing. This is also a form of indigenous pedagogy, which is a way of indigenous learning. And storytelling was that way of learning, of teaching and learning but there was also, obviously, observation that happened and you go about it and do what you need to do. But one element of it [medicine] is storytelling.
I’ve read these historical accounts that indigenous peoples would tell stories all winter long. So this is the time of storytelling, a time of education. That’s the legacy. And often indigenous peoples will tell stories by way of an answer. This is what I try to teach in the classroom that when we have a placement at NOSM for students to go into an indigenous community for four weeks. I help them prepare for it, I tell them that you’re going to ask an elder a question. They’re going to tell you a story and in that story, they’re actually answering that question for you. And you may not know the answer to that question immediately, but it might come a time in the future when you recall that story and you make that connection.
It’s a form of autonomous learning where the teacher or the elder or the storyteller tells the story and it’s up to the individual to the listener to “get it,” or not. And at some point in time they will. So, in essence, it’s a bit of an assessment like where are you at in terms of your knowledge and comprehension and understanding? I use that by way of an example because the stories that are being told are precisely about Indigenous healing and indigenous medicines in the sense that they’re a reflection upon the legacy of colonialism in Canada and the violence it is instilling on people of the past and the present and the impact that that has on people’s lives and how that translates into and manifests into these physiological outcomes that a biomedical lens can offer.
But it also speaks to you from a biomedical standpoint; you could look at the impact of stress on health. You could look at childhood development. You could take all of these frameworks and apply them if you wish to do so. However, the way that it’s spoken about, it’s about It’s about trauma and healing and how that’s overcome. And often I will come across or and even know that that these seemingly abstract human experiences are actually medical or medicine for indigenous peoples. For instance, just learning more about teachings can offer healing for an individual who is yearning for that; maybe through the colonial process [it] was excluded. And it’s a void in their life. And they need it. They need that reason and purpose and identity and a sense of being and understanding.
That relates to mental health and also physical health as well. They’re seeking an answer to their situation. And this is helpful for them. It’s also, I like to say, not the only solution, but it’s part of the answer, right? So obviously, meeting in person with someone is the best possible outcome. But it’s maybe a gateway towards that, ideally that it offers an opportunity for those to reach out to others.
It’s also about them telling us about what they see it being. And again, it’s from different perspectives, right? You might have a researcher who’s chatting about what this means. It might be an indigenous-physician guest who talks about finding a way to include. It could be an elder. Knowledge is a form of wisdom, and some of that relates to a healing wisdom And it could be a practitioner or it could be a helper. It could even be about human relationships. You could translate some of this into a social determinants of health framework.
So there’s various ways of interpreting, but it’s much like the story of the artwork that I shared that is the logo. It allows for the listener to draw the knowledge that they need or the teaching that they need, at that moment in time, at the level that they’re at, on their own terms. There’s nothing here is being imposed on anyone. When I’m asking the questions, I’m simultaneously processing what the listener may be thinking. And I deliberately do not reveal too much of the details, for instance, and I leave it up to the listener to figure that part out. There is in some part of responsibility but I’m not doing it for the person, and for instance, someone might be talking about the meaning of ceremony in their life. And I don’t go too deep. I just kind of touch upon the surface and it’s up to the listener to dig deeper if they need to. Right. This is what I’m talking about here in terms of this non-hierarchical way of learning this indigenous pedagogy, where there’s responsibility that is understood to exist with the person who seeks to learn.
And the teacher, or the one who’s telling the story, is not imposing things in part somewhat seemingly abstract, but is directly saying what needs to be said. And giving that option to the listener: this is what I’m telling you. If you don’t understand what I’m saying to you, it means you have more work to do.
JD: Yes.
DM: If you do understand what I’m saying to you, then you have a choice to take something from this if you would like. You don’t need to do so. And that is it.
JD: That’s very intriguing because it is a different way of conceiving of medicine and also of healing. And I got the message early on in looking at the podcasts that the disease we’re healing is collective, held in our society, a historical legacy in a sense. The last question I want to ask you is about “stories” themselves as a form of knowledge. You’ve made it quite clear that it’s a way of answering and giving information among First Nations people. It’s a traditional way of understanding. But you’ve got me thinking, since I’ve been looking at your podcasts, that medicine does that too, in the sense that we take a history of every patient and we’re not supposed to impose too much, just as you suggest [in your work], but we curate those histories. And the other way that storytelling is a form of knowledge in medicine is the case of the “case histories,” which go back to antiquity. In the sense that we build a disease concept from multiple case histories of people who’ve had similar symptoms or similar experiences. And so for the last question, I want you to talk about storytelling as a form of knowledge.
DM: Okay, … Let me situate that with Anishinaabe understanding of things. There are two forms of stories. They’re one form of storytelling is the tabatacamowin, which is stories of the past of events that have occurred. And there are sacred stories. And that is referred to as atiso’kanak.
The difference between those two? Well, “sacred” speaks for itself, they’re mythic, sacred. One of those stories is alive and that’s atiso’kanak. And those are sacred stories. We don’t really engage upon sacred stories in Indigenous Medicine Stories, but we do focus on tabatacamowin, those stories of lives lived. I just wanted to kind of situate that. Those are two forms of storytelling.
I think to engage with your answer, at the start I see commonality in humanity, and even commonality in intellectual paradigms. It’s almost as though we’ve been conditioned to be in opposition. In many ways, we’re still tribal peoples at our core and we’re the scientists and you can interpret this as being a “story,” but we’re going to call this a “case history” and we’re going to call it this. And it’s not going to be that, but as you’ve described, you’re, you’re talking about something that’s very similar. And some of this may be indigestible to some and incompatible, but at some point in time, maybe that might not be the case, but that’s how I approach this. I see commonality.
