It isn’t always easy to look back on an academic year and list the tangible things learned in a nine-month span. As my second year as a communication and media studies major comes to a close, I find myself to be a better writer, speaker and consumer of media than I was when I started in August. My set of strengths and general knowledge base is growing. Yay! Equally important, but arguably more difficult to measure, however, are the limitations that my own privilege and life experiences place upon my education and therefore my ability to become a more effective communicator and listener. I suppose that realizing that such limitations exist is half of the battle.
I began to notice the boundaries for what I could understand and conceptualize about the day-to-day experiences of groups in society outside of my own in my media and cultural criticism class. True to its name, the class involved consuming media texts and using theories and frameworks to understand what informs the experiences of different groups. Our class particularly focused on Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada as our group of interest, and despite graduating from a school called, Iroquois Junior Senior High School with a mascot that was an Indigenous person, I had minimal education on any Indigenous groups, their histories or their struggles. Yikes.
Of course, by the end of this class, I could point out potentially harmful media representations of Indigenous people. I could draw conclusions about the ways in which the multiple genocides they endured have shaped their lives and families today. I could even recognize the dominant ideologies that exist in communities of power and privilege that erase or forget about Indigenous people altogether. I definitely know more now about Indigenous cultures than I did in high school, a long overdue change. But I’d be lying if I said the stories I heard in class didn’t grow fainter in my mind once I packed up my things and left that class for the day. It’s easy to forget about something when you aren’t connecting to it beyond a reading or viewing, and as someone who plans to make media and tell stories for a living, trying to do so only through class materials and class discussions with peers who, just as eager to learn, also don’t know what they don’t know, feels like unfinished work.
We learn early on that a good communicator is an even better listener. I took comfort in remembering this when my professor invited me to attend the 15th Storytellers Conference in Niagara Falls, New York. Yes, I had just taken an entire semester of class related to Indigenous stories, but as a white woman from a predominately white school in rural Pennsylvania, I did not feel qualified to contribute to an event like this. So I was relieved when my professor told me that we would just be listening.
From the moment I arrived at the conference and sat down in a large room with the rest of the attendees to eat my breakfast, I felt out of place to say the least. One of the only white people there, being welcomed in a language I did not understand, I remember feeling nervous and especially grateful that my job was just to listen and observe. To my surprise, children of all ages came with their parents, and I watched several people call out to each other before embracing as friends who hadn’t seen one another in a while. It didn’t take knowing a language, however, to understand that for many of the attendees, this was a family event. My dress pants and blazer suddenly felt out of place as many attendees were wearing jeans, yoga pants, skirts or attire that was specific to their tribe. Soon I understood that what I had expected to be a very professional, sit-and-listen, powerpoint presentation sort of day was instead a gathering of friends and neighbors to hear one another’s stories and engage in a conversation. This realization reminded me of a common endpoint of many of our discussions in media and cultural criticism: there are colonial ties in everything we see and expect to see around us. The clothes I thought were the correct thing to wear, my surprise at seeing a toddler at an academic event and my idea of what I should bring to or expect to see from a presentation by a scholar were all products of colonial ideology that I’ve become accustomed to during my career as a student.
One of the first talks I attended was by an Indigenous photographer by the name of Rick Hill who took us through a slideshow of photographs he took throughout his life. Almost effortlessly, he remembered everyone’s names in all of his pictures, as well as details about their lives and where they ended up. He said he took the pictures as a way of preserving the identity of his family and community despite colonial efforts to erase them. The stories he told along with the pictures he showed called out negative stereotypes often associated with Indigenous people and created connections with members of the audience who laughed or spoke out loud with him. By the end of his talk it felt as if I had finished listening to a conversation with an older family member instead of an academic presentation. Hill was able to combine the facts and history I was familiar with from class with artwork he had been doing for decades in order to tell a story that resisted the multiple genocides that Native American communities experienced.
Another talk was given by a young woman from Pennsylvania who had just recently decided to reaccess her Indigenous heritage and begin learning her language. She spoke about sitting in her college classes and feeling frustrated at how her education and academic work seemed to blow over the fact that she and her classmates were learning on stolen land and ignoring the culture that surrounded them. She said that in learning her language and about her heritage, she was able to find a renewed sense of her identity that she is now bringing into her academic work and future career. At the end of her talk, a member of the audience began talking about her own tribal traditions before two more did the same. This was more than the school trip I thought it was. This was a sharing of stories, practices, artwork and a love for culture that is still alive and thriving, not just in classroom discussions, but in the day to day lives of Indigenous people.
I realized that experiencing the conversations and storytelling I did at this conference brought the people and groups I was learning about in class to a new level of reality and significance to me. Instead of subjects in a documentary or article, these people and their stories were right in front of my face and I felt lucky to be able to hear them as they intended to tell them, alongside family and friends. My wish for future students, especially future storytellers, is that it becomes a regular part of the communication studies curriculum to offer experiences like this conference that amplify voices that have been silenced and open the ears of students like me who otherwise might have never known to listen.