In the beginning Ja Seng Roi wasn’t convinced that stories could be so powerful. In one of her first field research trips, she recalls, a 85-year-old storyteller told her, “Every word has its own story. And every story has a world behind it.”

And those words stuck with her.

The more she spoke to Jaiwas, the traditional storytellers of the Kachin ethnic minority community in northern Myanmar, the more she realized the meaning of her interlocutor’s words and the power that stories hold.

Ja Seng Roi, a Kachin woman in her early 30s, is a researcher and story collector with the Kachin Orature Project, a community collaborative initiative started in 2016 for documentation, archiving, and revitalization of Kachin oral heritage. Over the past few years, she has interviewed hundreds of traditional storytellers across northern Myanmar recording Kachin oral narratives for the project.

Kachin Orature Project was initiated by Keita Kurabe, an associate professor of linguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan. In the early 2010s, Kurabe was studying the Jingpaw Kachin language of northern Myanmar as part of his doctoral research at Kyoto University, which was when he noticed “transmission breakdown” of Kachin oral heritage. That is, there had been a rupture in the transmission of the oral traditions to the next generation. 

“Fortunately,” Kurabe says, he “discovered the voice of younger community members who were eager to retrieve and maintain their oral history and heritage.”  This not only birthed the Kachin Orature Project but also inspired the community-based research model at the heart of the initiative. “This is a project conducted for, with, and by the members of the Kachin community themselves,” Kurabe says.

With a group of young Kachin community members, like Ja Seng Roi, at its helm, the project has since collected over 2,500 Kachin oral narratives in diverse genres–folktales, fables, legends, creation myths, folk epics, historical narratives, spells, ritual chants, riddles and many more.

Kachin Orature Project is a significant initiative towards preservation and promotion of an ethnic minority culture in Myanmar, an authoritarian state that has been following a policy of coercive assimilation of ethnic minorities. It is an initiative that shows resistance and resilience of a people in the face of a state-sponsored majoritarian policy known as Burmanization. Until 2014, for nearly 40 years under military rule, Myanmar had banned teaching ethnic minority languages like Kachin in government schools. With strict censorship in place, there was little room for the development of ethnic minority languages and cultural expressions.

Since 2011, Myanmar has taken steps towards a transition to democracy, but the latest coup d'etat has shattered hope.

In 2022, the military junta brought amendments to Myanmar’s 2014 National Education Law to promote the use of Burmese at the expense of ethnic minority languages, furthering imposition of the majority Burmese language on the ethnic minorities.

In Decolonising the Mind, novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observed that languages are imposed on a people to “control memory.”

“The larger goal of our initiative is not to let others control our memory,” says Ja Seng Roi. “We want to preserve our oral heritage and history, and pass it down to our children.”

‘These stories are our history’

The Kachin was an orality-based society. Writing was introduced only in the early 20th century by Christian missionaries. Meanwhile, Kachin jaiwas could narrate important events dating back to many generations with meticulous details. 

“Storytellers I’ve interviewed often begin a narrative by saying ‘I am telling you as my father told me’. By [accounting for the chain of transmission], they emphasize the accuracy of their narratives,” says Ja Seng Roi. 

According to Myo Thant Linn, an ethnic minority Shan poet and storyteller from Myanmar’s Kachin State and a Chevening fellow at the British Library in London, some oral narratives indeed bear characteristics of historical sources. “There are broadly two types of oral narratives. One that includes folk tales, creation stories, legends, ritual chants and the like. And the other is narratives of important events such as war, natural calamities, or the building of a monument,” he explains. “The second type of oral narratives are historical sources.”