When was the last time you asked someone their story? Stories preserve memory, pass on tradition, convey wisdom, and offer a glimpse of hope. In this way, asking someone about their story is not unlike asking them about what values they use to navigate their daily lives.
Recently, Narrative Initiative partnered with the Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP) to facilitate a narrative landscape project with one guiding question: “What could happen to advance healthy culture in Black and Indigenous communities if people knew the truth about our culture?” The organization, founded by Edgar Villanueva in 2019, works to change norms, expectations, and values in philanthropic giving. To that end, DWP wanted to observe how narratives around Black and Indigenous culture were held across organizers, artists, and their own staff. This question guided Narrative Initiative and DWP on a reflective, emotional, and invigorating journey of exploring harmful and helpful narratives that contribute to a culture of wellbeing and care in Black and Indigenous communities in the United States. What emerged from our research were raw, complex, and striking stories of how traditions of reciprocity, resilience, and hope are maintained through storytelling. This collection of stories demonstrates what “care as a practice” looks like in Black and Indigenous culture.
To “care” is to be invested in the wellbeing and needs of others. And for these communities, reckoning with the entrenched legacies of colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism is inseparable from embodying care.
There were distinctions and trends between communities. For Black interview participants we saw that care is associated with stories of shared responsibility, sacrifice, and solidarity. With Indigenous interview participants we heard how care is understood through generosity, kinship, and holistic wellbeing.
Similarities between communities included an understanding of care as reciprocity, feeding one another, healing, and the pursuit of freedom.
Participants identified racial capitalism, generational trauma, race-based violence, and colonialism as major determinants to collective wellbeing and liberation. In the face of this reality, establishing networks of care was named as the main intervention to the consequences of living within harmful systems. These networks were illustrated through stories of how families, both biological, adopted, and found family, built systems and traditions of care that made growth and success possible.
People spoke with pride when recalling how family members who did not have access to a car received rides to school. Others spoke about babysitting for a single mother so that she would be able to complete her education, keeping a family together after facing family separation, practicing empathy with elders who were traumatized by boarding schools, or choosing to experience “Radical Rest” as an adult after a childhood of sacrifice and martyrdom. These stories demonstrate values of resilience, hope, and reciprocity in navigating the obstacles and adversity present in everyday life.Storytelling is a potent medium for preserving legacies of care and by preserving and sharing these stories, we honor the past, navigate the present, and inspire future generations to continue the legacy of care.
By the end of our narrative landscape project, I was struck by how legacies of narratives steeped in scarcity, tokenism, erasure, and dehumanization were overrode by simple values of generosity, shared responsibility, and collective healing.
This realization ultimately wasn’t too shocking, considering I am a Black woman living in America and have had to overcome many myths about what is and isn’t possible for me and my loved ones. These myths about my identity, my intelligence, or my deservingness follow me into every room that I enter.
Similar to what we heard from Black and Indigenous interview participants, over the years, my devotion to acknowledging and pushing back against these myths has become less of a priority. Instead, I’m proud to be the author of my own narrative and allow the legacy of African American history to be something that strengthens me instead of boxing me in.
Storytelling is a pivotal tool for Black and Indigenous communities to affirm their identities and pursue intergenerational healing. Their stories depicted scenes of revival, community interconnectedness, freedom, and joy and are testaments to their collective strength. It’s important to celebrate how Black and Indigenous interview participants preserve and honor their cultural, spiritual, and sacred traditions to understand where they’ve been and where they are going . Within these vibrant stories is knowledge, medicine, and history that shape how care is embodied and influence outcomes of care.