I often talk about narrative medicine, you’ll be familiar with that, on how that’s kind of framed as this academic understanding of what you described: this way of telling our stories to the physician or even maybe to the patient sometimes. And I bring in storywork. And this is when I talk about this academically, like I’m doing now. Jo-ann Archibald, a Canadian academic from BC, indigenous Canadian academic, writes about “storywork” and a way of teaching [Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit, UBC Press, 2008]. But it really comes down to the inner essence of this history of indigenous learning in itself, right? And I just described that atiso’kanak.and tabatacamowin and how , stories have always been part of things, right?
I like to tell this story about how I was doing this project with the First Nations Information Governance Center on Indigenous perspectives of poverty. And I was speaking to a Mi’kmaq and this is in the east of Canada, a Mi’kmaq, I’ll say, knowledge holder, academic. I asked him six questions and he told me six stories, and the stories were over two hours long! And it was after about maybe 90 minutes when he paused and he confessed. He goes, “You know, I don’t know if I’m answering your question and I don’t know if you’re understanding what I’m saying.”
And I said, “I understand precisely what you’re saying. Keep on going.” When he came to the end in that research project, I just felt that at a loss because I could only capture maybe a minute or two of nearly two hours of very, very interesting stories that he was telling me that were just vibrant and alive. I could just feel and sense the detail of what he was talking about. Really, that’s what this is all about. It’s about demonstrating the utility of indigenous storytelling in educating because that’s what these are all about. And an elder or storyteller or, just an elder or, most will tell you a story anyway, right? They’ll just jump in the story and It’s just how it is, right? And it’s almost like this natural inclination of how to answer your question, because I think it makes it more interesting. When I hear stories about people’s lives and about experiences that they’ve had, it’s more interesting. I think you can remember it in much more detail.
I’ll just give you another example. I was going down this body of water close to where I live, where I hadn’t gone to before when I was new to boating. And I was speaking to an experienced person in the community who knew the waters very well. And he was telling me by way of story about how to navigate those waters. And it was almost like generating a mental map in my mind through the anticipated experience that I would go through in order to really kind of paint a picture of a map of where to go. And he also did that with even hunting, where he would tell me, okay, you got to go here and then he would kind of generate this portrait of this place. And as I was going through those experiences I could hear the voice in my mind describing what I was seeing as I was doing it. It was kind of like an original kind of a GPS kind of experience.
And I’ll just give you one more example of this. When I was early in my career, I was teaching indigenous studies at the University of Sudbury, which was formerly a federated University of Laurentian University in Sudbury Northeastern Ontario and I had invited an elder to come speak to the class and I thought they were learning all of these things. I was teaching a course on Indigenous tradition, culture, and spirituality. So I thought maybe I’ll invite an elder to the class. And the elder came in and I just gave a general idea, a general orientation to what the content was about. I didn’t impose what they should talk about, but I just offered that’s a useful direction to go. And over the course of an hour, the elder was telling stories about life and life stages and all of these things. And I found it fascinating. I was just captivated myself while sitting in the audience with the students. I just took a little pause and I looked around and I realized that some had no idea what was going on.
They were expecting this structured lesson plan with learning outcomes and content that would correlate some way to those learning outcomes and then, if they were being evaluated, there would be some kind of assessment associated with that. And I just came to the realization that there is something different here and there’s something worthwhile to consider. After the next class, I had basically deconstructed things for students to explain that this is how things happen. I began to learn that this is something that I needed to explain because it’s just something that just happens in its natural form.
Also, and as this relates to myself here, I didn’t immediately understand the meaning of all of what that elder had stated that day. I understood some or most of it. And it was probably about maybe five to seven years after the fact that I remembered that story and I still remember the story and this story, this is like 15 years ago, right? So this maybe speaks to the power of story in itself. It was five or seven years after that point in time that it was like a Eureka! moment that this is what that elder was telling me. I didn’t understand it at that time, but now I understand it. And I remember that story and I remember what they were trying to tell me and they were actually doing something that they thought was important for young people to know.
At that time, I was young myself. Stories are very powerful. And I think it’s the ideal medium to transmit knowledge and to even translate knowledge in this essence and if the listener does not yet know what’s going on, then at some point in time, possibly they will. And they may return back to the story and find something new.
And that’s the neat thing about learning. Sometimes you return back to a book you read 10 years ago and you find something new to learn and understand about it. So the same is the case with Indigenous medicine stories.
JD: That’s wonderful. Darrel. Miigwech! Thank you so much.
DM: Thank you for having me. And I look forward to sharing more Indigenous Medicine Stories with all of those who are interested in hearing them.
Darrel Manitowabi is an associate professor in the Human Sciences Division at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), Sudbury, Ontario. He is a citizen of the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, and he currently resides in the Whitefish River First Nation. He is an applied, medical and Indigenous anthropologist with research interests in Nishnaabe ethnohistory and Indigenous gambling, Indigenous social determinants of health, Indigenous healing, Indigenous-state relations and Indigenous self-determination. His research and publications examine how the historical legacy of, and contemporary expressions of colonialism impact the health and wellbeing of First Nations communities. Furthermore, his research examines how First Nations communities are active agents in decolonizing the Indigenous-state relationship through centring Indigenous perspectives in health, education, and governance.